Perhaps this was a "project." Perhaps he was hoping to enact some sort of change. There may be clues in his professional work.

I love how people say, but he was a scholar, he was an achiever, he was so good. It amazes me because truthfully, in my opinion, no one knows what goes on within somebody's head! No one knows what we are truly thinking, feeling, or anything.

We will never truly know why people do the things they do.

I don't quite know why exactly except that maybe it reminds me of my own tragic story but this just makes me weep. I feel so sorry for Jessica and all the people whose lives were lost and also for Steve, a bright, apparently caring fellow, who was interested in some important issues. Somehow I don't think this had to happen but how to stop it? Certainly I think taking the antidepressant out of the equation, as in never giving it to him in the first place, would have made a huge difference, but how to truly heal these guys, that's the question.

There are so many questions to be answered in this tragic case.

1. What was his full background? Did he engage in 'cutting' before or only after he started on his antidepressant nine years ago.

2. Did he go on and off his antidepressant during this nine years or was this his first time to discontinue - except for the 'home' in Chicago where the attendant reported that he occassionally didn't want to take his med.

3. Was he only on an antidepressant or was he also on a benzo or a mood stabilizer or antipsychotic?

Since his girlfriend loved him and his friends liked and admired him, I can only conclude that he had some kind of 'manic' psychosis due to discontinuation of the antidepressant. These types of 'manic' psychosis in antidepressant withdrawal have been reported to the Prozac Survivors Support Group & the International Coalition for Drug Awareness to be much more intense and much weirder than a natural manic psychosis.

Dear Beachwriter,

“We will never truly know why people do the things they do.” --- Beachwriter

I find it enlightening every now and then when I read forums such as these that some individuals simply get to the point and hammer the nail in one shot.

Then again it gives the media more sensationalism to feed upon and fill their air time and/or copy space and if one does follow carefully many of these reporting one probably will also find discrepancies from one reporting to the next. The media also gives individuals on this and other forums the opportunity to share their speculations and/or dogma without all the facts ever being evident and as you stated without the individual in question to truthful answer our many questions, “We will never truly know…”

Thanks for a direct and balanced viewpoint.

Warmly,
Herb
VNSdepression.com

Dear Philip,

While you’re at it and bringing up all these heinous murders and stimulating all these speculations and discussions I’d like to throw out another thought to you that you might have some interest in researching and reporting upon.

How about the “Copycat Syndrome” as a possible explanation to some of these actions?

Warmly,
Herb
VNSdepression.com

As someone who's been on and off of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers since her teenage years, I can't help being perturbed by the recent coverage of violence and the assumption that it's caused by stopping anti-depressants. It makes me think on two levels: one, how do I know this won't happen to me? Ie, how can we ever know if something is truly neurochemisrty gone haywire (obviously nevertheless in a social context) or something less? How to know when anti-depressant use is truly warranted? I have been suicidal since age 8 and on and off various medication over the years, consistently, but not continuously. Only three have ever helped - none of the SSRIs have ever had any effect. Does that mean that my depression is likely neurochemical? Who knows. That's the scary part. Will I someday "snap?"
And secondly, I don't think that medication should ever be fully blamed for something like this...when it comes down to it, there is an element of free will. We are more then our chemistry - we always have a choice about our behavior.

Herb,

No one can point blank say that because the shooter cold turkeyed a drug, that made him go on a shooting rampage. But it is very unfair on your part to say it is speculation when people like myself feel that this aspect needs to be explored.

Jay Cohen, a psychiatrist, who is not anti-meds, has said that SSRIs can definitely cause homicidal behavior in people who take SSRIS. Here is the link, http://tinyurl.com/378b9f. He criticizes doctors for not knowing what the warning signs are which is one of the points some ofus have been making regarding this issues.

Joseph Glenmullen, another psychiatrist who is also not antimeds, lists homicidal behavior as a withdrawal symptom of Paxil in his book, the Antidepressant Solution.

One rxlist.com, here are the side effects listed for Paxil:

Nervous System: Frequent: Emotional lability, vertigo; infrequent: Abnormal thinking, alcohol abuse, ataxia, dystonia, dyskinesia, euphoria, hallucinations, hostility, hypertonia, hypesthesia, hypokinesia, incoordination, lack of emotion, libido increased, manic reaction, neurosis, paralysis, paranoid reaction; rare: Abnormal gait, akinesia, antisocial reaction, aphasia, choreoathetosis, circumoral paresthesias, convulsion, delirium, delusions, diplopia, drug dependence, dysarthria, extrapyramidal syndrome, fasciculations, grand mal convulsion, hyperalgesia, hysteria, manic-depressive reaction, meningitis, myelitis, neuralgia, neuropathy, nystagmus, peripheral neuritis, psychotic depression, psychosis, reflexes decreased, reflexes increased, stupor, torticollis, trismus, withdrawal syndrome.

If you still think this can't happen or is rare, Laurie Yorke, the nurse who runs Paxil Progress Boards, said her son, Ryan, became psychotic while withdrawing from Paxil. This is a kid who was fine prior to Paxil and is fine not that he is off it. She feels very lucky that her son and her family were not killed.

While I fortunately didn't become homicidal while on Celexa, another SSRI, I became enraged over trivial stuff. I never had that problem off that med. Because of that experience, I can see how it is definitely possible to become homicidal on Paxil.

Herb, no one is suggesting that these drugs be banned. At leas I am not.

But situations like this are happening one too many times and getting people killed or causing near misses as in Laurie Yorke's case. Please put aside your agenda and look at the facts. People's lives, including yours are at stake. The next time, it could be you and your wife standing next to a shooter who may be on ADs or discontinued them at a shopping mall.

AA

There is something weird about this. If she got a call at midnight, why didn't she do anything? If someone called me and said something like that I'd call an ambulance or the police right away.

One thing I'm surprised more people are not mentioning here: what about the guns? It seems like he had quite an arsenal for who suddenly "snapped" after going off his meds. I don't know the answer, but I do know that no one with his mental health history has any business buying firearms. (Not that I think many other people do either...) I'm not discounting the possibility that antidepressant withdrawal played a part in sending him over the edge. It could also be that the psychosis was building already and that was what led him to stop taking the Prozac in the first place. Unfortunately we don't know the exact train of causation, and we may never know.

Having experienced the horrid, out of control, impuslive and VIOLENCE INDUCING "side effects" and "discountinuation syndromes" that antidepressant can cause first hand I can tell you a thing or two about it. The first thing is that if it does cause psychosis, it "creeps up on you" and you do not realize how sick you are until you are actually acting out: cutting yourself, survived a suicide attempt, physicaly attacked a friend... actaully "seen red". And you don't realize how sick you were until AFTER THE FACT, after you've been stabalized and can look back and go "oh god I did what?"... and know that THAT sort of behavior was not "you".

The second thing is the nature of the types of thoughts, impulses, fantasies, beliefs etc., that either having a bad reaction to an antidepressant you have been put on can cause you to "snap" (for me with some ADs it took weeks to get "delusional", and that was easier to catch onto by others around me and to get me off the drug without really bad effects. With other ADs it actually took MONTHS for the psychosis to hit, and it came on too slow, and then in the last weeks took over too fast for anything to be done.)
OR having a bad reaction to an antidepressant you have been taken off of, either because you are too messed up in the head already to be reasonable and slowly taper off the drug OR because you have a dipshit doctor that actually tells you to cold turkey off the stuff... that can cause you to "snap".
And just because a person doesn't "snap" within the first couple of days or weeks of starting or stopping an antidepressant, that doesn't rule out the possibility. What really needs to be taken into account is the HALF LIVES of the antidepressants or other psyche meds a person has started or stopped.
It is just like with opiates and how thier withdrawal syndromes work: If you take something like Herion or Vicodin which both have SHORT HALF LIVES, it will at first be harder to and take longer to achieve a "steady state" of the drug in your system/get your brain "hooked" on the stuff AND the withdrawal syndrome from these drugs that have shorter half lives start sooner after discontinueing the medication, are shorter WD syndromes and the hardest part will be over within a week for most people... and the "prolonged "post-acute" withdrawal syndromes that can happen with opiates (and other drugs) will be less likely to happen due to thier short half lives. But then you have to look at the other side of the spectrum of this one class of medications (just like SSRI/SNRI meds are in "one class of meds"), and think about things like Methadone, LAAM and Suboxone. Those two have very long half lives, from 24 hours to 72 hours, so are easier to become "hooked on" and to achieve a "steady state" of the drug in your system. The withdrawal syndromes for these drugs with longer half lives take a longer time to begin, and once they've begun can last two weeks up till two MONTHS versus a week, and a person is MUCH more likely to end up with a "prolonged" "post-acute" withdrawal syndrome that can last for YEARS.
So really depending on the half life of the drug you can expect anything from a few days of "feeling off" while you're adjusting to being on the drug, to a few weeks or months of feeling "off" while starting on the drug. And the same goes for the withdrawal/discontinuation syndromes, except that those are usually harsher than trying to get on the drug in the first place. And no matter what the psychiatrists and drug companies want us to think, you are not "in the clear" with you WD problems and possibility of being thrown into psychosis etc, anywhere near as quickly as they want us to believe. You can quit an AD with a long half life and still be having withdrawal symptoms, which can include IMPULSIVENESS and TERRIBLE THOUGHTS, uncontrollable dark and homicidal fantasies, and the possiblity of "snapping" and loosing all control of yourself... you can still be having these problems for MONTHS after stopping the drug. ESPECIALY if you stop it cold turkey because that is VERY hard on a persons brain chemestry, and if it wasn't messed up to begin with it sure can be after quitting a psyche med cold turkey.

I am not a violent person and do not naturaly have violet thoughts, I rarely even raise my voice with people, and despite having had suicidal thoughts and feelings since I was nine years old I NEVER attempted suicide UNTIL and unless I have been put on an antidepressant medication. I have also acted out violently when on antidepressants or shortly after quitting them, with VERY violent thoughts continueing on for MONTHS after discontinueing these meds. (thank god though the impulsiveness only lasted a few weeks after quitting, and the few weeks befor it got bad enough each time to quit).
I have NEVER been violent when I was not on an AD or besides within the few weeks after discontinueing one that had already made me violent.

These drugs do something to some part of the brain involved with violence and I do not know why they are not being stufied with fMRIs in people who are having these sorts of reactions to try and find out where in the brain or what is being done to the brain overall that causes these sorts of reactions. How many more massacers do we need to whitness befor the NIMH gets off thier ass and tries to figure out what about ADs is causing this problem?

I know I will NEVER touch an AD ever again because I know I am one of those people at risk for having my mind "snap" and doing something truely horrible. I can understand how a person who only had a dx of OCD and anxiety could act out in this horrific way and it's not because of the diagnosises, it's because of the treatment. I can believe that he was a DIFFICULT teen and had some problems with mental illness, but if everyone who was close to him is saying he seemed to be fine, or at least not to be a violent person, maybe had some depression, some anxiety, but not a violent person up until this last act on his part, then I think it is the drugs that caused it EVEN IF he took three weeks to plan it out and it was premeditated. If Prozac has a long half life then the WD syndrome could have been going on the whole time he was planning things out and I would still blame this horrible event partly on the drugs.

Hopefuly they will come up with a test that will make it so we can know who will have a bad reaction to ADs and whom they will work for BEFOR the person has to find out by experiencing complete hell and loss of control. I think ADs are DANGEROUS enough that the NIMH needs to research and come up with such a test and until then EVERYONE who is given an AD needs to get a serious talking to by thier doctor and a pamlet sent home with them saying how they need to have friends and family watch them for any changes for the worse and that they need to vocalize any bad thoughts that they start having after starting or stopping an AD so that they can be protected and taken to the hospital or some other safe environemtn until the bad reaction passes.
It's completely insane that people are given ADs so often and they aren't STRONGLY warned of what they can do and how they can "flip a person" into complete madness and warned that unless that person lets the people in thier life know this is happening to them, and unless they have people in thier life who will get them the help and protection from themselves that they need should they have a violent homicidal or suicidal reaction... that taking ADs without taking hte proper precautions can end in tragedy.