More Brisbane Violence

Hot on the heels of the recent and horrific murder-suicide comes another bizarre incident. As described in the Brisbane Times, police gunned down a man who chased two foreign tourists in Brisbane's CBD. Apparently, he was known to police. Clearly the 24 year old was deranged but again I'm left to wonder. Was he on any medication? Did he recently change his medication, come off the medication he was on or experience a change in his dosage? As with the recent murders, it seems unlikely that any attention will be paid to the possible role of medication.

If someone is on antidepressants or tranquillisers, the assumption is that there is already something wrong with their brain chemistry and the medication is helping to remedy that. The medication is viewed as helping the person cope and not causing the person to flip out and attack and murder people. Of course, the pressure is on mainstream media to ignore the possibility that the medication played anything but a helping role. Imagine the furore if a news article announced that a murderer had recently been started on Setraline by his physician and that it was known that this drug had been linked to homicidal and suicidal episodes.

Even family and friends of the perpetrator, unless they've read a book like Medication Madness, may not suspect that legally prescribed medication might be the trigger for homicide or suicide. In the two cases I've referenced in this post I don't know what the situation was regarding medication. Probably I'll never know because I'm reliant on what appears in mainstream media and nothing that is critical of Big Pharma offerings is see the light of day. In the case of Rowan Baxter's murder of his children, there's a natural aversion to blaming the act on medication that he may have been taking. By all accounts he was a nasty human being but setting your children alight is such an extreme act that the role of legally prescribed medication in producing a psychotic state must be considered.

The following news article from July 2017 is relevant:

Anti-depressants have been associated with 28 reports of murder referred to the UK medicines regulator in the last three decades, according to a new BBC investigation. Murderous thoughts were also believed to be linked to the medication on 32 occasions, according to Panorama, although the possible connection does not necessarily mean the drugs caused the events. In 2016, over 40 million prescriptions were made for SSRIs, a type of anti-depressant that boosts levels of the chemical seratonin in the brain. 

For the vast majority of people, the drugs are safe to take, however the programme has uncovered a number of cases of extreme violence thought to be linked to the medication. A father who strangled his 11-year-old son was among the cases thought to be linked to the drugs, the programme found. Professor Peter Tyrer, psychiatrist at Imperial College London who has been studying SSRIs, said: “You can never be quite certain with a rare side-effect whether it’s linked to a drug or not because it could be related to other things. 

"But it’s happened just too frequently with this class of drug to make it random. It’s obviously related to the drug but we don’t know exactly why.” Drugs manufacturer Pfizer who developed an SSRI called sertraline said a causal link between the drug and murderous behaviour had not been proved.

Finally, this gun lobby site has a comprehensive review of the role of antidepressants in gun violence.