“A US soldier was in custody in Baghdad today after allegedly killing five other military personnel and wounding three. The Pentagon confirmed that a soldier had opened fire at Camp Liberty, a US base just outside Baghdad and next to the international airport. The incident was one of the highest death tolls for the American military in recent months. The Associated Press reported a US official as saying that the shooting took place at a stress clinic, where soldiers suffering mental problems can go for treatment or counselling.” [by Ewen MacAskill in Washington for guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 May 2009]
How can we be at the dawn of the twenty-first century with technology hurtling us into a space age future and yet continue to find ourselves without a solution to the escalating number of acts of random, senseless violence?
The reason is that we have been fed all manner of wrong reasons for why these tragedies have taken place and so they continue. It is not guns that are the common denominator to these horrific events—some occur with knives, axes and even automobiles. Nor is it clothing, age, gender or political orientation.
The fact missed by most is that psychiatric, mind-altering drugs have been found to be the common factor in an overwhelming number of these acts of random senseless violence.
These drugs, on an ever increasing rise in society, in the military, and amongst schoolchildren, particularly over the last two decades, are actually creating acts of violence. The scientific research documenting the connection between violence, suicide and psychiatric drugs is overwhelming.
On the surface, the idea of tranquilizers or antidepressants creating hostility and violence may not make sense. After all, they are supposed to make people calm and quiet. But the reality is that they can and do create such adverse effects. Psychiatric drugs and treatments do create violence and the sooner we recognize this and do something about it, the sooner these kinds of killings will stop.
Last year the rate of suicide in the military exceeded that of the general population, and is highest since the Army began tracking it in the 1980s. A sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants, according to a June, 2008 report in Time Magazine.
Click here for more information about psychiatry and the creation of senseless violence.
Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.