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Saturday, December 22, 2012

SENSELESS SHOOTINGS - WHAT IS TO BLAME?

We have never had kids going into schools and shooting students in the history of man. The history of man- that’s a long time.
What has changed?
For hundreds of years, people have had guns.
For hundreds of years, children have endured poverty, orphanages, cruelties of every kind.
What is new on the scene? Think about it.

Every child who has committed these homicides has been on psychotropic drugs and under the “care” of a psychiatrist.
People, taking psychotropic drugs are committing suicide and committing homicides.  If you take the time to investigate, you will find that these deaths are going on about you all the time. It’s not like six degrees of separation. It’s like three degrees.  Someone you know knows someone who has had a bad experience.  Mighty prevalent, yet somehow we have bee induced to totally overlook this thing staring us in the face.   One of my best friends took a sort of muscle relaxant and said to her husband:  lock me in my room. Don’t let me out of my sight, or I will kill myself.” She knew it was the drug.  Others do not and think it is themselves.  My costumer on a recent film’s friend walked into the ocean when he  stopped taking a psychotropic drug.   A smart witty terrific pal of mine was given a drug by his doctor for a cold or regular sickness and he woke up in the night and started hallucinating blood pouring down his walls.  He found out from that doctor it was the drug, and asked the doctor why he hadn’t been warned.
There is a group of drugs called benzodiazapenes and if you want to take one of them, you might as well take your brain out and put it on a silver platter and hand it over to the nearest passerby.  It is no longer your own.  It may make you take your own life.  I know you’re a nice guy, but it may make you take the life of another.
Some years ago, on the internet, I could bring up the number of suicides of children in some city in Canada.  There had been six that week.  About three years ago I read in the paper that a lad had “woken up” and found that he was facing people holding a gun.  We are no longer, in this culture, privy to these facts.  The media does not disclose them to us. 

There is another class of drugs called neuropathics.  These also can make you take your own life.  Watch TV ads.  I know the wife of the man who lobbied to get the information that psychotropics can make you commit suicide into the warnings. After years, he finally did. The box says something like “suicidal ideations”.  This means that your brain, not being your own anymore, can make you take your own life, and this is just to get over body aches and pains! So you may not feel that pain in your knee anymore, but the reason for that might be simple: you are no longer here to feel it.


- Karen Black

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do feel there is something to this Karen. I know that today, drugs are handed out like M&Ms candy and people aren't encouraged to feel their feelings during sad/stressful/trying times. They are given drugs. It is normal to feel sad or stressed during certain events in life and I think getting through it, you need to let yourself have these feelings, not mask them with "medication". I do know people, however, that experience clinical depression and the drugs do help them. The thing that is so true, Karen, is folks are taking these drugs ans assume that there are no side effects. These drugs can have horrible side effects as we have tragically seen.

David Savage said...

Karen, it's David. You are totally right. The toll these drugs are having on our youth is not being talked about because, I suspect, the stranglehold ($TRANGLE-HOLD) BIG PHARMA has on our "elected officials" in Washington! The pharmaceutical lobby in Washington has the same silencing power as the NRA. They literally buy our legislators. I have friends who have killed themselves, I believe in part due to psychotropic drugs. I have taken them myself and was on "suicide watch" by my therapist for a year -- symptoms that I was unaware of even myself. So I applaud your discussing this.

Jack Providenti said...

Thanks Karen! The more people learn the truth of these drugs the closer we are to getting rid of them.

GSZ said...

Thank you for getting this info out. I have been sending this video to everyone I know as well as my reps in D.C. http://www.cchr.org/videos/psychiatrys-prescription-for-violence.html

Mossman said...

Thank you Karen for bringing this to the forefront.
It needs to be done.

Ron Moss

Mossman said...

Thank you Karen for bringing this to the forefront.
It needs to be done.

Ron Moss

Anonymous said...

Dear Ms. Karen Black
I am a fervorous admirer of yours since I was a child (I used to play an older girl in order to "deceive" the cinema porters to let me in) and I was very pleased when you received an award in Oporto a couple of years ago, since I'm from Portugal.
But...
Dear Ms. Black, about your post, in my honest (but professionally founded) opinion you are totally and absolutely wrong.
In every country in the world the statistics show that the highest percentage of those that commit murder crimes are not mentally ill, so why would they be under the influence of psychotropics?! Furthermore, the small percentage of mentally ill persons that commit crimes wouldn't have if they had been under a supervised and constant medication.
People tend to confuse mentally ill (the ones that have absolutely to take medication in order to function as human beings) with personality disorders (vulgo, psycho or sociopathy; narcissistic personality, etc), and the later never use psychotropics although some may feel attracted by other types of drugs, especially cocaine or meth among others.
I understand your dislike for psychotropics. As a clinical psycholgist with a psychoanalitical training, in the beginning of my career I used to "curse" the psychiatrists for prescribing those drugs. But when doing my internship in a psychiatric hospital (and I've always chosen heavy pathology as the destinataries of my care) I was able to discern that, although I still believe in the "power" of psychotherapy to address some issues, there are illnesses whose pain can only be appeased with some chemical help. The suffering of those persons that I met in psychiatric hospitals are due to a biological inbalance that no psychoterapy can resolve. Of course there is a price, of course the taking of those drugs contributes to an acceleration on the aging of the brain, especially in the memory and cognitive functions, but the price to pay if they are not taken is even higher: unbearable pain, the touch with reality is severed by the sinking in delusion, fear, dementia, death,..
While under medication all patients seemed to be able to reconnect with reality and I had a few cases where psychotherapy helped to re-balance their lives.
The only case of violence I witnessed (in which I was the victim but with no more consequences than a bruised neck) was from a public patient that had suspended his medication and had become delusional again...
Later on in my career I became a forensic psychologist and I worked mainly with the evaluation of the "dangerousness" of criminals that were sent either by the Court or by their Defense Att. I had a few cases where they invoked "mental illness", from those, in hundreds, only one was clearly a psychotic (schizoparanoid - he tried to kill his elderly mother because he believed she was the devil and was going to harm him) and guess what? He (22 y.o. had gone with his friends to a summer concert for a few days and decided that he wouldn't take his medicine because he might want to have some liquor or else...).
I never came upon anyone that committed crimes because of the psychotropics, on the contrary.
By the way, do you know that if it hadn't been because of these drugs the more impressing methods couldn't have been put aside (electroshocks, cold baths, saunas, ..)?

In a few words, what I'm trying to say is: the "senseless shootings" are the result of a culture and off a society that doesn't care, and not of any specific type of medical drugs.

Nerida