Guest Editorial

The Perfect Cultural Storm for Tragedy

For those of you with nerves still frayed and hearts broken over the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the holiday season was a very difficult one in December 2012. However, while we may all want to forget about it and move on, this incident had better not be forgotten so easily like those that have happened prior. It had better be a call to action on a multitude of fronts, or these precious children and adult educators will be added to the long list of those who have recently died in vain. A multitude of cultural issues are facing us as a society that we simply can no longer delay dealing with head on.

The immediate reaction to tragedies such as this latest one is to concentrate on gun access and availability. No matter where you stand on the constitutional right to bear arms, it is becoming impossible to rationally support the need for public access to semiautomatic assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, and military-style ammunition. Their only real purpose, by design, is to kill lots of people very quickly. There is a big difference between defending rational rights to gun ownership (and even concealed weapon permits) and private access to military-style weapons. However, regardless of these issues, the guns remain the low-hanging fruit in this conversation. Other issues are equally, if not more, important and responsible for creating an environment for this kind of situation to occur.

The constant exposure of our children during their developmental years to violent video games, movies, television, shows, and music creates desensitization to violence and, in a small number of subjects, tolerance for actually committing these kinds of acts as a way of living out what they do on the television or computer screen. Would anyone really be surprised if next year you can buy a video game where the theme is a person with an assault rifle entering a school to shoot up the place?

The breakdown of the family unit that has occurred in the past several decades is yet another issue that must be honestly evaluated. This is complex and due to many issues, such as the steep rise in divorce, escalating numbers of births by single mothers, and fatherless homes’ being the norm in large segments of our population, and all are clearly taking a toll on our children. Declining spirituality and faith, and the aggressive (and, many believe, excessive) level of politically correct secular pressure to defer from categorizing behavior as unacceptable with negative societal influence have also not helped.

Our population is also literally eating “junk” and goes through daily life consuming calorie-rich, nutrient-insufficient convenience foods routinely just as it is encouraged to do on all of the television commercials. The cold, hard truth is that even in a country of abundance like the US, people are malnourished. Yes, I said it: malnourished! Of course, I am referring to the inadequate consumption of real or whole foods and the critical micronutrients that they contain, not the number of calories. This has significantly contributed to the epidemic of chronic illness, including mental illness, and skyrocketing health-care expenditures. We are, frankly, as a society becoming fatter, stupider, and more culturally regressed by the day. Yes, all of this matters!

Finally, one of the most important factors, in my opinion (and credible data back this up) creating the soil for this reality that we now confront is the literal breakdown of the mental health system. Since an almost total federal defunding of comprehensive mental health services in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we have seen serious negative effects on our society. Almost total privatization of the system has led to nonlivable wages for counselors and many front-line mental health professionals and no funding for their continued education. In fact, many have pointed out correctly that the US effectively has no mental health “system” at all. However, in an outstanding Medscape article published as a response to the Newtown tragedy, psychiatrist James Knoll IV, MD, stated, “It is my contention that there exists no legitimate ‘system’ in the United States when it comes to mental health treatment. From a literal perspective, one might define a system as an organized, regularly interacting set of principles forming a network – especially for distributing something or serving a common purpose.” The reality is that we really have no “system” at all by the classic definition to even blame. After one tragedy in Massachusetts, the state’s former mental health director responded, “Will this case be the canary in the coal mine? Will it signal that we’ve gone too far in reducing client-staff ratios, in closing hospitals, in pushing independence for people who may still be too sick?”

The reality is that the standard of care has been reduced to the cheapest solution, if you want to call it that, which is basically a “drug them and shove them [out the door]” approach. People with serious mental illness, and clearly violent tendencies, are no longer institutionalized and given the long-term comprehensive care that they need. It is cheaper and easier to just prescribe an antidepressant, an antipsychotic medication, or both, and send them off unsupervised to live among us. It has been reported that Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, was taking the atypical antipsychotic drug Fanapt (formerly known as Zomaril), a medication with a very problematic history of its own. We know from medical studies that while these drugs may be marginally effective and necessary for some, other large metastudies show they may be no better than placebo. We now have over 30,000,000 Americans taking SSRIs, and the majority of those prescriptions are written by GPs, NPs, and PAs, most of whom have no advanced psychiatric training. We also know that teenagers and young adults can react differently to these medications than adults do, and a small but significant percentage of them can be made worse by these drugs. Many teenage girls have committed suicide after starting antidepressant medications for what had been only mild depression prior. Some boys and young men have virtually disassociated from reality and committed horrendous acts of violence, sometimes in a manner completely out of character for them previously.

I have, since this latest incident, heard some discussion about the lack of funding for mental health, but will more funding really just mean more of these medications’ being given out like candy to our already drugged-silly children without serious thought to whom they may be inappropriate for, or will it finally result in the addition of more comprehensive services and approaches? The handing out of medications to our children is out of control, and the link between their use and these incidents is becoming compelling. Could this be one of the main elements in the rise of such incidents? After all, guns have been widely available for a very long time, while the mass and almost reflexive use of these medications, like these incidents, is relatively new.

Fellow health-care providers, citizens, and especially parents, we have a toxic soup of issues facing us, and particularly our children, which may very well have led to the acts of horror that we have witnessed now on multiple occasions since Columbine. Having an honest and nonpolitical discussion as a nation about them will be difficult, but imperative. This will ultimately involve taking on powerful interests including the NRA, Big Pharma, Big Food, and the entertainment industry. These days our politicians are financially beholden to these very same powerful interests, are barely capable of speaking civilly across the aisle to one another, and have become virtually worthless in effecting any kind of meaningful change. Do the politicians really have the fortitude? I seriously doubt that they do, unless their feet are held to the fire by an outraged populous and a united health-care work force that will no longer stand by and see our children slaughtered in their schools.

David M. Brady, ND, CCN, DACBN

Vice Provost – Health Sciences
Director, Human Nutrition Institute
Associate Professor of Clinical Sciences, University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT
Whole Body Medicine, Trumbull, CT

Dr. Brady is a licensed naturopathic medical physician and certified clinical nutritionist. He is currently the vice provost of the Division of Health Sciences, director of the Human Nutrition Institute, and associate professor of clinical sciences at the University of Bridgeport. He is also the chief medical officer for Designs for Health Inc. and maintains a private practice, Whole Body Medicine, in Trumbull, Connecticut. Dr. Brady has been a featured presenter at many of the most prestigious conferences in integrative and functional medicine, including IFM, ACAM, A4M, IHS, IAACN, and AANP. He is a contributing author for Integrative Gastroenterology, the first integrative medical textbook on gastroenterology by Johns Hopkins physician Gerard Mullin, MD, and is a contributing author for Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine by Lord and Bralley and the second edition of Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients, 2nd ed., edited by Ingrid Kohlstadt, MD, MPH, FACN, FACPM.