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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

I'm Sure This Is Just a Coincidence

February 7, 2012 Fox News has a very depressing description of the family background of the 15 year old girl who slashed the throat and stabbed to death a 9 year old neighbor girl.  Her father was in prison, and her mother abandoned her:

Bustamante's grandmother and legal guardian, Karen Brooke, was asked in court if she noticed anything different about Bustamante as they left the home that evening. She appeared a bit happier than usual, Brooke said.
Brooke said her own daughter -- Bustamante's mother -- had lived a wild life of drug and alcohol abuse and had abandoned her children several times, including once not long before Bustamante attempted suicide in on Labor Day 2007 by swallowing a large bottle of Tylenol and making hundreds of cuts on her arms -- even carving the word "hate" in one of them.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/07/missouri-teen-killer-had-troubled-family-depression/#ixzz1lj424ZH7
There may be some involvement with her increased dose of Prozac--which often alleviates depression enough for the severely depressed to do something stupid or crazy.  (Until that point, they are too depressed to do much of anything.)

You read enough accounts like this, and it makes you just a little suspicious that "a wild life of drug and alcohol abuse" may not be the best strategy for child-rearing. But heck, perhaps Bustamante would have become emotionally disturbed, suicidal, then homicidal, even if she had grown up in a completely normal, stable, happy home.  Right?

I get pretty irritated with the "drugs don't cause this sort of behavior" and "what consenting adults do in private is none of the government's business" claims largely because there are so many cases where one person's stupidity has consequences far beyond their own body.  I agree that you have to draw a line, otherwise the government ends up with authority to tell us what time to get up in the morning, what time to go to bed, how many green leafy vegetables to eat, but pretending that we are all islands, with no effect on others, is incorrect.

3 comments:

  1. Someday two women will marry,
    "have a child together", and divorce. When that happens, how will the court know who to favor? Which woman takes the part of the husband/father in the family law rules? What woman will stand for that sort of treatment? The courts will have to make it up as they go along again, and after the same-sex divorce goes through the appellate procedure, men will bring an equal protection claim because the law is applied differently to them when a woman divorces them.
    I don't see how this won't happen. Leftists are too doctrinaire and stubborn to see it otherwise, and there will be a tremendous fight.

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  2. There may be some involvement with her increased dose of Prozac--which often alleviates depression enough for the severely depressed to do something stupid or crazy. (Until that point, they are too depressed to do much of anything.)

    That's a common theory, but when I did some research into it in the late '90s I couldn't find any evidence of it, nor did my very experienced psychiatrist (old enough to be very happy about the development of benzodiazepams since the barbiturates have a terribly narrow therapeutic index: a light weight woman could go into respiratory arrest with as few as 2 drinks...), after quite a bit of thought and discussion of the concept, believe it to have much if any merit. We were, though, entirely focusing on suicide (my RKBA interests were driving my curiosity).

    Obviously there are going to be outliers and/or correlations without causations; did the person do something stupid and/or crazy because of a prescription mental illness drug or were they on the drug because it was believed their behavior had a biological cause?

    One caveat: antidepressants (and many other drugs) can most certainly trigger mania, that's happened to me a couple of times. People with less self-control or who go full blown, auditory hallucinations manic ... well, that could get ugly.

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  3. My comment above belongs to the previous post. I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

    Drugs are a lot like money. Money gives you the ability to fully express the depth and breadth of your stupidity, and drugs allow you to express the full extent of your evil urges.

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