(In response to Charleston shooter Dylann Roof...)
A white man enters a historically black church. He pulls out a gun and kills nine people. We discover that he was on the drug suboxone (not at the time of the shooting, however). We also know that, based on his confession to police, he was an absolute racist son of a bitch.
Suboxone is a drug used to help opioid users manage addiction. Much like methadone, it's used as replacement therapy by substituting heroin or other opioids with something a) legal and b) that can be controlled by doctors. For example, give an opioid abuser suboxone to replace heroin (without withdrawal symptoms) and then eventually take the abuser off suboxone. It's helped countless people with their addictions. Like almost any drug, it can have side effects.
Back to the shooter, his roommate claims that he was strongly pro-segregation. He told a survivor of his shooting that he had to do it because, "you've raped our women and are taking over the country." His clothing suggested that he was anti-apartheid. Oh... he also wanted to start a race war.
So, what's to blame? Was it the suboxone, which the shooter had stopped taking, or was it the fact that the shooter was simply a racist bastard who wanted to kill? If you're to believe some of the news stories right now, it's due to the suboxone. Rather than a possible correlation, the news has stamped this with causality.
They're also implying that suboxone was being used to treat mental illness. Suboxone is NOT an antidepressant - of any kind, including the category SSRI. Unfortunately, the news is lumping these together, pulling 'information' from SSRI forums and implying that the shooter was on such drugs that would cause the attack. And, man, this pisses me off.
I'm not saying that he was or wasn't mentally ill (we don't know that). In fact, I'm a fairly big proponent of the belief that you're probably mentally ill if you're willing to walk into a church with the intention to kill. Even if you were raised to be racist, most folks have an on/off switch that will tell them that murder isn't a good idea. And, if the person doesn't have that on/off switch, there are therapies that will help correct it... including antidepressants or anti-psychotics. And those drugs can have side effects that include, in rare cases, irritability and aggression... maybe even to the point of being homicidal.
But he wasn't on those. He was on suboxone.
Fantastic. As if there wasn't enough stigma plastered on those suffering mental illness, there's another shooter in our midst.
Worse, there are also sites compiling some of the most violent acts of our lifetime and implying that, again, their causes were due to the drugs that the offenders were on (or not on). It's the drug's fault. We're over-medicating people. Their therapists should have known better.
Please know, I believe that we are over-medicating people - in some cases. It absolutely can be the drug's fault - in some cases. But that isn't the case here. This isn't an easy "cause and effect" situation. Right now, we just know that the shooter was a damned prick who wanted to kill.
I'm furious at the media. I have to be on mood stabilizers. They've been a godsend in leveling mania and depression. I've also been on straight-up antidepressants and I have experienced first-hand some of the worst side effects. Mental illness isn't cookie cutter. Most of us will go through a long and arduous process of trial-and-error until we've found the right drugs to help. Also, the 'right' drugs won't always help every day. In the case of bipolar disorder, mood stabilizers will help some of the time... not all of the time. There will be days (or hours) when the disorder will explode through the best drugs. The same goes for clinical depression. The best antidepressants won't help during the worst of lows. To make matters more difficult, one drug won't help every patient. An SSRI might work for one patient, while an SNRI might work for another. That's why there are so many different drugs on the market. One more time - mental illness isn't cookie cutter.
I understand that in horrific times, we want someone or something to blame. It's easier for us to point fingers and say, "Ah ha! It was the drug's fault!" By having a scapegoat, we can wrap our minds around an awful event that took place. But it's not that easy and, by pointing fingers at drugs the shooter was not on, you're making worse the stigmas already riddling mental illness and its treatment.
Get the facts and stop the media subterfuge. If you can prove to me that this person was on an antidepressant and it caused this terrible act of violence, then I will submit. I leave that door open! For now, I will continue to believe that the shooter is, quite simply, a horrible, racist dirtbag that deserves a long, long life in jail.
