Well, it seems that there is currently a lull in the round of people running around shooting up schools or businesses, so I guess that it might be time for me to post a few observations on this sort of thing. I doubt anybody will actually read this until someone goes running around shooting people and that will make my observations seem insensitive, to which I respond that maybe if someone had actually bothered to pay any attention prior to when the shooting started, then you wouldn't be here reading this thinking I'm an insensitive asshole.
This article, much to your surprise, has absolutely nothing to do with guns or gun control. Because guns have absolutely nothing to do with it. For the class of people who would run around killing people in schools or businesses, knives would work just as well as guns. Swords would be pretty effective too. Any number of improvised explosive devices would also be quite effective, though I will not enumerate a list of them, lest I be accused of putting ideas in peoples' heads. The methods used in their application would be different than those of the guns, but they would be used nonetheless.
Why is this article not about guns? Because guns are just pieces of metal. They have taken on a mystical quality of having fearful magic attached to them that will kill off innumerable hundreds just by their mere presence in a room. This is stupid, though it is why people fear them so much. But, at the end of the day, they are nothing but pieces of metal. So are a knife, a candlestick, and a lead pipe. The metal is not the problem here. The person using it is the problem. The problem here is not the hunk of metal. It's the person telling the metal what to do.
If we are not talking about pieces of metal, what are we talking about? We are talking about people. So let's look at these folks who go around shooting up schools and businesses. And when I talk about them, I will do so with as much dispassion as possible. And when we look at a group of people as a distinct group, we should start by looking at what these individuals in the group all have in common.
First off, all of these guys are pretty smart. The Columbine shooters were honor students. The kid at Virginia Tech got into Virginia Tech, for goodness sake. These are all kids with genuine brains. Like it or not, they were all significantly smarter than average.
These aren't just some idiots waving a gun around and shooting randomly into crowds. These guys always used their intelligence to plan ahead and make sure that things were ready so that they could do as much killing as possible. They never ran out of ammunition. They were always very thorough in every room they entered. As I said above, I would be dispassionate, and I meant it.
I once spoke with someone who admitted to being bullied incessantly in high school. And this person admitted that they sometimes wished they could bring in a pistol and just blow the bully's head off. As this person described it, the teachers didn't care what the popular kids did and didn't do anything to stop it; they just let this kid get pushed around and beat up. And do you really think that this is a unique experience in all of high school? The physically strong have enjoyed pushing around the weak since time immemorial. And are we really surprised when some harried schmuck who sees this sort of thing 8-10 times a day every day for 20 years can't be bothered to defend the weak? No, the schmuck would (at most) probably just give a speech about "fighting your own battles" and "back when I was your age" and "kids these days", then pretend that a good pep talk will make the worst experience of that kid's life into some minor event.
Is it any wonder that kids would store up anger when they get shoved around by the other kids? After all, if they fight back, they get beat up more. And if the teachers, who are supposed to enforce some discipline, give tacit approval of the abuse by doing nothing to stop it, then there is no recourse to physical abuse than a response of physical force. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but any intelligent person (see above) knows that weapons are the only equalizers for physical inferiority; the weak cannot bully the strong.
Oh that's right, they are all taking antidepressants! What are the odds? Of course, it's probably just coincidence. Surely there is no correlation between a drug that alters brain activity and the fact that a rampaging maniac who takes that drug is a rampaging maniac.
I knew someone who had clinical depression required antidepressant medication to manage it. Apparently, it did help the depression go away. However, it also made this person very angry at just about everything. This person vented anger vocally rather than physically, but the difference was nonetheless noticeable for those who knew this person well.
Some comedian once said, "depression is anger without enthusiasm." Excusing the glibness of the observation, it is essentially correct. Depression is a lot of anger that the person points directly back at themselves. The person is angry at themselves for whatever mistake or failing they see in themselves. Rather than directing the anger outward, it remains pointed inward. The problem is that, for the clinically depressed, they have a lot, lot, LOT of anger that they point at themselves. Now take that and triple it, then triple it again it for some poor kid struggling with the wildly intense moods that come with puberty.
And I hate to break it to you, but people in their mid-to-late teens tend to be a pretty angry lot. That's why they deface property or get in fights or break shit just to break shit. They are an angry bunch that doesn't know what to do with all that anger.
Anyway, from my own, admittedly limited, experiences with people taking antidepressants, it seemed to me that antidepressants just take that anger and turn it inside out. Now, instead of that pointing anger inward, the anger is directed outward. I'm willing to guess that pointing the anger inward was the one way that these people managed to keep their anger under control—don't blame them for what they do, blame yourself and your own failings and weakness. However, if that control mechanism is switched off, the anger can only be directed outward.
Let's phrase it another way. I think we can all agree with the statement, "There is something wrong with you if you want to kill everyone in the school." But if the very control mechanism that says the, "There is something wrong with you if," part is turned off, then there is nothing left for you except the, "You want to kill everyone in the school," part. The medication makes the person incapable of thinking that there is something wrong with them. Which, I should point out, is exactly the point of taking an antidepressant! People take antidepressants so that they will stop thinking things are wrong with them all the time—I mean, that's what depression is: a person always finding fault with themselves.
The problem is not depression, it's anger. But I'm willing to guess that nobody thinks to make an anti-anger pill in the expectation that it will cure depression. No, we found the chemical that makes people think things are wrong with them, so we get rid of that and no more depression. But maybe, if we got rid of the anger that people were pointed at themselves, we could make things much better for everyone.
For those young adults out there, if you're reading this, don't listen to your parents when they talk about how great high school is and how it is the best time of your life. That is complete horseshit. High school sucks. Just get through this excrutiating, awkward, painful period of your life with as much knowledge as you can and move on... preferably away from your idiot parents who somehow think that the best years of your life consist of cliques, rigid social stratifications, and relentless posturing and popularity contests that punctuate a series of essentially boring classes that produce more work every night after school than your parents do all week at work.
When I go to work, I do my job. I have one job all day. It is the same job every day and I do the same thing for that eight hours I spend there. Nothing ever changes for me, nor will it ever change for me unless I get a different job, in which case I will eventually settle into the new job just like I did with my current job. Personally, I don't think this situation is the best time of my life either, but it is at least pretty easy.
You, on the other hand, have to deal with literature, mathematics, history, physics and/or chemistry, a foreign language, and perhaps a few other electives such as computers, woodworking, cooking, or whatever else you may choose from any such options offered by your high school. Oh, and you don't even get to settle into the sort of repetitive routine that your parents have at their job; you are constantly being challenged with new information that you need to learn and master if you are to continue on to new information that you will then need to learn and master. Trust me, that sort of broad-gauge, intensive learning experience would leave the average adult mentally broken down after a week.
I admit that I actually had a fairly decent, if unremarkable, high school experience. I hated it all the same. Of all the times in my life, that is the one I have the least fondness for in my recollections. If high school turns out to be the best time of your life, I can only say that I'm very, very sorry.
So let's see, where were we? Let's recap by doing the following:
Do I really need to describe what we get when we mix this all together? Okay, I'll say exactly what we get. We an excellent recipe for a monster.
As much as I'd like to say we need to end bullying, it's not going to happen. For some, power and stature are no fun unless they are used to abuse the powerless and minor. But antidepressants are not the solution. Yes, they may keep kids from becoming suicidally depressed, but it often happens that they simply become homicidally angry. And sometimes it will just make them more suicidal—one of the side effects of antidepressants is... get this... suicidal thoughts! I should note that the original title of the article was "If It Gives You Suicidal Thoughts, It's Not an Antidepressant", but I think we moved in an entirely different direction with this one.
Rather than a kid just up and killing himself, now we have a kid who pops off and kills a whole lot of other people before he kills himself. In case you had not heard, all of these shooting rampages end when the shooter kills himself. But now, instead of people feeling bad about not doing something for the poor kid, you get a lot of people who get to feel hate toward a monster. Here's the really sad part about things: people would much rather hate someone else than feel guilty about having done nothing to help someone else when they were alive.
Therapists, for their part, just see depression. Depression has a cure in a pill. Give the kid the pill, the depression is cured. Bam, problem solved, who's the next appointment? The therapist can get on with his or her life knowing that he or she did all he or she could for the kid—it's not his or her fault that the kid went on to kill a bunch of people, because the therapist didn't tell him to do that. Medicine is not going to do anything because medicine considers its job to be done as soon as the prescription is written. A kid who shoots up a school is a problem for law enforcement.
Nobody wants to pay attention to the fact that all of the these school shooting rampages are committed by kids taking antidepressants. But I will freely admit that nobody will every accept that idea, since it offends both politics and modern medicine. So we'll be more than happy to create monsters just so we can have someone we can call evil. And really, that makes for much more interesting news than preventing these kids from becoming monsters in the first place. So who in a position to do something about this is going to actually do something to get these kids off the antidepressants? Nobody. Because it's not in anybody's interest to stop these kids from taking antidepressants. And so the killings will continue.