Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings

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[sSRI-Research] Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School

Shootings

 

 

 

 

Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings

 

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/05/03/26.php

 

Sat, 26 Mar 2005

 

The New York Times reports that family members of Jeffe Weise, the

Mennesota student who went on a shooting rampage, believe that

Prozac " could have been the final straw " that triggered Weise to

kill.

 

" They kept upping the dose for him, " she said, " and by the end, he

was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but

think it was too much, that it must have set him off. " Lee Cook,

another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a

few weeks before the shootings on Monday.

 

" I do wonder, " Mr. 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. "

 

Health Canada has been far more concerned with drug safety issues and

with informing the Canadian public about severe adverse drug effects

than the FDA. Thus, antidepressant drug manufacturers are required to

disclose the risk of violence toward others.

 

Eli Lilly's Canadian Prozac label (dated May 18, 2004) states:

 

" There are clinical trial and post-marketing reports with SSRIs and

other newer anti-depressants, in both pediatrics and adults, of

severe agitation-type adverse events coupled with self-harm or harm

to others. " See: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hpfb-dgpsa/tpd-

dpt/prozac_e.html

 

One of the The Times reporters who contributed to the article was

sent a copy of that Prozac Canadian label. Yet, The Times article

misinformed readers when it stated:

 

" Though research has not linked antidepressants to acts of violence

on others, several incidents have gained wide publicity. "

 

Given the importance of providing the public with accurate drug

safety information - espcially evidence of " self-harm and harm to

others " in patients prescribed Prozac and the other SSRI

antidepressants, it behoves The Times to correct that statement.

 

Otherwise, people might suspect that the the " news that's fit to

print " is being filtered by vested interests.

 

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav

212-595-8974

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/national/26shoot.html?

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES

March 26, 2005

Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings

By MONICA DAVEY and GARDINER HARRIS

 

RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 - In their sleepless search for answers,

the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and

then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was

prescribed for his waves of depression.

 

On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her

nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found

herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise

began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that

Ms. Lussier described as a " cry for help. "

 

" They kept upping the dose for him, " she said, " and by the end, he

was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but

think it was too much, that it must have set him off. " Lee Cook,

another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a

few weeks before the shootings on Monday.

 

" I do wonder, " Mr. 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 effects of antidepressants on young people remain 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 the makers of antidepressants to

warn of that danger on their labels for the medications.

 

The suicide risk is particularly acute when therapy starts or a

dosage changes, 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 Mr.

Weise's rampage through Red Lake High School.

 

Without knowing Mr. Weise's 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, which makes Prozac.

 

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

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

bracket. Mr. Weise, though just 16, was taller than 6 feet and

weighed 250 pounds.

 

Ms. Lussier, who lived with Mr. Weise in her mother's house on the

Red Lake Indian reservation in far northern Minnesota, said she could

not understand what else, aside from drugs, had changed to explain

his sudden violence.

 

Since his suicide attempt and 72-hour hospitalization a year ago, Mr.

Weise had seemed to be improving, she said, and he was receiving

mental health counseling and a doctor's care at the medical center on

the reservation.

 

Others in Red Lake said, however, that they had seen few signs of

improvement in the dour, solitary boy.

 

The driver of a school bus, Lorene Gurneau, said she often saw Mr.

Weise standing outside the middle school, wearing his long black

clothes and strange hairdos, staring off into nothing, in a daze,

even as children raced by or teachers passed him.

 

Still, in at least one Internet posting last fall, Mr. Weise sounded

determined to improve his life after his suicide attempt, and he

noted that he was taking antidepressants.

 

" I had went through a lot of things in my life that had driven me to

a darker path than most choose to take, " the posting said. " I split

the flesh on my wrist with a box opener, painting the floor of my

bedroom with blood I shouldn't have spilt. After sitting there for

what seemed like hours (which apparently was only minutes), I had the

revelation that this was not the path. "

 

" It was my dicision, " he went on, " to seek medical treatment, as on

the other hand I could've chose to sit there until enough blood

drained from my downward lacerations on my wrists to die. "

 

On Monday, in the hours before the shooting, Mr. Weise had seemed

cheerful and normal, Ms. Lussier said. His teacher, who was spending

an hour a day at his house as part of a " homebound " study program

that the school system had created because of his troubles, arrived

to give him his homework assignments, as usual. At 12:30 p.m., less

than three hours before the shootings, another aunt, Shauna, stopped

in.

 

" He was watching a movie on TV, " Ms. Lussier said. " There was nothing

out of the ordinary. 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? "

 

Though research has not linked antidepressants to acts of violence on

others, several incidents have gained wide publicity.

 

In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker walked into a printing plant in Louisville,

Ky., with a bag of guns and killed eight co-workers and himself. He

was taking Prozac, which had recently been approved.

 

In 1999, a student involved in the Columbine High School shootings in

Colorado had reportedly taken Luvox, an antidepressant similar to

Prozac.

 

In 2001, Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents while taking

Zoloft, another antidepressant similar to Prozac. His lawyers faulted

the drug, but a jury in Charleston, S.C., convicted him of murder in

February.

 

Still, Katherine S. Newman, a professor at Princeton University who

has studied school killings, said just a small percentage appeared to

have possibly involved psychiatric drugs. Of 27 such killings from

1974 to 2001, fewer than one-fifth of the suspects had been diagnosed

with a mental health disorder before the shootings, Professor Newman

said. Dr. Frank Ochberg, a former associate director of the National

Institute of Mental Health, said he once dismissed any links between

antidepressants and suicides or homicidal acts. The recent research,

however, has changed his mind, Dr. Ochberg said.

 

" If your intention is shooting the place up and dying as you do it,

you can put the fantasy together, " he said. " Suicidal and homicidal

intentions together could theoretically follow the same path. "

 

Monica Davey reported from Red Lake for this article, and Gardiner

Harris from Washington. Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting from New

York.

 

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