It isn't very funny, really, but we speculated as soon as we heard of this horrific event whether the kid was on Prozac. Apparently our black humor was accurate.
Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings:
The family of the Minnesota teenager who killed nine people and then himself was left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.
...Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a “cry for help.”
“They kept upping the dose for him,” she said, “and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off.”Lee Cook, another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a few weeks before the shootings on Monday.
...
Ms. Lussier, who lived with Mr. Weise in her mother's house on the Red Lake Indian reservation in far northern Minnesota, said she could not understand what else, aside from drugs, had changed to explain his sudden violence.Since his suicide attempt and 72-hour hospitalization a year ago, Mr. Weise had seemed to be improving, she said, and he was receiving mental health counseling and a doctor's care at the medical center on the reservation.
Others in Red Lake said, however, that they had seen few signs of improvement in the dour, solitary boy.
Of course, one shouldn't read too much into isolated incidents, I'd be cautious prescribing anti-depressants to certain types of folks. And by the way, a big public thanks (for nothing) to the FDA for protecting the public. Wouldn't want to investigate such things, because the anti-depressant category is such a huge money maker for the FDA's corporate masters.
Though research has not linked antidepressants to acts of violence on others, several incidents have gained wide publicity.In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker walked into a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., with a bag of guns and killed eight co-workers and himself. He was taking Prozac, which had recently been approved.
In 1999, a student involved in the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado had reportedly taken Luvox, an antidepressant similar to Prozac.
In 2001, Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents while taking Zoloft, another antidepressant similar to Prozac. His lawyers faulted the drug, but a jury in Charleston, S.C., convicted him of murder in February.
