Paul McCarron said his wife had seen a psychiatrist, but had stopped taking prescribed medication in the months prior to the May 13 death. He said she stopped taking it because it gave her suicidal thoughts.
“She was always crying,” the friend says. The friend asked McCarron if she might be suffering from depression. McCarron replied that she was taking anti-depressants , the friend says.
–Peoria Journal Star, 5/18/2006
I’ve been noticing a trend. Often when there’s a senseless homicide or suicide, there’s a mention somewhere in the article that the person is or has been on some sort of anti-depressant medication. Often it says they’ve just stopped taking it, had their dosage changed, or changed brands. The McCarron case is no exception, as you can see from the news article quoted above.
That got me thinking — is it just my imagination that I keep seeing this, or have other people noticed this, too? So I started doing a little research. I found out that not only have other people noticed it, there have been clinical studies to prove it, and there are many people who are concerned about the drug’s role in violent crimes.
The anti-depressants under scrutiny are medically described as “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” or SSRIs for short. They’re marketed under brand names such as Prozac and Zoloft.
A website called SSRI Stories is a repository of news accounts of violent incidents where SSRIs played a part. Included are the Columbine shootings and Dr. McCarron’s case. In addition:
There are 34 cases of bizarre behavior, 28 school shootings/incidents, 46 road rage tragedies, 10 air rage incidents, 32 postpartum depression cases, over 500 murders (homicides), over 180 murder-suicides and other acts of violence including workplace violence on this site.
Just a few years ago, an article was published in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine by Dr. Peter Breggin called “Suicidality, violence and mania caused by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs): A review and analysis.” The abstract explains the study’s findings:
Evidence from many sources confirms that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) commonly cause or exacerbate a wide range of abnormal mental and behavioral conditions. These adverse drug reactions include the following overlapping clinical phenomena: a stimulant profile that ranges from mild agitation to manic psychoses, agitated depression, obsessive preoccupations that are alien or uncharacteristic of the individual, and akathisia. Each of these reactions can worsen the individual’s mental condition and can result in suicidality, violence, and other forms of extreme abnormal behavior.
The two things that are particularly chilling in that abstract are the words “commonly cause” — in other words, these are not rare side effects, but common ones — and “obsessive preoccupations that are alien or uncharacteristic of the individual” — for instance, suicidal or homicidal thoughts and actions.
Do I think that the drugs made McCarron kill her autistic child? I don’t know; that’s up to the jury to decide, if the defense even uses that as an argument. My point is not to try McCarron in the court of public opinion here. I just want to bring attention to the serious, documented side-effects of anti-depressant drugs and wonder aloud, why are these drugs allowed to remain on the market?
