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VESTER: It has happened all too often. A troubled teenager gets his hand on a weapon, and lives are changed forever. But why? ON THE RECORD investigates, and, as Fox’s Douglas Kennedy found out, the trail can often lead right to the medicine chest.
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DOUGLAS KENNEDY, FOX CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Two years ago 16-year- old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage.
(on camera): Describe around that time how you were feeling. CORY BAADSGAARD, TOOK GUN TO SCHOOL: In the morning, I just — I didn’t feel like going to school. I felt sick. I didn’t feel like really — you know, like I could get up very well, and so I went back to bed, and the next thing I remember, I’m in juvy in the detention center where I used to live.
KENNEDY (voice-over): Just one more apparently unexplainable violent outburst at school, unexplainable to everyone but Cory’s dad.
(on camera): So, in your mind, there’s no doubt what happened here?
JAY BAADSGAARD, CORY’S FATHER: I had no doubt that the medication did this. I mean, he was — had amnesia, you know, hallucinations earlier, abnormal dreams, which are all side effects of the medication.
KENNEDY (voice-over): That morning, Cory was on a mix of antidepressants prescribed for what doctors called situational depression. His father says the pills turned Cory from a sensitive teenage boy to a volatile marauder susceptible to blind rage.
JAY BAADSGAARD: He was never a violent kid. I mean, he’s always been a good kid, loved us, hugged us all. You know, he’s never watched violent videos, and, until the medication, he started — you know, after that, then we realized that he was having aggression problems, and — you know, it was out of character.
KENNEDY (on camera): At Fox News, we found the Baadsgaard story with antidepressants compelling. So we investigated further. We found a disturbing number of recent school shooters were either on medication or were experiencing withdrawal.
(voice-over): The list includes: 15-year-old Kip Kinkle withdrawing from Prozac when he shot 22 classmates, killing two, after murdering his mother and stepfather at his home in Springfield, Oregon; 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush on Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one; 18-year-old Jason Hoffman on Effexor and Celexa when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five; 15-year-old Shawn Cooper on a mix of antidepressants when he shot students in Idaho; 15-year-old T.J. Solomon, also on a mix of antidepressants when he aimed his shotgun at classmates in Conyers, Georgia, wounding six; and 17-year-old Eric Harris on Luvox when he and partner, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 classmates and a teacher in the bloodiest school massacre yet, Columbine.
DR. PETER BREGGIN, PSYCHIATRIST: One of the things that in the past we’ve known about depression is that it very, very rarely leads to violence. It’s only been since the advent of these new SSRI drugs that we have murderers, sometimes even mass murderers taking antidepressant drugs.
KENNEDY: This man sees another explanation for the students’ violence.
DR. ERIC HOLLANDER, MT. SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: They may not be getting adequate diagnostic evaluation. They may not be in intense enough treatment. They may not be on the right dose for the right length of time.
KENNEDY: Dr. Eric Hollander is a consultant for various drug companies, including the maker of Paxil.
HOLLANDER: There is no evidence that being on an antidepressant medicine would increase the likelihood of homicide or suicide.
BRUCE WISEMAN, CITIZENS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS: As the number of drugs increased, so, too, have the number of school shootings.
KENNEDY: Bruce Wiseman runs a group that has monitored long-term effects of antidepressants on kids for years.
WISEMAN: The drugs have got documented side effects of mania, of psychoses in some cases, of violence, of suicidal tendencies, and you have studies documenting the fact that these kids were not violent, took the drugs, and became so.
KENNEDY: Indeed, Fox News recently obtained confidential documents belonging to the maker of Paxil, the drug Cory Baadsgaard had been taking when he snapped. The document suggests a patient taking Paxil is eight times more likely to attempt or commit suicide than patients taking placebo.
And data publicly available from the drug companies show a small percentage of patients on all antidepressants experience mania, a state of mind sometimes associated with violent outbursts.
WISEMAN: When you take the figures of — one drug manufacturer talked about maniacal behavior of 4 percent. Well, if there are, as some reports say, two-million kids on these drugs, that’s 80,000 time bombs waiting to explode.
KENNEDY (on camera): Waiting to explode. That’s exactly what Cory Baadsgaard’s father said happened to Cory on antidepressants. He says the solution is simple: Stop drugging our children.
JAY BAADSGAARD: Just stop medicating the kids, and they — I don’t think we’ll have these problems. Or as many as we do now.
KENNEDY (voice-over): And Cory agrees. He’s out of jail and off the drugs, and he says he’s doing just fine.
In Washington state, Douglas Kennedy, Fox News.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
VESTER: So what happens when the drugs designed to save your life make you want to take it? We’re going to have that in part two of our series, “Drugging Kids.” It’s ON THE RECORD tomorrow night.
But, first, is the cure worse than the disease? An explosive debate on our exclusive series, fair and balanced, ON THE RECORD.
Then later, what these people do could stop or start a war? ON THE RECORD’s on the ground with the weapons inspectors in Baghdad for a live late-breaking update. Stay with us.
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VESTER: We’re back to debate the report you just saw on drugging kids. It’s a Fox News exclusive.
Joining us in L.A. is Bruce Wiseman — you just saw him in the report — the national U.S. president for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and author of the book, “Psychiatry, the Ultimate Betrayal.”
In Washington, we have Dr. Joan Kinlin. She is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, a clinical faculty member at Georgetown University, and a member of the American Psychiatric Association.
Welcome to you both.
BRUCE WISEMAN, CITIZENS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS: Thank you.
DR. JOAN KINLIN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: Thank you.
VESTER: Dr. Wiseman, let me start with you and just try to sort of feel you out as to where you are. Do you think that all antidepressants in teenagers are dangerous or just some?
WISEMAN: First of all, I’m — just so you know I’m not a doctor, just to make sure the record is straight there.
I think the problem on this — I think psychiatrists have been misleading the public, not only about the subjective or unscientific nature of psychiatric diagnosis, but also about the potentially violence-inducing nature, the violence-inducing side effects of the drugs used to treat them.
I — this is a billion-dollar mental-health industry with a vested interest of keeping the public uninformed here. I think the public needs to be aware of this and that, clearly, there is documented evidence that these...
VESTER: But is that true of all antidepressants or just some?
WISEMAN: Well, it’s certainly true of enough of them that it’s a problem.
Seven out of the 12 last school shootings were on these kinds of drugs. Studies at Harvard, studies at Yale, studies at Columbia, studies at the State University of New York all tie these kinds of drugs to acts of suicide and/or violence. It’s enough to be a real concern.
Whether it’s all of them or not, what I can tell you is that the medical literature makes it clear that there’s a connection.
VESTER: Dr. Kinlin, let me ask you. I mean, you know, can we say that it’s the medication that did it, or is it the preexisting condition in the young person that did it...
KINLIN: Well, I...
VESTER: ... and that — you know, that the medication just wasn’t enough to stop it?
KINLIN: As an expert in school violence, these are extremely rare events, and I think that one cannot extrapolate from what happened to state that this is what caused the violence. We know, in fact, that most violence is caused by people who are untreated and have serious depression, and...
VESTER: Right, but we’re talking for the moment about kids who were being medicated. So let’s sort of confine it to that.
KINLIN: Well my understanding is that most of these kids were not — either not on medication at the time of the shooting, or were on multiple medications, and that possibly might have been the source of it.
VESTER: You think then that there are contraindication — that they were — the cocktail of medications and not one individual SSRI — you know, Paxil, Zoloft...
KINLIN: That is my understanding. And the cocktail of many medications.
VESTER: OK. Bruce, let me ask you. Is it — do you think that parents are overmedicating their kids, that, you know, that whatever it is that’s going wrong either in the child’s life or in the family’s general dysfunction that parents are afraid to kind of deal with it and talk it out, and so they’re saying, “Yes, sure. OK. I’ll take a prescription for my kid.”
WISEMAN: Well, I don’t think there is any question about it, Linda. You know, we spend $50 million a year on the war on drugs in this country, $50 billion a year, and yet kids line up in the corridors of our school getting their fix of kiddie cocaine when, in fact, there are probably educational problems there that are the basis of these kind of things, and —
You know, a child looks out the window, he butts into line, he interrupts the teacher, he is slapped with a psychiatric diagnosis, and then put on these kinds of medications which — and, with all due respect, clearly, are documented to cause or that have side effects, such as mania, such as psychoses, such as violence. This is documented in the peer review literature.
VESTER: Dr. Kinlin, I understand that you believe in talk therapy. You do believe that meds work, but you also feel like, you know, you’ve got to talk to the family and find out what’s going on first before you write that prescription.
So I ask you the same question. Is it — you know, it — do we have a problem with parents who are not willing to deal with the root issues either in the child or in the family itself?
KINLIN: I find that, if a parent comes with the child and they come for a very careful and full evaluation, you do an evaluation of the family, the psychosocial history, you find out about the school, you do a complete medical history, get all of the pediatric records, and find out and do evaluations, send particular questionnaires to the teachers, to really try and understand in what facets of this child’s life do they have problems, and then you decide how will I proceed? But always there’s a combination of talking and sometimes medication. It depends on whether or not it’s indicated and it’s truly needed.
VESTER: Bruce, if you could sort of pick a best-case scenario, would you say that what you’d rather see is no meds for any teenagers until there is better research on all antidepressants?
WISEMAN: Well, I don’t — I don’t think there’s any question of it. These kids in many cases have mental toxicities, lead toxicities. They should go to a non-psychiatric medical doctor if there’s some problem and be tested for underlying physical problems.
These kinds of things can parade as psychiatric symptoms, as I say, medical toxicity, lead toxicity. In some cases, Linda, these children simply aren’t being taught to read, and yet the mental health industry is labeling them with some subjective disorder and putting them on stimulant drugs that are similar to cocaine.
VESTER: We’ve got to leave it there for the moment. Bruce Wiseman, Dr. Joan Kinlin, thank you both very much.
When ON THE RECORD continue, they’re in, and they’re ready to go, but can a bunch of scientists and researchers stop a war in Iraq? ON THE RECORD takes you live to Baghdad for a late-breaking update coming up next.
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