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RE: Anti-Anxiety Pills
a lot of them say "may cause suicidal thoughts or actions" on the labels and advertisements, are homicidal thoughts and actions that big a leap?
a lot of them say "may cause suicidal thoughts or actions" on the labels and advertisements, are homicidal thoughts and actions that big a leap?
Yes, I think it's a pretty big leap. The reasons for suicide and homicide are usually quite different. Mass shooters are often suicidal but by comparison suicidal people are not often mass shooters.
I'm not saying these drugs aren't dangerous, but turning this correlation into a causal effect is faulty logic. At best, it oversimplifies things and at worst it is completely inaccurate. Clearly people that are prescribed these drugs are not getting the psychological treatment/supervision that they need regardless of the root cause.
they allow people to do things that otherwise they would have too much anxiety to do. Indeed in addition to the drugs there is generally a psychiatrist who fucked up in most of these large non Islamic mass shooting cases, and sometimes people called the police 47 times on someone and they didn't ever charge him with anything. It takes multiple systems to fail, the family, the community, law enforcement, mental health, usually a school or two, for one of these school shootings to happen.
But if the only reason you aren't shooting a bunch of people is because you have too much anxiety to do so, then you have serious problems that need to be dealt with immediately. If the only reason you aren't shooting a bunch of people is because you have too much anxiety, you would probably go do it the first time you had a couple of drinks or did something particularly relaxing.
Another think to consider is that I think in at least some of these cases, the person involved WAS taking such medication but had stopped. To suddenly stop taking this kind of medication can be dangerous as well.
these drugs make a couple of drinks look like a peach tea in terms of removing inhibitions. Studies show that everyone or almost everyone has thought about committing homicide but no one or almost no one actually does it.
yup, suddenly stopping it probably also dangerous.
I don't know, for some people alcohol has a pretty damn strong inhibition removal.
But for the vast majority of people, it is not just anxiety that prevents them from killing someone anyway. And the vast majority of people who take these drugs do not become suicidal or homicidal which I think makes my point.
There are a handful of mass shootings a year at most. By comparison, how many people take this medication? I don't know the numbers but I'm guessing mass shooters account for a very minuscule fractional percent of all people who take this medicine. Not very strong evidence that the medicine is the actual cause.
sure a lot of people take them and don't commit mass murder but it seems like all or most of the people who commit mass murder take them.
But most of the people who are taking them have mental issues anyway which was my original point. It's kind of like saying that most people who are dying with an infection are dying because they are taking antibiotics.
I'm not saying these medicines are not a contributing factor in some cases but there isn't any proof of that yet. Correlation is not causation and 99.9% (or more) of the people who take this medication do not become mass killers. Even it does contribute in some cases, it's something that needs to be understood better and addressed not by just simply banning the medication which I believe does help a lot of people.
one of the problems with actually studying mass shooters is to draw any conclusions or strong statistics because the sample size is so small. if we had good numbers we could see if there are more of these mass shooters now or before the introduction of antidepressants and antianxiety medications.