It's wrong to kill, and yet I think these kinds of murders are understandable given the fact that these caregivers have complete control over their patients' lives, invalidate all of their patients'experiences, rob their patients of all hope, dehumanize them, and of course top it off with telling them they have to take drugs that cause violence.

I'm not lost at all. I'm sure your regular readers know where I'm going with this. But I would place a bet that he was going crazy on some medication cocktail. I'm sorry but calling the folks who recommend this stuff "caregivers" is not much different than calling those psych hospitals where people get involuntarily committed "havens". As a society we cannot keep giving this stuff out without a detailed explanation of the possible consequences to behavior of either reacting adversely or withdrawing irresponsibly. And that is not happening so these crimes will continue unabated and get worse with the dramatic increase in polypharmacy. I know I'm jumping to conclusions about this specific incident perhaps but it certainly fits a pattern I've seen over and over again.

I agree with the above comments, with the exception of one caring psychiatrist, who actually gave excellent therapy along with prescribing lithium. This is a terrible thing to say, but perhaps if my son had become violent and harmed the psychiatrist who prescribed the Zyprexa that killed him, perhaps maybe, maybe, maybe the next doctor would have discovered the problem and saved my son´t life. I feel a little brutal about making that statement but I feel a lot brutal about losing my son, with an incompetent doctor who gave no warnings at all.

Having read over 2,100 cases on www.ssristories.com [similar to this tragedy], I still continue to be dumbfounded by the cache of weapons involved in these horrible incidents. In this case, there were a total of 10 knives and one meat cleaver.

This is common in SSRI induced violent episodes.

Perhaps the man was diagnosed as 'bipolar' though, after he went insane on his antidepressant, so now he is on a cocktail of drugs [or in withdrawal] and there will be an outcry by the medical community to get these people 'treated'. Sigh.

Sorrowful,

My condolences regarding the loss of your son. I can't imagine what that must be like for you. Your thoughts are totally understandable.

Unfortunately, if your son had harmed the psychiatrist who prescribed Zyprexa, the next one wouldn't have figured it out. He/she would have medicated your son into oblivian. Sorry, I am very cynical.

Again, my condolences.

AA

“I think these kinds of murders are understandable given the fact that these caregivers have complete control over their patients' lives, invalidate all of their patients'experiences, rob their patients of all hope, dehumanize them, and of course top it off with telling them they have to take drugs that cause violence.” --- Sally

I find it quizzical and interesting without much evidence or information how anyone can automatically arrive at the above conclusions. I certainly don’t find this murder at all understandable at the moment and if the “caregiver” had complete control then there would have been no such happening.

I am a support person and caregiver and quite frankly I take strong exception to the above statements as I have no complete control over anyone or will I ever. Secondly I’ve never invalidated my spouse’s experiences or life and the opposite of robbing all her hope or dehumanizing her I’ve cherished her, helped keep her alive, given her encouragement and reasons to live, stood by her for over 4 decades and have helped to give my wife a reasonable quality of life currently free of depression. Then again, over those 4 decades she’s taken many medications in the hope of alleviating what was her life threatening depression and it never ever caused her to be violent.

I would also point out that most all of my spouse’s attending physicians were caring and compassionate and always trying their best to alleviate her suffering, once again, contrary to the statements I’m reading.

I’m further confused by her use of the term “them.” At one time I also recall the same writer using the term “they.” I would suggest the writer consider occasionally using the first person singular as I’m wondering who “them” and “they” are? I would guess the writer I quoted was probably speaking from her own personal experiences although she leads one to believe that all “caregivers” treat others like she’s been accustomed to or treated.

Warmly,
Herb
VNSdepression.com

philip, i am a very, very, very reasonable person, last thing i would ever think of is hurting a fly, yet when i was under forced treatment (injectable zyprexa, abilify, etc) i felt like a CORNERED ANIMAL, FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE.

these people took my life away COMPLETELY. again i say, i rebuilt it from ashes and so now i can SORT OF forgive, but NEVER FORGET.

this system is BUILT to destroy your psyche, to debase you, to bring you to the brink of such despair that you get to a point where you operate at instinct of survival level and at that point, it is enough for someone to simply fake aggression towards you & you will kill.

mercilessly.

i thank all gods and demons of 10 directions for protecting me and getting me through those stages with no harm done to anyone, but many times i look back and i shiver thinking of how close i came, under complete influence of psychotropic drugs, which completely altered my thinking patterns and made me oblivious to reality, to causing terrible harm.

so don't be surprised. you are only surprised because you've never really been institutionalized because they said you are too happy and you are delusional trying to share your happiness with the world and here, take these things and you'll feel better, in your oblivion.

again i say, it is UNSPEAKABLE what happens to people in this system and if you think i dramatize, again i say, i prefer to be in jail, fucked in the ass and all my other holes daily by 8 thugs than have to face whitecoats and their restraints and cold cement isolation room floors.

i know, this post is vitriolic and you can probably feel the simmering hate coming through these words, but this is as it should be and i hope to god whoever in the psychiatric field does this to innocent people, especially KIDS these days, realizes that this simmering hate and suffering really they cause in people will return to them, not in the form of my doing anything to anyone really, but simply because the universe was design to be FAIR. always. even when it's not aparent in the short run.

good luck to eli lilly and all the psychotropic manufacturers out there. as for me, i'd rather live in the lobotomy era, at least then you ended up happy after they removed your frontal lobe.

Not all caregivers are like the ones Sally describes.

The doctor is a beacon of hope to the new patient as they believe this person will save them from their own personal hell. So when time passes and nothing seems to improve the doctor goes from a "God" to a "Devil" in some peoples mind as this person "failed" to save them, the rare patient completely snaps and where is there rage directed at: the person they see as responsible for their situation. Part of me is surprised it does not happen more often

I also want to make a statement that I see a psychiatrist, who has given me hope, listened and is kind.

'Caregiver' is a broad term word, so my first reaction is exactly what everyone expected from me, and I knew what to expect from this thread from others.

That being said; I would never in my right mind want someone dead/murdered who was in charge of medicating me or anyone else, if I or say, my daughter died.

1999-- Zyprexa was given to my daughter, and I am going to come to the defense of psychiatrists now and ask all of you if you truly believe that Zyprexa data that LILLY buried, was available to the innocent doctors?

The main thing I would do/have done if my daughter fell to death at the rx'ing of medications by a psychiatrist, and it was proven that doctor understood the warnings and didn't discuss--I would want the doctor's license removed from practice.

This thread has such a tone of justified murder.

I may as well say what I really think to sum this up:

This really does harbor anti psychiatry, full-blown commentary, and I can only imagine that woman's family and friends are shattered--does anyone believe she deserved her death? honestly?

A funeral is a funeral.

did anyone look at this therapists website. She seemed cool and supported work without meds. I think it's a tragedy. Peoples flippant view about a murder is a bit disconcerting.

I, too have been forced drugged and felt treated like an animal. I still have compassion for this woman and do not assume anything about her without knowing her.

We don't know if the murderer was on drugs or not.

We should take a reality check and put things into perspective.

Two shrinks dead. No big deal. An insignificant body count compared to, say, the daily death toll on the nation's roads.

So let us not get bogged down with strained sentimentalism.

Noone here knew them from Adam. In life they were, erm, chaff.

On the other hand, every survivor who reads these websites will personally know MANY innocent victims of psychiatry.

Clinical psychiatry is causing the unnatural deaths of MILLIONS of people each year.

In many of those cases where "treatment" is not accepted voluntary, but is forced on patients against their will, these totally avoidable deaths are little short of murder.

Let us keep that in focus.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists are well-meaning and caring individuals so when I imply that "caregiver" is not an appropriate label, I simply mean that they are acting out of ignorance, not being deliberately malevolent. The woman who appears to have been the target of this attack was a CBT practitioner, something I really tend to endorse. Of course I hope I did not sound like I thought she deserved to die. I am simply making the point that unless we have full transparency about psych medications and fully informed consent we can expect these incidents to continue unabated. No one -- neither the practitioners nor the patients -- are adequately prepared for or warned about the bizarre behavioral changes that accompany the use of current treatment paradigms. At the same time we have no idea what incredibly warped thinking and disturbed life story was behind the whole incident. It's very sad.

1. absolutely i should be held responsible if i should ever committ murder.

2. i'm not advocating murder

3. antipsychiatry as an argument against this thread is bullshit. i repost:

it would be nonsensical to call a physician critical of coercions in the name of dermatology and "anti-dermatologist," or a physician critical of coercions in the name of oncology an "anti-oncologist."

the fact that it is NOT nonsensical to call a physician critical of coercions in the name of psychiatry and "antipsychiatrist" is evidence that psychiatry IS about coercion, NOT HEALING.

***

p5 from words to the wise, 2oo4, t.szasz - i beg you to read the book, it'll give you so many ideas about how deep the psychotic rabbit hole goes...

one more thing, if you ARE MEDICATED, on psychotropic drugs, you should have NO WORD to say anywhere.

not in advocating PRO DRUGS, not AGAINST DRUGS.

you are DRUGGED UP and that's that.

i say this having been 2 years off ALL DRUGS and realizing that while i was on zyprexa and all the other unspeakable drugs, i was effectively OUT OF MY MIND.

not because of the goddam bipolar which all it ever did to me is make me LOVE EVERYONE and speak of GOD and crap like that and perhaps embark on ridiculous WORLD SAVING projects, etc - that is what the so called MENTAL ILLNESS did to me, make me an INFINITELY BETTER PERSON OVERALL up until they started drugging me out of existence in order to convince me that GOD IS BULLSHIT.

you know what?

we'll see in the final analysis who wins, GOD or PSYCHIATRY.

bring it on, eli lilly & globally brainwashed psychiatry.

after seeing philip here say that this thread advocates murder, i'll say, i'm 100% behind tom cruise & scientology, even though i think they're all a bunch of sci-fi cooks wishful dreamers crazed about money.

but fuck me, between 2 evils, psychiatry is MURDEROUSLY MORE DANGEROUS than scientology.

there. i've said it.

& there will come a day when Jane Pauley and Ted Turner will say it too. maybe not this year, maybe not 5 years down, but soon enough.

call me delusional, but it is delusional people who move worlds after all, so blah.

I think I know why a patient may have done what was done. When somebody is positioned as some people are, the last thing one does is contradict the version of reality that they have created for themselves.

A person who sees the world as a murderous place, will use violence, when threatened (or to serve some other objective). Personally, I see the world as a nasty, duplicitous place, for the most part, but I understand that it need not be that way and that not everybody else sees things as I do. That's why it's always worth seeking to ascertain how a person is positioned, before one tells them about one's own version of the world.

As to the OP, and subsequent comments: if one is not violent, one will not understand how people can resort to violence, with such ease (and you can be sure that a person who has done one violence will do everything in their power to avoid taking responsibility for taking this route). If one wishes to understand why people are violent, one has to ask violent people, not peaceful people who have sought to speculate on the matter.

Nobody "deserves" to have violence done to them. But nobody deserves to have others attempt to override their experiences with ones that are alien. That is the "I'm right, you're wrong," school of argument, and you will know for yourselves how efficient that is in winning people over.

Example: "The world is a shitty, violent place, full of shitty, violent people."

"No. The world is full of caring, generous people, who want nothing other than what is good for you."

How could a person possibly make the second assertion, without having established what causes the first person to reach the conclusion that they have? The second assertion is completely contradictory to the first person's experience, and is likely to be perceived as a lie. If the second person were to continue on that tack, I could see the first person starting to consider the possibility that the second person were trying to drive them mad, by stating things that patently weren't true.

It doesn't matter. You don't have to scrape the surface too deeply to realize that most people's realities are complete fictions, founded upon an obsession with one or more things that has attracted their attention, for whatever reason (and I include myself in that statement). You see, even if one tries to challenge one's assumptions about the world, if enough people proceed as though those assumptions are true, then to all intents and purposes, they are true, and it doesn't really matter whether or not one sees significant flaws in the belief. Example: try joining the Scientologists, and telling them that psychiatry's a good thing!

Like I wrote: it doesn't matter.

Matt

I think this site is fantastic in that it lets anyone comment. The fact is that everyone has a different opinion on these things and unfortunately it is still going to take a long time for larger society to shift away from the dominance of the medical model in treatment approaches for people's difficulties coping with the stresses of day to day life.

My only disappointment is people's black and whiteness here. Greyness is the key to maintaining balance in life and using it to enhance understanding of these tragic occurences is particularly important.

I believe that some people go to see psychologists because they believe they want to change their lives but sometimes find themselves no longer able to deny the role of their own decision making and behaviours as they engage in that process. These revelations can sometimes be way too confronting and lead the individual to do anything to continue preserving their former beliefs about themselves and their environment. Unfortunately the psychologist (or whoever it was that raised flags which could not be denied) becomes a representation of these threatening reflections of themselves and needs to be 'destroyed' in attempts at self preservation.

Once again this in no way excuses the behaviour, but I think it is something for mental health care professionals to remember. We need to consider whether people struggling to cope have the capacity to handle new and different view points on their situation, and as part of this consider the functional benefits of the 'delusions' they currently hold. It is not our place to make others see things our way. The pros and cons of introducing a particular view of an individuals circumstances need to be carefully considered for the safety of not only that professional, but the other people in that persons life.

"Example: "The world is a shitty, violent place, full of shitty, violent people."

"No. The world is full of caring, generous people, who want nothing other than what is good for you.""

As an afterthought, I would suggest that the above approach fails, because neither party to the discussion is capable of accepting the possibility that the other's reality can exist. It is, in the most real sense imaginable, a failure to communicate.

And yet, the "I'm right, you're wrong" school of argument is the one that is almost universally favoured. I wonder why that would be?

Matt

I CANNOT BELIEVE WHAT I AM READING!!! Did anyone stop to think that this was the actions of a man in a drug induced psychosis? Did you also stop to think that he had seen this Psychologist in the past that could have dx with a drug problem so he was no longer being prescribed medication? Do you think it is possible he was on a hunt for samples of drugs? Are we really so naive to condemn an entire profession because of a few hacks? I guess the people writing these inhumane and insensitive words must have some inside knowledge to the investigation and are apparently homicide detectives because they seem to come to some very quick conclusions on why this woman was killed. Shame on you. Are you also the same people who condemn certain racial groups because of the acts of one person?

As a new therapist entering into the this field, I can't help but to wonder what happened in the therapy room before the murder.

I wish that it was as simple as wondering why someone would turn on their caregiver. Frankly, I'm surprised I haven't read about this type of thing happening sooner or more often.

Samuel, most clients [I assume] do not arrive for a typical appointment wheeling a suitcase [with presumed knife/knives]inside.

Samuel, I also wanted to comment that the article linked in this post clearly states he was not in her office "having an appointment"; nor does anyone know if he was anyone's patient at all.

He was waiting with a patient, and made small talk who was there for an appointment. After killing one and injurying another, he robs the psychiatrist and exits the building.

I'm curious what patients feel about police wanting all patient files opened/searched in a quest to find a suspect in this case? [who may not be a patient].

Patient confidentiality vs. preventing another [possible]murder?

I can not in any way comprehend how ANYONE can say they actually "understand" how a person can lose it and brutally kill a person who seemingly had no other intentions than to help others. Sure there are some "bad" mental health workers out there, but there are also many who are good. If you ask me, The problem stems from movies such as SAW, and the plight of the Scientologists against psychiatrists & psychologists who are viewed as devils by a cult created by a man who indeed practiced devil worship (LRon Hubbard was a disciple of Aleister Crowly). These are strong influences to harm good people who don;t dserve such a horrid demise! I mourn for this woman's loss, it is a hurt to a strong community in New York. RIP Dr. F!

Stephany,

I understand that most patients don't arrive for their selected appointments with a suitcase of [knives]. My point of interest was in the time surrounding the event, not necessarily directly 'before' the killing, but during the previous few sessions/weeks. What happened in the therapy room during those sessions that ultimately convinced the patient that murder was his only option?

I don't know Samuel, it sure is sad that it happened. I'm not sure she was his therapist, it appears he was a patient of the other doctor there. It leads one to ask many questions, for which we just don't have answers.

I only want to say Is is soooo important that patients be shown compassion and caring from caregivers. I realize they are tired and overworked perhaps, but SOMETIMES regardless of all the many many meds, a person just needs to see someone cares a little.