Antidepressants and Homicide: Automatism Spectrum Disorders
Join us on Saturday, October 5, 2024 at 6-8 pm BST
In this presentation, David Healy, along with panelists Jim Gottstein and Christopher Lane, poses a question for all of us to consider. There is overwhelming evidence from clinical studies and from tragic events that antidepressants can cause homicide. Judges and prosecutors both acknowledge this to be true. However, no jury has ever acquitted a person for homicide on the basis of a drug they took. If the person shows any hint of intent, we convict them, not the drug.
The only hope of acquittal is if there is evidence that the killing happened in an “automatic state,” like sleepwalking. Yet, most of our behaviors are in fact automatic (reflexive and unconscious), and SSRIs reshape the sensory inputs that drive these reflexes, with relatively immediate effects on our personality and potentially our character. Doesn’t that make a case for acquittal?
This webinar will explore this effect that SSRIs can have, and explore whether we, as a society and in the court of law, can draw a line between whether a person is “present”—or not “present”–at the time a crime is committed. It will also explore cultural, political and legal factors that block acquittals.
Single Ticket: $10 USD. Funds will support Mad in America’s work as a non-profit organization. We understand that not everyone can afford the expense at this time. Please type in the code homicide for a free ticket as needed.
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Ask a Question: If you’d like to submit a question for the panel, please email it to [email protected] at least 48 hours prior to the start of the event. We will review all questions and choose those most relevant to the audience and topic. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions during the discussion. Thank you!
About the Panelists
David Healy has worked on serotonin reuptake systems for 40 years: in the laboratory, as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies, as a clinician using SSRIs and recognizing the problems they cause, and for over a decade as a member of the RxISK.org team that collects reports on treatment induced adverse reactions.
This has put him in a good position to outline what was known about these drugs from the start, what was learnt about their hazards and when, and in particular how companies have managed the problem that stopping these drugs posed for them – hazards known about before the drugs were marketed.
Jim Gottstein is an Alaskan lawyer and author of The Zyprexa Papers (2021) which shows how Eli Lilly was illegally promoting the use of an antipsychotic drug on children and the elderly, with particularly lethal effects.
In 2002, he founded the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights) to mount a strategic litigation campaign against forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock. PsychRights’ mission includes informing the public about the counterproductive and harmful nature of the drugs and electroshock.
In addition, Jim co-founded a number of organizations to help psychiatric patients, all but one of which were peer-run including Mental Health Consumers of Alaska, Alaska Mental Health Consumer Web and Soteria-Alaska.
Christopher Lane, Ph.D., is a member of Northwestern University’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and a regular contributor to Psychology Today, where he writes about psychiatry, psychiatric drugs, and all kinds of side effects. His books include Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), translated into six languages, on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s.
About the Host
Robert Whitaker is the author of four books, and coauthor of a fifth, three of which tell of the history of psychiatry. In 2010, his Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness won the U.S. Investigative Reporters and Editors book award for best investigative journalism. He is the founder of madinamerica.com, a website that features research news and blogs by an international group of writers interested in “rethinking psychiatry.”