We all knew that such psychiatric abuses were happening in the the old Soviet Union, but in 2023? In Norway?
Photo of Trond Harald Haaland and his lawyer Barbro Paulsen. Screenshot Facebook / Kjetil Tveit
This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.
The same day police arrived at his door, he had shared one of my news stories.
First a word of warning. This story you are about to read is WORSE than you think.
I did not believe this could happen in a democracy. This should not ever happen in a democracy. But then again, I am beginning to ask myself if we are actually still living in a democracy.
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.
Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”
While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.
The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.
Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.
In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:
The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.
The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.
Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.
That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.
These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.
Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.
An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.
Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.
For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.
One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.
For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.
NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.
Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.
Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.
The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.
The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.
Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.
Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.
As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.
No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
We stand at a crossroads.
As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”
About 30 million Americans are taking benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin- about 12.5% of the adult population. Doctors and psychiatrists have prescribed these drugs for decades to treat anxiety. But a new study reveals “benzodiazepine usage and discontinuing usage” can create “nervous system injury and negative life effects.”
“Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients. Even though I took my medication as prescribed, I still experience symptoms on a daily basis at four years off benzodiazepines. Our survey and the new term BIND (benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction) give a voice to the patient experience and point to the need for further investigations,” said Christy Huff, MD, one of the paper’s coauthors and a cardiologist and director of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition.
About 76.6% of the respondents had long-lasting symptoms after discounting the use of benzodiazepines. Almost half of the respondents had these ten symptoms for more than a year:
low energy
difficulty focusing
memory loss
anxiety
insomnia
sensitivity to light and sounds
digestive problems
symptoms triggered by food and drink
muscle weakness
body pain
The most alarming part of the study was the symptoms listed above were new and distinct and weren’t experienced before respondents used Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin. Many respondents reported damaged relationships, job loss, and increased medical costs. Also, 54.4% of the respondents reported suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide.
But don’t worry because doctors and the government tell us benzodiazepines are safe, just like they said OxyContin wasn’t addictive in the 1990s.
If Trump wins and if he is serious, then this is huge news. An investigation into Big Pharma is long, long overdue.
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In recent decades, there has been an unexplained and alarming growth in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children. We’ve seen a stunning rise in autism, auto-immune disorders, obesity, infertility, serious allergies, and respiratory challenges. It is time to ask: What is going on?
“Is it the food that they eat? The environment that we live in? The over-prescription of certain medications? Is it the toxins and chemicals that are present in our homes?
Every year, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to treat these chronic problems rather than looking at what is causing them in the first place.”
Sixty years of violence and death on a massive scale has not dimmed Big Pharma’s lust for profit at any cost. They remain the greatest threat to public health in the world.
A.D.H.D. is not a disease and Pharma’s ‘medication’ is not a cure.
The heartbroken mom of the Oklahoma girl who fatally stabbed her younger brother in a “demonic” rage said the child had recently become “angry for no reason” while taking ADHD medication — but by the time she pulled her daughter off it, it was too late and she experienced a “manic episode.”
April Lyda revealed during an interview on NewsNation on Thursday night what she believes led her daughter to attack her 9-year-old brother, Zander, in the chest on Jan. 5 at their home in Tulsa.
“From what we found it looks like it was a medication issue, not anything else. Like a manic episode of some kind,” a tearful Lyda told host Chris Cuomo.
“Psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs are the common denominator of the growing number of shootings and other acts of violence, which are soaring right along with the soaring prescribing of psych drugs.” Killers on Psych Drugs
Here’s a question that every American should be able to answer: What percentage of the killers—that have carried out mass shootings across the United States—were on powerful psychiatric medications?
a—1%
b—25%
c—50%
d—75% or more
Why don’t we know the answer to this question? Doesn’t the United States have more mass shootings than any country in the world?
Yes, it does.
And aren’t these shootings the source of great suffering and anxiety?
Yes, they are.
And don’t most people genuinely want to know why these lone gunman feel compelled to kill innocent people?
Yes, they do.
Then, why don’t we know? Why—after more than two decades of these bloody incidents—do we still not have a definitive, thoroughly-researched answer to this one simple question: How many of these mentally-disturbed killers were on dangerous psychiatric medications?
Instead, the media pursues a line of inquiry that fails to reveal anything even remotely conclusive about the gunman’s actions. If “white supremacy” or “Nazi ideology” impacted the killer’s decision to go on a deadly shooting spree in Texas, then why didn’t he target a black community center or a Jewish synagogue? Wouldn’t that have been more consistent with his alleged ideology?
Yes, it would have been, which suggests that his alleged ideology is a symptom of his fragile mental condition not the primary factor driving his behavior. The reason these people go on crazed killing sprees is because they are ‘damaged goods’ not because they are ideologues. There’s a big difference.
So, why does the media keep harping on this silly the idea that the killer’s behavior was effected by his feelings about “white supremacy” or “Nazi ideology”? It’s ridiculous, after all, the killer was not white himself nor were his victims racially targeted. They were merely random passersby strolling through a shopping mall. In other words, there is no evidence to support the case that is being made by the media. But—here’s the thing—the media doesn’t care about evidence because their real goal is to advance a political agenda aimed at linking violent fanatical behavior to race-based uber-nationalism. What they are trying to do, is make a subliminal connection between the erratic behavior of a ruthless killer and the sincerely-felt patriotism of many Trump supporters. The media has been hammering away at this same theme for over six years culminating in the January 6 fraud. This is just the latest iteration of the same tedious political psy-ops.
If the journalists were serious about investigating this latest bloody incident, they’d try to find out whether the killer had been on the FBI’s radar before the onslaught took place. (as so many mass killers have been in the past.) Was he? Was Mauricio Garcia on the list of potential “domestic terrorists” compiled by the FBI?
We’ll probably never know, because that would expose the inner workings of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency which would undoubtedly cause considerable embarassment. So, the FBI is going to circle the wagons and make sure that never happens, which means that a good portion of the truth about this event will probably remain concealed forever. Even worse, we can expect that the media will continue to push their wacky theory that Garcia was a “non-white white supremacist” regardless of the fact that the claim makes no sense at all. Here’s how analyst Michael Tracey sarcastically summed it up:
If a non-white person is a “white supremacist,” does that mean he believes in his own innate racial inferiority? @mtracey
Leave it to Tracey to expose the imbecility of a meme that defies reason but to which the media clings like the Holy Grail. It’s actually shocking that anyone can take this type of verbal hucksterism seriously when, in fact, the whole “non-white white supremacist” thing is one of the most absurd concoctions of all time. It’s pure gibberish.
So, where should we look for answers? Where can we find rational explanations for these sporadic acts of violence?
There’s only one place we can look; at the mental state of the person who committed the crime. That’s where we have to start. If we want to understand what drives a man to kill random people in a school or shopping mall, we need to know something about the psychology of the perpetrator. Fortunately, volumes have been written on this subject by respected professionals who have researched the topic, studied the data, and drawn their own informed conclusions. Take a look:
Close to 17% of Americans are taking psychiatric drugs with side effects such as acting aggressively, being angry, or violent and acting on dangerous impulses...
Psychotropic drugs are hardly helping when their side-effects include worsening depression, new or worsening anxiety, agitation or restlessness, panic attacks, new or worsening irritability, acting aggressively, being angry, or violent, acting on dangerous impulses, an extreme increase in activity and talking (mania), and other unusual changes in behavior or mood.
“Rather than helping the individual, psychotropics alienate, and push them into more and more potentially dangerous behavior,” states the president of the Florida chapter of CCHR, Diane Stein.
This situation was so egregious that in 2004, the Federal Drug Administration issued a “black-box” label warning indicating that the use of certain antidepressants to treat major depressive disorder in adolescents may increase the risk of suicide, homicide, and other acts of violence.
A study entitled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others… declared … In the 69-month reporting period we identified 484 evaluable drugs that accounted for 780,169 serious adverse event reports of all kinds…. The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms.”“Psychiatric Drugs and Side Effects – The Unseen Hand Behind Violence in America“, Citizens Commission on Human Rights
These are the victims of the Texas Mall Shooting
It all sounds very serious, doesn’t it? It sounds like something that policymakers should be aware of so they can tighten regulations on these potentially-lethal medications. It also sounds like something that pharmaceutical industry would try to keep out of the newspapers so people don’t see the connection between these drugs and the mayhem they produce. Simply put, the truth is being hidden for power and profits. What else is new? Here’s more background from another article:
A growing number of school shootings and other shooting rampages were committed by individuals under the influence of, or in withdrawal from, psychiatric drugs known to cause mania, psychosis, violence and even homicide. Consider this list of 13 massacres over the past decade or so, resulting in 54 dead and 105 wounded – and these are just the ones where the psychiatric drugs are known. In other cases, medical records were sealed or autopsy reports not made public or, in some cases, toxicology tests were either not done to test for psychiatric drugs or not disclosed to the public….
Given the growing list of shooters who were on psychiatric drugs, given the fact that 22 international drug regulatory agencies warn these drugs can cause violence, mania, psychosis, suicide and even homicide, and given the fact that a major study was just released confirming these drugs put people at greater risk of becoming violent, CCHR International asserts: “Any recommendation for more mental health ‘treatment,’ which [inevitably] means putting more people and more kids on these [psychiatric] drugs, is not only negligent, but considering the possible repercussions, criminal.” (“The Real Lesson of Columbine: Psychiatric Drugs Induce Violence”
So, why aren’t we addressing the elephant in the room? Is there any doubt that the gunman at the Dallas-area shopping mall was mentally-unstable, probably had some history of counseling and treatment, and may have been on powerful psychiatric drugs? If you were a professional journalist, isn’t that where you would start your investigation rather than trying to cobble together some far-fetched theory based on photos of Nazi memorabilia on an isolated social media post?
We are told repeatedly by the media and the pundits on cable news that ‘guns are the problem’, but isn’t the case against powerful psychiatric meds equally compelling? It’s worth noting, that guns don’t fire themselves and that, typically, guns are not fired into crowds unless they are wielded by unstable, deranged people who—more often than not—have some traceable mental history in which they were diagnosed, counseled and treated. All we want to know is which medications they were prescribed so we can better monitor their use in order to protect the public. Unfortunately, the media is unwilling to provide this information due to a fundamental conflict of interest. They are paid by the drug companies. Here’s more from an article at the American Psychiatric Association:
A link between several types of psychotropic medications and violent behavior toward others has been documented in a recent study…
In a study published in the December 15, 2010… They found that during the study period, 780,169 serious adverse events of one kind or another had been reported for 484 drugs, and that of those serious adverse events, 1,937 had been acts of violence. They defined a violent event as any case report containing one or more of the following items: homicide, physical assault, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, or violence-related symptom….
“In addition, antidepressant drugs showed consistently elevated risk, even when compared with antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. . . .”
Paul Fink, M.D., an expert in the study of violent behavior and a past APA president, commented. “I can tell you that as a psychiatrist who has practiced for a long time, I was unaware that [varenicline and antidepressants] had been linked with violence toward others. . . . Psychiatrists and mental health professionals need to be aware of this association.” The study had no outside funding.” Several Medications Linked to Violent Acts
Keep in mind, normal, well-adjusted men who are happily married and gainfully employed, do not commit random acts of homicidal violence. These are people who have serious psychological problems, who may have sought professional help, and who have (oftentimes) been prescribed various psychiatric medications.
These medications—while beneficial to many—can result in excessive violence in a small percentage of users. The public needs to know about these drugs so they can balance their benefits against the risks to public safety. So far, there has been no admission that these risks even exist. Instead, all the blame has been placed on guns which has merely fueled greater distrust of both the media and the political establisment. In fact, most gun owners now believe that the politicians are not interested in public safety at all but merely use it as platform for promoting their own narrow interests. Ostensibly, those interests now include the repeal the second amendment followed by the disarming of the American people. That’s the goal and most gun owners know that’s the goal. Here’s one last clip from a letter to the editor titled Psychiatric Drugs are Behind the Violence by Doug Dale:
As Congress, surrounded by armed guards, metal detectors, chain link fence and paramilitary forces, debates infringing on the constitutional right to bear arms by private citizens, isn’t it time they actually address the root cause of these mass killings?
These events were unheard of until the FDA began approving more psychiatric drugs several decades ago. From 2004 to 2009, researchers accessing the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System revealed that 1,537 cases of violence were linked to 31 different types of psychiatric drugs.
Other professional studies concluded that patients didn’t have homicidal ideation until after taking these drugs. From 1992 thru 2017, 37 school shootings have been linked to these medications. In a report submitted to the Senate in 2014, it was estimated that 90% of school shooters were using antidepressants. Obviously, it’s not a person’s mental health, but the drugs that cause this violence.
The pharmaceutical lobby contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to congressional members that craft federal laws. Who will deny that these drugs are the root cause of the mass killings? Will it be uneducated political groupies drinking the gun-control elixir, politicians taking campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical lobby, the pharmaceutical industry and/or the doctors peddling this poison to the public, and if so, why?…
In 2001, a drug manufacturer removed a cholesterol drug from the market because it was linked to 31 deaths. We are way past that number in mass killings.
Congress needs to ban gun ownership from anyone being prescribed these drugs, then, at the least, make it a federal crime to write new prescriptions going forward. To do otherwise, one can only conclude that Congress could care less about how much collateral damage they cause.
If we want to stop the mass shootings, we need to strictly regulate the psychiatric medications that are causing them.
The big networks are going to protect their customers at all costs, and you are not their customers. You are the product. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are all trying to get as many of us watching as possible so that they can deliver millions upon millions of ad impressions to their true customers. Of course the biggest customers of all are in the pharmaceutical industry. According to Adweek, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than 400 million dollars on national television advertising during the month of March alone…
For Americans not yet convinced of Pfizer’s intentionally sinister role in the declining physical and mental health of our nation, the billion-dollar company’s behind-the-scenes funding of the test widely used for depression is another decisive example. Specifically, while searching in the late 1990s for ways to encourage primary care doctors to prescribe its newly-released antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline)—instead of presenting peer-reviewed scientific research—Pfizer teamed up with a marketing whiz named Howard Kroplick, who devised a simple checklist that created a sense of certainty and accuracy around a mental illness diagnosis.
A new study from the CDC says that, during the COVID era, Adderall use exploded among young women and teenage boys. When you add this to the number of young people on psychotropic drugs for depression, you must wonder whether this prescription drug use is an underlying reason for a whole lot of problems in America.
I’m not very familiar with Adderall (or a similar drug, Ritalin). My kids spent their early years at a classic Montessori School, and Montessori kids are almost never prescribed ADHD drugs. This is because they’re not forced to sit at their desks for hours or deprived of physical activity at recess because it’s too competitive or dangerous. Instead, Montessori kids can constantly move through their classrooms if they’re doing their work, and they get hours of free play a day.
Plus, my kids grew up in a safe neighborhood where they were constantly engaged in physical play, along with team sports. In other words, they had lots of activity that safely siphoned off the animal energy in all young bodies.
That’s not the case for most American schoolchildren, which I believe explains most ADHD diagnoses today. The easiest way to make a child sit still and focus is to prescribe Adderall. That’s a combination of two amphetamines—yes, the kind of stuff that makes adults manic and often dangerous. The common side effects are nasty:
That print is small, so let me fill you in on some of the “common” side effects: They include hostility, mood changes, drug-induced psychosis, depression, aggressive behavior, altered mental status, hallucinations, manic disorder, dysphoric mood, and suicidal ideation!
So why do we give these amphetamines to kids? We do so because Adderall has a paradoxical effect: Rather than speeding kids up, it slows them down. Significantly, though, a lot of these kids become addicted and continue taking Adderall long after they cease to be kids. They’re also not immune to any of those side effects.
Adderall was already the teachers’ friend in American schools before COVID, but since COVID, it’s become a scourge (emphasis mine):
ADHD medications have become increasingly common in recent years but the loosening of online prescribing rules during the pandemic made them accessible with just a few clicks of a button.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study today showed that the biggest rise in new prescriptions was among women in their 20s, with scripts rising about a fifth from 2020 to 2021. Across all ages and sexes, scripts increased about eight percent in that time.
The CDC estimates that six percent of women aged 20 to 24 are now taking the medications. The group most likely to be prescribed ADHD drugs is still teen boys 10 to 14 – at about 10 percent – but this is largely unchanged from pre-covid.
In addition to Adderall, America’s young people are drowning in a sea of psychotropic drugs. As teens struggle with life in the modern era, doctors put them on “antidepressant” drugs in the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) family. Take the much-prescribed Prozac. Its common side effects include symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, acute confusion, agitation, manic disorder, mood changes, suicidal ideation, memory impairment, and depersonalization.
Even worse than that, it recently emerged that there’s a very strong likelihood that serotonin deficiency has nothing to do with depression—which means that the medicines are not working along the intended lines. And as noted, a lot of the side effects cause great suffering and may make the patient a danger to himself or others.
Regarding the latter problem, here’s a list of kids in school who committed or wanted to commit mass murder and who were also on psychotropic drugs. The list only goes through mid-2019. There are probably lots of crimes that could be added.
There’s also a list of four so-called “transgender” people who committed mass murder. I’m willing to bet all were on some prescription medicine in the Adderall or SSRI families. Given that the Tennessee shooter, a 20-something-year-old woman, was getting treated for mental illness, I would really like to know what prescription medicines she was taking.
I am not a fan of Scientology. But I do know that the one thing it got right a long time ago was that we were endangering young American people by the rush to medicalize unhappiness tied to the difficulty of growing up (Ed: there’s a lot more than that that they got right Andrea). Think of their emotional world: They’re bombarded with false apocalyptic climate visions, the left’s aggressive push for early sexualization (with lots of help from Hollywood), the isolation of social media, the even greater isolation of COVID, and easy access to marijuana. Add in psychotropic drugs and amphetamines, and it’s a wonder that more haven’t gone crazy.
The term “superbug” conjures images of bacteria with superpowers—able to evade the effects of the antibiotics given to destroy them. The prolific use of antibiotics is thought to be the cause, and bacteria, in a fight for their survival, have adapted—making an increasing number of antibiotics ineffective against a growing number of bacterial infections.
A new study published in PNAS on Jan. 23 has shown that antidepressants, some of the most widely prescribed medications in the world, cause antibiotic resistance, giving them the potential to become dangerous superbugs.
So why do we give these amphetamines to kids? We do so because Adderall has a paradoxical effect: Rather than speeding kids up, it slows them down. Significantly, though, a lot of these kids become addicted and continue taking Adderall long after they cease to be kids. They’re also not immune to any of those side effects.
Psychiatric News 
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