Medicating For Immediate Effect
Deborah Venable
12/24/07
“I
hear voices telling me what to do.”
These
words uttered so often by the mentally ill may be the key to understanding so
much. Recently we were once again shocked
by a senseless attack on innocent victims – this time at a large shopping mall
in Nebraska – by one individual who had not even attained legal drinking
age! Robert Hawkins, 19, left a couple
of suicide notes to “explain” his actions.
“I’ve just snapped,” he wrote.
That
explains it! Everyone knows that when
someone “snaps” anything can happen.
This
individual joins a long list of “snapped” cases resulting in senseless
destruction that is yet to be understood by the sane mind. David
Kupelian
wrote an article published by World Net Daily back in August of this year
recounting some of them. His article
starts out with a specific quote from Christopher Pittman, 12 years old, explaining
why he killed his grandparents and burned their house down:
"When
I was lying in my bed that night, I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head
kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them."
I
guess he “just snapped” too. The two
cases are similar because both young men had lived tumultuous lives without
stable parenting homes and both had been under psychiatric care and mind
altering drug therapy. They both had
people who supposedly “cared” about them.
Indeed, the twelve-year-old turned on the two people who probably cared
the most about him – his grandparents.
In Robert Hawkins case, Sandra K. Markley, a deputy county attorney
who had been involved with the young man’s earlier juvenile case and ultimately
made decisions concerning his “treatment” said, “we all cared about this child.”
The
state of Nebraska’s “caring” had a stiff price tag for the taxpayers – an estimated
$265,000 plus! Therapy costs for a
broken child funneled from several broken homes into the state’s “caring”
Department Of Health and Human Services did not save this child or his victims,
even though, “all appropriate services
were provided when needed and as long as needed.” (This quote from Todd Landry, director of the department.)
After
events such as these we are subjected to the many recriminations for “missing
the signs” leading up to the terrible acts, and we are reminded once again that
mind altering drug therapy and the whole field of psychiatry may need to come
under a lot more public scrutiny than it obviously does – especially in the
case of resorting to drug therapy to “fix” children! After the dust settles, though, we slip back into the mindless
practice of medicating for immediate effect.
If
we can’t all come to agreement that far too many people, young and old, are
under psychiatric care, including mind altering drug therapy, this problem will
continue to worsen.
Medicating
for immediate effect is fine if we’re talking about taking an aspirin for a
headache, but in terms of treating the mind, we cannot condone indiscriminate
trial and error, band-aid medicating without more attention to long-term
effect. America is medicating herself
into oblivion!
In
the book, Professional Parenting, Raising
the Hope For America’s Future, I included a chapter called, The Mind Matters. This chapter was researched almost a decade
ago, but the problem of overmedicating children with behavioral symptoms has
only increased. My disclaimer still
stands of course:
“Severe unavoidable mental illness is
heartbreaking, but that caused by neglect or pharmacological abuse is
unforgivable.” (page 36)
I
have seen and worked with the “heartbreaking” version of mental illness – those
poor souls who are under constant care and monitoring for it. I have also personally seen the effects of
drug-induced mental illness. I
witnessed how thoughtless diagnosing and follow up drug therapy can affect a
previously sound mind. It is a very
painful subject to me that I have never written much about until now.
Thirty-one
years ago my father’s very real physical problem, caused by an aneurysm, was
misdiagnosed at first as sudden onset dementia. He was passed off to a team of psychiatrists who proceeded to
medicate for immediate effect. After
only a few doses of these powerful drugs, my father began to slip away into an
oblivion I could not accept. I was
appalled at the attitude his doctors took with me and the uncaring way they
treated him, so I flushed the medication and searched for answers
elsewhere. A different hospital and a
very different team of doctors found the problem and attempted to repair the
now ruptured aneurysm, but precious time had been lost and my father passed
away five hours after the long surgery.
He was seventy-three and had the heart of a forty year old man and a
mind devastated by unnecessary drug therapy.
Nowadays
folks hardly bat an eye at admissions of recreational drug use, yet illegal
drugs are at the root of most of the crime and incarcerations in the country –
in one way or another. Also an
increasing number of American citizens are under constant legal drug therapy
for physical and mental disorders. From
pain management to behavioral management, pharmacological treatment has grown
to astronomical proportions. People are
maturing into society under the belief that they must have access to medical care, including prescription drugs,
at the expense of employers and/or taxpayers instead of providing it for
themselves.
The
health care crisis, if there is one, has been caused by this flawed
thinking. If quality has diminished it
is because most of the important decisions about individual health care are
being made not by the consumer but by the providers. In much the same way that education quality declined in this
country over the last half century, health care will continue a downward spiral
unless this thinking is turned around.
Attention
to the long-term effect must be the goal.
Our enemies have certainly made it theirs! Here’s another excerpt from the book, Professional Parenting, Raising the Hope For America’s Future:
Goal
32 from the 1958 Current communist Goals:
“Support any socialist
movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture – education,
social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.”
Goal 39 – “Dominate the psychiatric profession and
use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who
oppose Communist goals.”
(Page 132)
I
don’t know what it will take to focus attention on these goals – there are 44
in all – but after fifty years of ignoring them, we have a good idea about
their long-term effect. While so many
folks are busy inventing conspiracies that demoralize America even more, we
have an undeniable conspiracy against America and everything she has stood for
being aided through the ignorance and apathy of Americans from all walks of
life, even as they “listen to voices telling them what to do.” I think it is about time that everyone wakes
up and stops medicating for immediate effect before we all lose our minds!