The Prozac presidency

By Tom Quiner

This is odd:

Under George H.W. Bush, there were 12 mass murders that took place in the U.S.

Under Bill Clinton, 23.

Under George W. Bush, 20.

Under Barack Obama, 162.

Under the most liberal, most anti-gun president in U.S. history, mass murder has exploded.

When we look at incidents with at at least 8 deaths, the numbers are also shocking:

Under Ronald Reagan: 5

Under George H.W. Bush: 3

Under Bill Clinton: 4

Under George W. Bush: 5

Under Barack Obama: 18

So, are Barack Obama’s policies and leadership having a “disparate impact” on mass murder in the United States?

It is a fair question.

When liberals see disparate impact in hiring and wage statistics, they intone that this is de facto proof of discrimination, deserving of lawsuits and draconian government intervention, even when the data is innocently, and logically, explicable.

Using liberal logic, then, this is proof that Barack Obama’s leadership is causing an orgy of mass murder.

When the president’s party controlled Congress in his first two years with a veto-proof majority, they ignored gun control issues.

Since then, Mr. Obama has issued 23 executive orders in an attempt to make it more difficult for people fighting mental illness from getting their hands on weapons.

Under his watch, mass killings have reached epidemic proportions, despite these executive orders.

Critical thinkers with cooler heads will acknowledge that this is a complex issue. The president is not the issue. The horrific murders in California were clearly acts of terrorism. Most of the others were perpetrated by people who were unhinged, for whatever reason.

The president offers up Pavlovian responses with each killing, intoning the need for even more stringent gun control, but he misses the point.

Guns are not the root cause of the problem, despite the lamentations of the political left.

An increasing number of mentally ill individuals are snapping.

Why?

If guns are the means, but not the cause, why are the Obama years so characterized by mass murder?

Is it conservative rhetoric?

Is it climate change or sunspots?

Is it video games?

I do not make light of this issue, only the diagnosis and prescriptions of Mr. Obama and his sycophants who seem remarkably unserious at delving deeper into the pathology of mass murder.

There is something we know about this age that is different than yesteryear. More Americans than ever are medicated. More than 10% of Americans have acknowledged that they used anti-depressants in the last 30 days.

I know people on anti-depressants. So do you.

These therapies can be effective in a lot of people.

Some doctors are warning, though, that psychotropic medicines carry potential side effects that can trigger manic responses in the seriously mentally ill. The warnings are spelled out in writing with each prescription.

Dr. Moira Dolan speaks to these side effects in the video above.

Dr. Dolan is an Internal Medicine physician for the Medical Accountability Network. She is also a commissioner for the the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights International, a watchdog group that investigates and exposes fraud and abuse in the field of mental health.

She points out that one of the potential side effects in Prozak, for instance, is a disorder known as akathisia. Convicted murderer, Jack Henry Abbot, suffered from the condition and described it like this:

…[It comes] from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain … The muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside of your mouth and your jaw locks and the pain throbs. … Your spinal column stiffens so that you can hardly move your head or your neck and sometimes your back bends like a bow and you cannot stand up. … You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go … you cannot get relief …

Prozak warnings include mania, hypomania, anxiety, insomnia, and suicide (especially in younger patients). In all, there are 25 pages of precautions.

The Wall Street Journal carried a piece a few years ago called “The Medication Generation” that talked about the dramatic increase in the use of anti depressants, especially in the young. The piece said some 4 million teens are on anti depressants.

Anti depressants go by the term, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. There are 67 incidents of SSRI-associated violence described on a website called SSRI Stories, Anti-Depressant Nightmares.

In other words, violent side-effects to SSRIs may not be as isolated as we think.

Again, this is a complex issue that deserves more than knee-jerk political responses from both sides of the political spectrum, and especially from our nation’s Chief Executive.

We need more than a Prozak presidency.

We need a pro-active president on this serious issue.