Friday, February 15, 2008

Idiots

I don't have anything particularly compelling to add to the discussion floating around surrounding the shooter at the NIU killings, but this headline caught my eyes just now.

Police: Illinois campus gunman reportedly off medication

I love that people this obviously unstable somehow think it's a swell idea to just stop taking the medication they are prescribed. And his friends knew he had stopped taking it and had begun acting erratically and they apparently decided not to do anything about it. One would think that if someone needs medication not to go shoot up a school, there should be some plan devised to make sure they are taking it and don't decide to see what happens when they go off their meds.

Also, his eyebrows are freakishly groomed. Weird.

Anyhoo, that is all. Thoughts go out to the slain and their families. Let's hope this impels some people to maybe not vote for John McCain, who believes the right to bear arms is something we have a "sacred duty to protect." Douchebag.
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3 comments:

John Barleycorn said...

There is no legal justification for forced medication. It's against basic human rights. Besides that, it's a decidedly 1950's way to approach the issue. Not only is it against basic human rights to dump pills down someone's unwilling throat because their "problems" have been societally defined as fixable with psychiatric drugs, but it's two steps away from involuntary commitment to mental hospitals.

If he was medicated to begin with, it means he made the choice to become medicated. But pills are a crapshoot; some work, some don't, and some have horrible side-effects only experienced by certain individuals which may cause them to stop taking said medications.

Emphasis here on choice. Just as it was his choice to start taking them, it's his choice to stop.

Granted, those who are dangerous should not stop taking their medications, but since the pills Steven Kazmierczak had stopped taking have not been named, it's impossible to assume what, exactly, he was being treated for.

Let's say it's a simple depressive disorder easily sorted through with talk-therapy and a proper dosage of anti-depressants. What goes unexamined is life circumstance. Since friends and loved ones only say, "He went off his meds" and do not specify what those meds are, we're immediately led to believe it's his lack of medication leading him to commit violent crimes. But what about circumstance? To distribute blame in this case -- either on Steven's responsibility to ingest drugs (which no one can do lawfully) or to his friends, who, according to you, "apparently decided not to do anything about it" -- totally overlooks details; makes sweeping assumptions and judgments based on little evidence and too many watered-down CNN blurbs.

Claiming that his friends "apparently decided not to do anything about it" is unfair to Steven, his friends, and the victims of this crime. People do not generally turn a blind eye to threats of violence. "Erratically," in this case, is ill-defined and vague. It could mean anything from "not sleeping well" and "nervous jitters" that could be associated with anything from anxiety to severe mental disruption. To assume he was drooling from the mouth and gasping for the blood of innocents and everybody turned away from it is inappropriate.

February 20, 2008 at 11:33 AM
Gidaren-kun said...

I wasn't overly concerned while writing this with crafting a strong argument about what exactly led him to shoot up a classroom.

Obviously something like this has a plethora of reasons behind why it happened and there's never going to be a great explanation for it.

I was simply pointing out that it's stupid for someone who is prescribed medication (one assumes for a reason) to stop taking it, whether because it makes him feel like a zombie or because he wanted to run a social experiment. I'm not arguing that we don't totally overmedicate people nowadays, but if someone were, say, psychotic...I don't think their medication should be left up to them to decide. It's just as irresponsible for someone who needs drugs to maintain mental stability to decide to go off them as it is for a legally blind person to drive without glasses.

I don't know whether he needed drugs to maintain sanity. I'm just saying it's a pretty asinine thing to do.

February 20, 2008 at 11:52 AM
John Barleycorn said...

"I was simply pointing out that it's stupid for someone who is prescribed medication (one assumes for a reason) to stop taking it, whether because it makes him feel like a zombie or because he wanted to run a social experiment."

This, then "I'm not arguing that we don't totally overmedicate people nowadays..." cancels the other out.

Why was he medicated and what for? What if the diagnosis was incorrect? What if the dosage was too high or too low? What if he was allergic to the medicine or experienced physical discomfort from taking it?

Just because a doctor says you should take a pill doesn't mean 1) you should, and 2) the doctor is right. Because our society is so over-medicated, and because we foolishly believe a pill can solve most if not all woes, much actual therapy is missed in the crossfire.

And again, you're missing the relevant point of the actual mental condition, which no one knows, and therefore it's misguided to claim understanding on an incomplete topic.

If Steven truly were psychotic, we would hope his prescribing doctor wouldn't overlook it and send him skipping down the road with a bottle of Prozac. There are measures to treat the severely mentally ill. You're assuming he was obviously psychotic, which is likely incorrect, given that proper measures, within law, hadn't been followed.

February 20, 2008 at 12:19 PM

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