Mass Shootings and Psychiatric Drugs – the Connection

By Jon Rappoport

I’ve been tracking the connection since 1999, when I wrote a long white paper, for the Truth Seeker Foundation, on school shootings and psychiatric drugs. The paper was titled: “Why Do They Do It? School shootings Across America.”

The drugs aren’t the only causative factor, but they produce what I call the Johnny Appleseed effect throughout society. Sprinkle enough of the drugs among enough people and you get otherwise unexplainable violence popping up—in schools, in workplaces. The psychiatric plague eats out the country from the inside.

Here are excerpts from my 1999 report—

The massacre at Columbine High School took place on April 20, 1999. Astonishingly, for eight days after the tragedy, during thousands of hours of prime-time television coverage, virtually no one mentioned the word “drugs.” Then the issue was opened. Eric Harris, one of the shooters at Columbine, was on at least one drug.

The NY Times of April 29, 1999, and other papers reported that Harris was rejected from enlisting in the Marines for medical reasons. A friend of the family told the Times that Harris was being treated by a psychiatrist. And then several sources told the Washington Post that the drug prescribed as treatment was Luvox, manufactured by Solvay.

In two more days, the “drug-issue” was gone.

Luvox is of the same class as Prozac and Zoloft and Paxil. They are labeled SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). They attempt to alleviate depression by changing brain-levels of the natural substance serotonin. Luvox has a slightly different chemical configuration from Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft, and it was approved by the FDA for obsessive-compulsive disorder, although many doctors apparently prescribe it for depression.

Prozac is the wildly popular Eli Lilly antidepressant which has been linked to suicidal and homicidal actions. It is now given to young children. Again, its chemical composition is very close to Luvox, the drug that Harris took.

Dr. Peter Breggin, the eminent psychiatrist and author (Toxic Psychiatry, Talking Back to Prozac, Talking Back to Ritalin), told me, “With Luvox there is some evidence of a four-percent rate for mania in adolescents. Mania, for certain individuals, could be a component in grandiose plans to destroy large numbers of other people. Mania can go over the hill to psychosis.”

Dr. Joseph Tarantolo is a psychiatrist in private practice in Washington DC. He is the president of the Washington chapter of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians. Tarantolo states that “all the SSRIs [including Prozac and Luvox] relieve the patient of feeling. He becomes less empathic, as in `I don’t care as much,’ which means `It’s easier for me to harm you.’ If a doctor treats someone who needs a great deal of strength just to think straight, and gives him one of these drugs, that could push him over the edge into violent behavior.”

In Arianna Huffington’s syndicated newspaper column of July 9, 1998, Dr. Breggin states, “I have no doubt that Prozac can cause or contribute to violence and suicide. I’ve seen many cases. In a recent clinical trial, 6 percent of the children became psychotic on Prozac. And manic psychosis can lead to violence.”

A study from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that in five examined cases people on Prozac developed what is called akathesia. Symptoms include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the “jerking of extremities,” and “bicycling in bed or just turning around and around.” Dr. Breggin comments that akathesia “may also contribute to the drug’s tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies … Akathesia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture and could possibly tip someone over the edge into self-destructive or violent behavior … The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the Public Citizen Research Group, reports, ‘Akathesia, or symptoms of restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on Prozac.'”

Other studies:

“Emergence of self-destructive phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1991, vol.30), written by RA King, RA Riddle, et al. It reports self-destructive phenomena in 14% (6/42) of children and adolescents (10-17 years old) who had treatment with fluoxetine (Prozac) for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

July, 1991. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Hisako Koizumi, MD, describes a thirteen-year-old boy who was on Prozac: “full of energy,” “hyperactive,” “clown-like.” All this devolved into sudden violent actions which were “totally unlike him.”

September, 1991. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Author Laurence Jerome reports the case of a ten-year old who moves with his family to a new location. Becoming depressed, the boy is put on Prozac by a doctor. The boy is then “hyperactive, agitated … irritable.” He makes a “somewhat grandiose assessment of his own abilities.” Then he calls a stranger on the phone and says he is going to kill him. The Prozac is stopped, and the symptoms disappear.

The well-known Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics reveals a strange fact. It states that Ritalin [given for ADHD] is “structurally related to amphetamines … Its pharmacological properties are essentially the same as those of the amphetamines.” In other words, the only clear difference is legality. And the effects, in layman’s terms, are obvious. You take speed and, sooner or later, you start crashing. You become agitated, irritable, paranoid, delusional, aggressive.

In his book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin discusses the subject of drug combinations: “Combining antidepressants [e.g., Prozac, Luvox, Paxil] and psychostimulants [e.g., Ritalin] increases the risk of cardiovascular catastrophe, seizures, sedation, euphoria, and psychosis. Withdrawal from the combination can cause a severe reaction that includes confusion, emotional instability, agitation, and aggression.” Children are frequently medicated with this combination, and when we highlight such effects as aggression, psychosis, and emotional instability, it is obvious that the result is pointing toward the very real possibility of violence.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was titled, “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate”) [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed over a hundred adverse affects of Ritalin and indexed published journal articles for each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects then, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

* Paranoid delusions

* Paranoid psychosis

* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis

* Activation of psychotic symptoms

* Toxic psychosis

* Visual hallucinations

* Auditory hallucinations

* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences

* Effects pathological thought processes

* Extreme withdrawal

* Terrified affect

* Started screaming

* Aggressiveness

* Insomnia

* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphatamine-like effects

* psychic dependence

* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug

* Decreased REM sleep

* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia

* Convulsions

* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

Other ADHD medications, which also have a chemical profile similar to amphetamines, would be expected to produce some of the same effects listed above.

The ICSPP (International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology) News publishes the following warning in bold letters: “Do Not Try to Abruptly Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs. When trying to withdraw from many psychiatric drugs, patients can develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical reactions…Therefore, withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done under clinical supervision…”

—end of excerpts from my 1999 white paper on school shootings and psychiatric drugs—

There is a problem. It is chilling. Pharmaceutical companies, which manufacture drug after drug for “mental disorders,” are doing everything they can to cover up the drugs’ connection to violence.

They use their lawyers and PR people—and their influence over the press—to scrub the connection.

And now, one typical, disturbing, official reaction to every new mass shooting is: build more community mental health facilities. Obama was prominent in this regard, after Sandy Hook in 2012. The implication? More drug prescriptions for more people; thus, more violent consequences.

I’ll close with another excerpt from my 1999 report. It is the tragic account of Julie Marie Meade (one account of many you can find at ssristories.org):

Dr. Joseph Tarantolo has written about Julie Marie Meade. In a column for the ICSPP (International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology) News, “Children and Prozac: First Do No Harm,” Tarantolo describes how Julie Meade, in November of 1996, called 911, “begging the cops to come and shoot her. And if they didn’t do it quickly, she would do it to herself. There was also the threat that she would shoot them as well.”

The police came within a few minutes, “5 of them to be exact, pumping at least 10 bullets into her head and torso,” as she waved a gun around.

Tarantolo remarks that a friend of Julie said Julie “had plans to make the honor roll and go to college. He [the friend] had also observed her taking all those pills.” What pills? Tarantolo called the Baltimore medical examiner, and spoke with Dr. Martin Bullock, who was on a fellowship at that office. Bullock said, “She had been taking Prozac for four years.”

Tarantolo asked Bullock, “Did you know that Prozac has been implicated in impulsive de novo violence and suicidalness?” Bullock said he was not aware of this.

Tarantolo is careful to point out, “Violent and suicidal behavior have been observed both early (a few weeks) and late (many months) in treatment with Prozac.”

The November 23rd, 1996, Washington Post reported the Julie Meade death by police shooting. The paper mentioned nothing about Prozac.

Therefore, readers were left in the dark. What could explain this girl’s bizarre and horrendous behavior?

The answer was there in plain sight. But the Post refused to make it known.

The Psychiatric Matrix: What You Need to Know

By Jon Rappoport

May 21, 2018

First of all, as I reported some months ago, 25% of college students in America have received a diagnosis of a mental disorder, or are on psychiatric drugs. I mention this to indicate how widespread psychiatric control has become.

That statistic has been reported by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

NAMI also states: “Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.-43.8 million, or 18.5%-experiences mental illness in a given year.”

These figures are earthshaking. They reflect a relentless push, by organized psychiatry and their pharmaceutical partners, to expand the diagnoses of mental disorders and the toxic drugging that follows.

Indeed, if you consult the DSM, the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you’ll find listed 297 distinct and defined and labeled disorders. This is marketing at an awesome level.

This is also a cultural revolution. Over the past few decades, millions of Americans have been convinced they have a brain malfunction of some kind. If you don’t think that creates a vast victim mentality, think again.

And yet, wait for it—not one of the 297 mental disorders has a defining diagnostic lab test. Not one.

I’ve made this point many times. Occasionally, readers point out that there are tests. Yes, but not DEFINING tests. If tests existed which invariably point to a true diagnosis of a true condition, those tests would be published in the DSM, the bible of the psychiatry. But they aren’t. Nowhere in the DSM will you find them.

Instead, every mental disorder is defined by a list of behavioral “symptoms.” Committees of psychiatrist gather and debate, and decide which clusters of symptoms add up to which labels of mental disorders.

It would be as if you walked into a doctor’s office, talked to him for ten minutes, and then he said: “You have cancer. I can tell by the way you’re talking and behaving. We start chemo tomorrow.”

As with a number of investigation I’ve done, some people respond with: “Oh no, that couldn’t be.” But it could be, and it is:

There is NO DEFINING lab test for any so-called mental disorder. No blood test, no urine test, no brain scan, no genetic assay.

Professional researchers will try to tap dance and bloviate around this shocking revelation: “We do a different kind of science. We’re making breakthroughs every day. We’re getting closer.”

Fine. Let us know when you’ve arrived. Until then, don’t diagnose 25% of the population with mental disorders, and don’t drug them with debilitating and toxic chemicals.

Here is what we’re dealing with: the profession of psychiatry has been given the government seal of approval to monopolize the field of mental health. The nature of their psychiatric work marks these “professionals” as some of the craziest people on the planet.

How do psychiatrists get away with it? They have journals. They populate schools and hospitals. They testify in criminal trials. They are funded and backed by some of the most powerful corporations in the world: Big Pharma. They’re medical doctors, and the public is trained to believe them.

Worst of all, the psychiatrists believe themselves.

They’re indoctrinated through years of schooling.

They’re in a waking trance.

They’re men and women who would never sacrifice their exalted positions of authority and their money for the sake of the truth.

What about parents and their children? “Jimmy, we’re so happy you’re going to college. Now, there is a 25% chance you’ll be diagnosed with a mental disorder while you’re there. That’s a good thing. You’ll get help. Listen to the doctor. Take the drugs.”

Of course, parents don’t say that. But by default, and through ignorance, that’s what they’re setting up their children for.

“This college you’re attending, Jimmy—it’s basically a psychiatric clinic. But you’ll also learn valuable academic information on the side.”

One of the great rebels inside the psychiatric profession is Dr. Peter Breggin. He wrote the 1991 classic, Toxic Psychiatry. Here is a story Breggin recounts. Read it and remember it:

“Roberta was a college student, getting good grades, mostly A’s, when she first became depressed and sought psychiatric help at the recommendation of her university health service. She was eighteen at the time, bright and well motivated, and a very good candidate for psychotherapy. She was going through a sophomore-year identity crisis about dating men, succeeding in school, and planning a future. She could have thrived with a sensitive therapist who had an awareness of women’s issues.”

“Instead of moral support and insight, her doctor gave her Haldol. Over the next four years, six different physicians watched her deteriorate neurologically without warning her or her family about tardive dyskinesia [motor brain damage] and without making the [tardive dyskinesia] diagnosis, even when she was overtly twitching in her arms and legs. Instead they switched her from one neuroleptic [anti-psychotic med] to another, including Navane, Stelazine, and Thorazine. Eventually a rehabilitation therapist became concerned enough to send her to a general physician, who made the diagnosis [of medical drug damage]. By then she was permanently physically disabled, with a loss of 30 percent of her IQ.”

“…my medical evaluation described her condition: Roberta is a grossly disfigured and severely disabled human being who can no longer control her body. She suffers from extreme writhing movements and spasms involving the face, head, neck, shoulders, limbs, extremities, torso, and back-nearly the entire body. She had difficulty standing, sitting, or lying down, and the difficulties worsen as she attempts to carry out voluntary actions. At one point she could not prevent her head from banging against nearby furniture. She could hold a cup to her lip only with great difficulty. Even her respiratory movements are seriously afflicted so that her speech comes out in grunts and gasps amid spasms of her respiratory muscles…Roberta may improve somewhat after several months off the neuroleptic drugs, but she will never again have anything remotely resembling a normal life.”

Welcome to the psychiatric matrix.

Psychiatry Marries Surveillance State

Explosive: psychiatric diagnosis, Surveillance State linked 

By Jon Rappoport

Pay close attention to this one. It’s the future coming at you like a strong wind.

First, a bit of background. As my readers know, I’ve assembled conclusive proof that psychiatric diagnosis of mental disorders is a fraud. It’s pseudoscience. There are no defining lab tests. No definitive blood, saliva, hair, brain, genetic tests.

Instead, committees of psychiatrists meet and discuss arbitrary clusters of behaviors, group them and label them with “mental-disorder” names.

But diehards insist that one of the earliest and oldest disorders, schizophrenia, is the exception. That one is solid. That one isn’t pseudoscience. That one is the “gold standard.”

Wrong.

As fiercebiotech.com reports, “…Diagnosing schizophrenia relies on subjective methods…There is no single test for schizophrenia, so diagnosis typically involves observing symptoms and ruling out other potential causes for them…”

Want more? Fiercebiotch: “And while scientists have observed differences in brain scans of healthy people and those with schizophrenia…these are not currently used to diagnose the neurological disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).” Not used because the brain scans aren’t precise or definitive.

Same old, same old. Committees of psychiatrists “observe symptoms” (behaviors) and invent rules for diagnosis of schizophrenia.

As usual, the public is the last to know.

Now, there is a new project afoot that aims to change the non-objective diagnosis, using MRI images of the brain. IBM and the University of Alberta are working on it:

Fiercebiotech: “The team used machine learning to create a model that identifies schizophrenia based on connections in the brain, IBM said. The fMRI data was taken from different sites, using different machines, but the algorithm could differentiate between the patients with schizophrenia and without 74% of the time.”

No one is popping champagne corks. This was a small pilot study using 95 volunteers. Typically, these projects die out when larger studies are done, because the results aren’t specific enough.  

That’s why NO brain tests, for ANY so-called mental disorder, are labeled definitive in the psychiatric bible, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

However, the computer boys and medical pros keep trying—and here is where the Surveillance State enters the scene in an ugly way.

Fiercebiotech: “Mindstrong Health, cofounded by former NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health, a federal agency] chief Tom Insel, is working on technology that analyzes smartphone data to determine a person’s mental state. The company’s tech collects information on which words are used, or a person’s location when using certain apps, for example, and turns them into objective measures of brain function. The company recently raised $14 million…”

“Meanwhile, Boston-based Akili Interactive and Pfizer reported data last year showing that a video game-based diagnostic test could distinguish between people with and without brain amyloidosis, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. And PureTech’s Sonde Health is working on the analysis of ‘vocal biomarkers,’ or changes in nonlinguistic characteristics of a person’s voice, to indicate changes in health.”

To make a long story short: spy on everybody through their cell phones and computers, in order to diagnose them with ANY mental disorder.

The Surveillance State gets a new justification, and the psychiatric establishment gets to play Big Brother, “to protect us all” from mentally ill persons.

This research was kicked into a higher gear by Obama’s Brain Mapping Project, which he announced in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. The Project is necessary, he claimed, to help prevent such future tragedies.

No, the Project is necessary to expand surveillance of the population, for the sake of control.

Psychiatric diagnosis, and the toxic drugging that follows, IS a form of control.

“Well, we have a red-flagged subject in Boston who’s been using key words in his cell phone calls, and the non-linguistic pauses and voice inflections indicate he’s demonstrating a schizoid pattern. According to outlined procedures, we need to step up surveillance on him, do a deep check on his financials, quietly interview a few of his friends and co-workers, determine his voting record, find out what groups he belongs to. He’s a college professor. He teaches American history. Do we have anything on how he interprets the Founding Fathers, the Constitution…oh look, he seems to be making statements about the need to return to limited central government…we’ve got a live one, guys. Get busy…”

Diagnose the prof with schizoid tendencies and put him on an anti-psychotic drug, which will sink him into a brain haze and slow down his motor reflexes, at minimum.

Psychiatry and the Surveillance State:

 

Kissing cousins.