David Kupelian used a June 22 WorldNetDaily column to highlight claims of overmedication in the case of Lindsay Clancy, who has been accused of killing her three children. He went on to add:
The Clancy case is jarringly reminiscent of another infamous case involving a mother who killed all of her children while suffering from postpartum psychosis and taking an antidepressant drug whose manufacturer later conceded the medication could induce “homicidal ideation” – that is, murderous thoughts and feelings.
In 2001, Houston-area mom Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children – Noah, John, Paul, Luke and baby Mary, aged 7 years down to 6 months – in the family bathtub. Immediately after, Andrea called 911 and confessed, and when police arrived she opened the door and calmly told the officers, “I killed my kids.” Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.”
And neuropsychologist Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.”
Yates had been taking the SNRI antidepressant Effexor. (SNRIs, short for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are similar to SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, in that both chemically elevate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain). In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her five children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (since acquired by Pfizer) quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.”
As he has before, Kupelian failed to mention one key reason why Yates may have been obsessed with Satan: Yates and her husband were in thrall to a fundamentalist Christian street preacher who convinced the Yateses to sell their possessions and live in a bus the preacher had sold them; Andrea believed the preacher’s teaching that it was better to kill oneself than to mislead a child in the way of Jesus. Kupelian always leaves out that part of Yates’ story, which is a much more likely explanation for what happened. Still, he insisted that “Indeed, as this writer has previously documented, most of America’s most infamous and gruesome mass murderers over the years have been taking these controversial prescription drugs.” In that column, he again invoked Yates while refusing to disclose her link to the street preacher.
Kupelian went on to praise Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for ranting against anti-depressants:
At a summit called “the Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit” held in Washington, D.C., Kennedy said: “The United States does not just face a mental health crisis, we face a dependency crisis driven by over-medicalization. The data is clear: One in six American adults take an antidepressant. One in 10 children are on prescription medication for their mental health. Thirty percent of college students report using psychiatric medications in the past year. And in nursing homes, more than half of the residents are on prescribed antidepressants.”
According to the MAHA press release on the event, Kennedy said “HHS and four of its sub-agencies have issued a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, directing healthcare providers across the country to expand their use of ‘non-pharmacologic’ treatment for mental health, and strengthen informed consent whereby patients are informed of a medication’s risks and side effects.”
Kennedy also told the audience that, “moving forward, federal health regulators will advance regulations that support evidence-based treatments that don’t rely on medication. Such alternatives to medicalization include psychotherapy, building social connections, behavioral strategies, sleep-focused care, exercise programs and dietary improvements.”
Kennedy’s more enlightened, multifaceted – and less medication-dependent – approach to mental health issues makes even more sense in light of a stunning, if largely unpublicized, revolution in understanding depression that has recently emerged. And that is, the entire operating theory on which modern antidepressant drug therapy has been based for the last half-century – namely, that depression is caused by abnormally low levels of brain neurotransmitters, which therefore need to be artificially elevated by means of SSRI and/or SNRI antidepressants – has been all but abandoned by today’s medical science worldwide in just the last few years.
[…]If the long-lived but profoundly counter-intuitive medical orthodoxy that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain – a theory heavily promoted by major drug companies to promote antidepressant sales – is finally dead, perhaps that opens the door to a new, more reality-based era in which depression and other “mental illnesses” can be seen in a new light. Then, genuine help might finally be forthcoming for the millions of people living and suffering with what ultimately amount to troubles rooted not in a shortage of brain chemicals, but in psychological conflict, trauma and spiritual oppression – indeed, in the battle between good and evil raging inside every human being.
Kupelian offered no evidence to support this.