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A new, government-backed study [PDF] answers a question that has been on the minds of some Americans amid this summer's headlines from Charleston, Chattanooga, and Lafayette. According to the research, mass public shootings are indeed occurring more frequently than ever before in the United States.
The findings, published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) last week, show that the average rate of mass public shootings has increased from one incident per year in the 1970s to 4.5 incidents per year from 2010 through 2013. The numbers corroborate a 2014 report from Mother Jones. Scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University independently analyzed data that Mother Jones had collected, and the results showed a marked rise in the frequency of mass shootings in the last three decades. Notwithstanding the recent cluster of high-profile incidents, the CRS report also finds that over the past 14 years, the rate of increase has tapered off.
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/mass-shootings-congressional-report/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:37PM
There is likely no good data. However, I have some knowledge of, and experience with, these drugs. And I submit the problem is noncompliance or withdrawal, not actual use.
Here is what I find interesting: withdrawal from antidepressants that have a primarily serotonergic mode of action can cause a lowered threshold for brief psychotic breaks and an increase in random epileptiform discharges ("brain zaps" in colloquial terms). Clomipramine is well known at the local psychiatric emergency ward for its tendency to induce strong adverse reactions when people forget a couple of doses. Venlafaxine is notorious (among currently popular drugs) for causing the epileptiform discharges when you use the fast release formulation and forget a couple of doses.
Lanza is one datapoint. If we're discussing frequency, the question is the overall trend, not a single case. And the overall trend is an increase in serotonergic antidepressants (which, incidentally, have a horrible track record as regards efficacy in actual clinical practice (very different from the studies; patients you find in clinical practice are almost all excluded from the studies)). Also, a long term stable trend that any doctor can confirm for you, is that patients have terrible compliance. This means there is a steady increase, starting in '82 (zimelidine), and really peaking from '87 (fluoxetine), of people who are periodically experiencing a lowered threshold for brief psychotic breaks and an increase in epileptiform discharges, while in a difficult life situation. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for an increase in episodes of aberrant behavior, akin to what we actually see.
Of course, this is just a hypothesis. But it offers a testable prediction: that trends in the prescription rate for serotonergic drugs over time will be congruent to trends in mass violence, when corrected for other factors that influence violence and stress levels (e.g. socioeconomic factors). Factor analysis with pooled data from different regions that have similar laws as regards firearms should turn up something if the timeframe '70 through '15 is included, assuming the hypothesis is correct.
If it is correct, we can limit the problem while improving mental health care, simply by replacing these drugs with others, which is borne out by the evidence anyway. Compare the efficacy of old school unselective, irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibitors on top of NMDA-antagonists (e.g. shrooms, ketamine, memantine, amantadine) to the SSRIs and the SNRIs, and you will find that there is a dramatic difference in both remission rate, time to remission and degree of remission. But such a cocktail requires skill and precludes indiscriminate prescription. It is also off-patent. So it is unlikely to happen.
Still, it's worth checking the hypothesis, if you happen to be sitting on the correct data; anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @09:23PM
> Lanza is one datapoint. If we're discussing frequency, the question is the overall trend, not a single case. And the overall trend is an increase in serotonergic antidepressants
Is that the trend? Like VLM you are making an unsupported claim. I've provided a data point to the contrary, where is the data to support the original claim that there is a trend in the first place?