Whenever young people, either alone or in pairs, shoot up their place of study, their rampage is followed by tiresome, unimaginative debate. One side, the Joe Liebermans of the world, decry the degeneration of youth culture, and it's apparently devastating effect on young minds. The other, the more conscientious types, take the more irreverent position, and point to the arsenal of weapons stockpiling in suburban playrooms.
What rarely receives mention, and blame, is medication.
Many of the most high-profile school shooters of the last decade have enjoyed quite an unhealthy relationship with dangerous pharmaceuticals. The catch of these pharmaceuticals, is that their side-effects wildly betray their original function.
"A man who killed five students and himself during a shooting spree at an Illinois college had stopped taking medication and become erratic in the last two weeks, buying two guns used in the bloodbath just six days ago, officials said on Friday."
Reuters
Besides his eventual affinity for guns, the only thing that Stephen Kazmierczak had in common with the Harrises, Klebolds, and Seung-Huis of the afterlife,was his medicinal diet. Eric Harris started off with Prozac, and ultimately upgraded to zoloft. Dylan Klebold, like Seung-Hui a decade after him, was also a regular consumer of Anti-depressants (what brandname exactly, was never disclosed by police).
Now, the obvious counter-argument to blaming medication for this kind of violence, is that all of these men were crazy enough to qualify for the prescriptions they received. Unfortunately, anti-depressants are wildly overprescribed in America; mild depression often serves as a sufficient precondition for heavy medication. My own shrink was no different. After 3 short visits, the lovely lady was convinced that my social ineptitude and short attention span could be cured with the drop of a pill.
"There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him."
Theordore Dalrymple
Widespread debates on violence only seem to stir up in America, when lone gunmen shoot enough people to get the attention from the media that they never received from their peers. After the shots are fired, and the bodies are bagged, different groups hype their main concerns, with differing levels of self-interest. The fact that medication is rarely mentioned, might well have to do with the indisputable power of the pharmaceutical companies in America. It might also have to do with the fact that medication is so deeply intertwined with American existence, that both sides in the debate can agree on it's necessity. Of course, gun control should remain the central issue in this debate (after all, its hard to stab your way through a full assembly hall) but the liberal distribution, and reliance on these heinous chemicals also deserves mention.
PS: I'm not a member of the church of Scientology.