Shooter's family suspects Prozac

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Shooter's family suspects Prozac

Teen's dosage increased during past year

 

By Monica Davey and Gardiner Harris

New York Times News Service

 

March 26, 2005

 

RED LAKE, Minn. -- In their sleepless search for answers, the family members of

Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, say they are

left wondering about the drugs Weise was prescribed for his depression.

 

On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Weise, the nephew she lived with,

and her father, who was among those killed, she said she found herself looking

back over the last year when Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac. He

took the drug after a suicide attempt Lussier described as a " cry for help. "

 

" They kept upping the dose for him, and by the end he was taking three of the

20-milligram pills a day, " she said. " I can't help but think it was too much,

that it must have set him off. "

 

Lee Cook, another relative of Weise, said his medication had increased a few

weeks before the deadly shooting on Monday.

 

" I do wonder, " Cook said, " whether on top of everything else he had going on in

his life, on top of all the other problems, whether the drugs could have been

the final straw. "

 

The effect of antidepressants on young people remains a topic of fierce debate

among scientists and doctors. Last year, a federal panel of drug experts said

antidepressants could cause children and teenagers to become suicidal. The Food

and Drug Administration has since required antidepressant makers to warn of that

danger on labels.

 

The suicide risk is particularly acute when therapy starts or a dosage is

changed, the drug agency has warned. Although some studies link the drugs to an

increased suicide risk, the research does not suggest such a connection to

violence like Weise's rampage through Red Lake High School.

 

Without knowing his medical history or precise diagnosis, it is virtually

impossible to speculate on what factors may have affected him: the drugs, his

underlying depression, a gloomy childhood wrapped in tragedy or something else

entirely.

 

" What I can say is that his physician, I'm sure, made the appropriate

recommendations based on whatever the dosages were, " said Morry Smulevitz, a

spokesman for Eli Lilly and Co., which makes Prozac.

 

The recommended dosage range, Smulevitz said, runs from 20 milligrams to 80

milligrams a day, so Wiese's 60 milligram dose fell in that bracket. Weise,

though just 16, was more than 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds.

 

Lussier, who lived with him in her mother's house on the Red Lake Indian

reservation, said she could not understand what else, aside from drugs, had

changed to explain the sudden violence. Since his suicide attempt and 72-hour

hospitalization a year ago, Weise had seemed to be improving, she said.

 

Others in Red Lake, though, said they had seen few signs of improvement in the

dour, solitary boy. The driver of a school bus, Lorene Gurneau, said she often

saw him standing outside the middle school, wearing his long black clothes and

strange hairdos, staring off into nothing, in a daze, even as kids raced by or

teachers passed him.

 

On Monday, in the hours before the shooting, Weise had seemed cheerful and

normal, Lussier said. His teacher, who was spending an hour a day at his house

as part of a homebound study program the school system had created because of

his troubles, arrived to give him his homework assignments, as usual.

 

" There was nothing out of the ordinary, " Lussier said. " People keep saying he

was depressed, but if you saw him, he was getting better. All we can think of

is, what about the drugs? "

 

2005, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/health/chi-0503260276mar26,1,1940679.stor\

y?coll=chi-news-hed

 

 

 

 

 

Laura

 

" To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or

that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic

and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. " -

Theodore Roosevelt, 7 May 1918