What drove these people to kill?
The Power of Media
For those of you that know Bex and I well, we haven’t had ‘normal TV’ connected within our home for a lot of years. We don’t have Cable TV and we don’t have Free-To-Air TV either. We just watch shows on demand streamed through the internet without advertisements. We feel it’s healthier for us and Kaiya not to be bombarded with it all the time. Word of mouth from my family, friends and clients literally becomes our news feed. If it’s really important we’ll watch it on a news website. Abstaining from daily news is what we call ‘selective ignorance’. Something we adopted from Tim Ferriss. Logging onto Facebook the other day showed 15 out of 20 posts being about the CT shooting. All I could think was ‘not again’ and ‘another day in America’. It’s an unfortunate but valid stereotype as there have been 61 mass shootings in the US in the last 30 years! [1].
Australian 1996 Gun Ban / Buy Back
Everyone on Facebook was screaming anti-gun sentiments, which is fair enough. Here in Australia, we had a mass shootout in 1996 that brought the country to a standstill [2]. The government immediately reacted and created a ‘gun ban/gun buyback’ scheme that removed over 600,000 guns from the public. There haven’t been any mass shootouts since. There has however been an increase in ‘non-gun suicides’, ‘assault rate’ and ‘robbery’ [3]. Yes of course, nowhere near as many deaths as mass shootouts, but the fact remains, getting rid of guns does not actually fix the root core of the problem. It is not addressing why all these people are getting angry enough to kill people then commit suicide in the first place.
Bowling for Columbine
As shown in the documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine’ by Michael Moore [4], he found that Canadians have the same access to guns and ammunition, same access to violent movies and nowhere near the same problem with mass shootings. Let alone even double digit mortality rates from guns in the area of Windsor where he did his research. He also noticed that the nightly news and TV in general lacked the same fear mongering he experienced when watching it at home in the USA. People in Windsor left their doors unlocked and felt safe. A quote from a citizen he interviewed: “If more guns made people safer, the USA would be the safest place in the world. It isn’t, it’s the opposite”. So in the case of Canada he clearly showed access to guns is not affecting the incidence of mass shootings.
What makes people angry enough to kill people including themselves?
More than ever after killings like this, I feel it is more important than ever for parents to question how they are raising their children and to question what our governments and schools are teaching us as right from wrong. To understand how powerful the media and government are and how much fear is being created surrounding how we live our life. To understand how much chemical laden, neurotoxic crap food is served in school cafeterias and the effect this has on our neuro-chemistry. To understand how much the typical family unit / tribe has changed from yesteryear and what effect it is having on our health. To understand what effect shoot ’em video games have on the sub-conscious. The list can go on. In this case, it can go on to understanding how lethal pharmaceutical drugs can be on the human body. In 2010 in the USA, Pharmaceutical Drugs were the third leading drug killer after cigarettes and alcohol [5]. Why the heck are we giving these things to kids? Can these things designed to improve our health be a contributing factor in these mass shootouts? Spending for prescription drugs in the USA was $234.1 billion in 2008, which was more than double what was spent in 1999 [8].
Is drugging our children the answer to optimal health for them?
The Drugging of Our Children
[/vc_column_text][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”10″][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/26e5PqrCePk” align=”center”][vc_separator type=”transparent” thickness=”10″][vc_column_text]This documentary puts a lot of focus on the incessant ‘clinical diagnosis’ and labeling of kids as having issues like ADD and ADHD. Here’s some pertinent points and quotes I made during the film:
– The children that were to blame for the Columbine, Georgia, Kentucky and Colorado mass shootings were on psychotropic drugs. Columbine Killer, Eric Harris, was on ADHD drug Ritalin for 1 year prior to shootout.
– There are no quantitative biological forms of measure for ADHD and ADD. Some diagnostic measures for ADHD obtained from the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)’ used by school teachers, doctors and psychiatrists are:
‘Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat’, ‘Work is often messy and performed carelessly and without considered thought. Individuals often have difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities and often find it hard to persist with tasks until completion’ [6].
Brad: Sounds like normal kids to me! Or more so, kids that have had a pop-tart or cereal breakfast and have unstable blood sugars! I also wonder if Albert Einstein, Nicola Tesla or Thomas Edison would have fit these diagnoses for ADD or ADHD!
– The DSM has therefore attracted praise for standardizing psychiatric diagnostic categories and criteria. It has also attracted a lot of controversy and criticism. Some critics argue that the DSM represents an unscientific system that enshrines the opinions of a few powerful psychiatrists. Most Psychiatrists then get their information about the latest drugs to treat these mental disorders straight from pharmaceutical representatives.$16 billion a year is spent on pharmaceutical representatives doing this job.
– Kids are being pushed to achieve from a very early age. To develop a resume from the word go. This is certainly the case in Japan [7].
– Approx 10% of boys ages 6-12 in the states are taking psychotropic drugs. Schools get awarded more money for kids that end up getting diagnosed with ADHD.
– Increased dosages of Ritalin lead to lots of side effects such as child depression. Anti-depressants like Prozac and Zoloft are then used. This then affects their sleep, so they are prescribed Paxil, which is known to produce hallucinations. Two teenagers on the video talked about their own experiences with the hallucinations motivating them to kill people.
– During a clinical trial of anti-depressant Prozac, a teenager experienced hallucinations and fantasies of murdering his classmates and his classmates murdering him [9] [10].
– Pharmaceutical companies go as far as to pay for Professorships, entire laboratory costs in universities and pay for the distribution of major journals such as the ‘Archives of General Psychiatry’ which is sent to all Psychiatrists in the USA free of charge. They sponsor a heap of the credit courses that MD’s have to take to keep their credentials up to date as well as plenty of free conferences for doctors.
– The ‘New England Journal of Medicine’ looked hard for an academic psychiatrist or expert that was NOT on the payroll of a drug company so they can write an unbiased synopsis of the pros and cons of anti-depressants.
– For 15 years, the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical corporation covered up up their own internal investigation that showed people on Prozac were 12 times more likely to commit suicide, than people using other anti-depressants!! The 1988 document indicated that 3.7 percent of patients attempted suicide while on the blockbuster drug, a rate more than 12 times than cited for any of four other commonly used antidepressants [11].
– An FDA Hearing on Prozac shown in the movie plays like a suicide convention of former patients using the drug explaining how it affected them.
– Who is benefiting from the prescription of these drugs? Pharmaceutical companies, advertisers, MD’s, teachers who can’t control their classes.
– One lady’s child was taken from his school and placed in a ‘special school’ and dosed with Ritalin against her will. After fighting many times to try and get her son released, she had to abduct her child from the special school, and immediately leave for the Canadian border. She lived there for several years before one day getting pulled over by the Canadian police whereby she was made aware that she was wanted by the FBI for kidnapping and stood the chance of being locked up for 10 years. She went to California and went to jail. She has since left jail and is still searching for her child’s whereabouts.
-The end of the documentary talks a lot about the power of food and how much of a change teachers at schools have noticed when their school cafeteria lunches changed.
I feel that the bottom line is this. We all have lives where our emotions go up and down. We have periods of depression and happiness. Life is an experience. It’s never perfect. These ebbs and flows are not a reason to go running to a doctor to medicate ourselves to achieve perfection and normalcy 100% of the time. It’s a time for reflection on how we are living our life! A time that Bex and I get ourselves and clients to reflect on how much balance lies within the Primal 6. What is the root cause of why we are depressed or angry in the first place? Yes it’s certainly a longer road compared to the ‘pill for an ill approach’, but as shown in the video, a whole lot healthier and safer!
In the words of Hippocrates, ‘the father of modern medicine’:Â ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’. Eat non-chemical laden neurotoxic food first 100% and see how your moods change before dosing up with big pharma!
1/ A Timeline Of Mass Shootings In The US Since Columbine
DEF: Mass Shooting: “The discharging of firearms multiple times by one or more parties into a group of unarmed victims”
2/ The Australian Port Arthur Massacre
3/ Results of the 96 /97 Australian Gun Laws and ‘Buyback’
4/ Bowling for Columbine – Documentary [from 1:11 onward]
5/ Legal vs. Illegal Drug Deaths Per Year
6/ DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Psychiatric Manual
8/ Prescription Drug Use Continues to Increase: U.S. Prescription Drug Data for 2007-2008
9/Emergence of self-destructive phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine treatment.
10/ Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupation during fluoxetine treatment.
11/ Document may reveal Prozac risk
Mass Shootings and The Drugging of Our Children – March 2013
