Screening Sandy Hook

From 2005 to 2011, drug usage has increased seven times among the military, thirty times faster than for the civilian population. Drug use constitutes a chemical lobotomization. Other effects of the drugs include depersonalization, irritability, hostility and other characteristics that lead to criminality. Since 2006, violent sex crimes and domestic abuse has increased by thirty percent among active service personnel while child abuse has gone up by forty-three percent. On March 11, 2012, in a remote Afghan village, Staff Sargent Robert Bales murdered sixteen people, nine of which were children. On September 16, 2013, navy veteran Aaron Alexis took a shotgun to Washington DC’s navy yard where he killed twelve people. According to records, psychiatrists had prescribed Trazodone, an SSRI antidepressant. Currently, an average of twenty-two veterans and/or active-duty service people commit suicide each and every day, many of which have never seen combat and do not have PTSD. That is over 8,000 suicides per year. The media remains silent about this. The children of a formerly-deployed soldier who is on drugs are often prescribed drugs allegedly in order to handle a chaotic family situation. At least 1.9 million children have a military parent while one million have a deployed parent. There have been two million children of military parents who have visited a military psychiatrist. Out of those visits, the psychiatrist has prescribed drugs for ninety-one percent. The taxpayer picks up the tab for all of the prescription drugs. The army formally screens its soldiers at least five times. Pfizer, the manufacturer of Zoloft, developed one of the questionnaires. A group composed of eight drug companies devised another questionnaire. The VA recently hired 1,600 mental health workers to address the mental health issues within the military. These experts will no doubt continue to disperse the psychiatric drugs that are the core of all of the suicides, violence, mass murders, addiction, and family problems. Today, psychiatry is a $330 billion industry annually, which delivers pain, damage and death. Initially the drugs, the SSRIs (stimulants), make one feel better but some people experience side effects within a few days. Often the side effects include acts of violence and suicide. Since 2002, the suicide rate among the military has almost doubled. From 2009 through 2012, more soldiers died from suicide than from traffic accidents, cancer, homicide or heart disease, what the Secretary of State referred to as an epidemic. Eighty-five percent of the military suicides were among people who never experienced combat. Fifty-two percent were never deployed. Yet, no one holds the military psychiatrists responsible. Psychiatrists claim that these drugs save lives. They withhold information about the suicide risks and suicide ideation. Most of those drugs have black box warnings covering ages eighteen to twenty-four, the age of the average soldier. Reportedly, the national rates of suicide have remained steady or increased slightly in recent years, indicating the issue is a larger national health problem, not simply a military and veterans issues. In the first six months of 2012, to June 3, there were 154 suicides among active-duty troops. This is about fifty percent more than were killed in action in Afghanistan. This is in addition to other problems that the military is struggling with such as increased sexual assaults, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and other misbehavior. The 2012 active-duty suicide total of 154 compares to 130 in the same period last year, an eighteen percent increase. It is more than the 136.2 suicides that the Pentagon had projected based on the trend from 2001-2011. The military has established telephone hotlines, provided more mental health specialists, added stress management training and invested more in research on mental health risk. The Defense Secretary at the time, Leon Panetta sent an internal memo to the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leaders saying that suicide “one of the most complex and urgent problems” facing the Defense Department. He said that there was a “stigma associated (with) seeking help for mental distress,” especially in the military. He said, “We must continue to fight to eliminate the stigma from those with post-traumatic stress and other mental health issues.” He added that commanders “cannot tolerate any actions that belittle, haze, humiliate or ostracize any individual, especially those who require or are responsibly seeking professional services.” People in the military, especially during wartime, have always suffered from anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares, stress and depression. Now, the troops are engaged in America’s longest war. However, there is a glaring difference – the data demonstrates that pharmacology has replaced compassion and talk therapy. A soldier previously talked about his experiences. Now, a quick-fix base psychiatrist writes a prescription for a “pharmacological potion,” which appears to have severe unintended consequences. The “ever-increasing use of dangerous psychiatric medications may be fueling the funeral pyre of military suicides and other unexplained deaths.” The Defense Department admits that nearly one-third of the suicides occurred among those who had never participated in combat. According to Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, mental health issues were the primary cause of hospitalization of active-duty members of the military in 2007, 2009 and 2011. From 2001, the government spent almost $2 billion on psychiatric drugs. By 2007, the rate of suicide among returning soldiers from the Second Gulf War was skyrocketing. According to the military guidelines, psychiatrists were treating these soldiers with Zoloft or other SSRIs, despite the evidence, available for years, that these drugs were ineffective and frequently triggered suicide.