4. Blaming Patients Stopping Their Medication As A Source of Violence

The fact that these drugs are a recipe for violence is obscured because frequently after a violent crime has been committed, psychiatrists or their allied organizations such as the pharmaceutical company-funded National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), blame the offending person’s violent behavior on his failure to continue his medication, but the truth is, it is most likely the result of withdrawal effects from the drug itself.

In 1995, a Danish medical study reported the following withdrawal symptoms from psychotropic drug dependence: “Emotional changes: fear, terror, panic, fear of insanity, failing self confidence, restlessness, irritability, aggression, an urge to destroy and, in the worst cases, an urge to kill.” (emphasis added)¹⁷

In 1996, the National Preferred Medicines Center, Inc., comprising physicians in New Zealand, issued a report on “Acute drug withdrawal,” saying that withdrawal from psychoactive drugs can cause 1) rebound effects that exacerbate previous symptoms of a “disease,” and 2) new symptoms unrelated to the condition that had not been previously experienced by the patient.¹⁸ With withdrawal from antipsychotics, the person can experience restlessness, anxiety, and agitation; withdrawal from benzodiazepines (minor tranquilizers) can cause “heightened emotional response;” for example, “anxiety” and “insomnia.”¹⁹ The SSRIs can create “agitation, severe depression, hallucinations” and “aggressiveness.”²⁰ Tricyclic antidepressants can cause akathisia which studies show can cause severe restlessness and agitation.²¹

Psychiatric drugs cause violence; they kill. These are facts that psychiatrists and NAMI are not comfortable with. Psychiatrists for obvious reasons—they could and should be held liable for a crime committed by their drugged-out patients—and NAMI because it “is awash in money from drug companies”—$3.2 million per year from nine such companies that manufacture these often crippling drugs that psychiatry demands.²²

5. Recommendations:

The Council of Europe’s Resolution 1235 on Psychiatry and Human Rights, Article (iii) Problems and abuses in psychiatry (c) prohibits the use of mechanical restraints on patients. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights guarantees individuals the right to be free from “torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Therefore: Laws must be introduced requiring a mandatory reporting system where there has been any injury or death from chemical, mechanical or other restraint in mental health facilities and psychiatric wards; this needs to be reported to an independent body. With no mandatory reporting required for such deaths, children continue to be tortured and killed in psychiatric institutions like prisoners of war.

The use of restraints on children in particular must be banned.

Laws must provide for mental health workers to be criminally culpable where the use of such restraints on adults results in injury or death.

In addition to restraint legislation in order to determine trends in psychiatric-drug associated crime, regulations should be enacted whereby a person charged with a violent offense, should be tested for psychiatric drug use. An independent data base should be established to collect this information to determine which drugs are most indicated in crime. The data and findings should be publicly accessible.

Reject any move to broaden the powers of involuntary commitment laws or to introduce community treatment orders ("assisted treatment"/"outpatient commitment") that enforce people, under threat of hospitalization, to stay on “medication.” This is especially the case when the argument for community treatment orders is based on the misconception that enforcing drug maintenance will prevent violent acts or crime. Workable mental healing must be delivered in a calm atmosphere characterized by tolerance, safety, security and respect for people’s rights.

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