The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Troubled teen contends antidepressants drove him to kill (AP, 12/4/2004)
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Joe Pittman's hands shook as he read his son's confession to a roomful of strangers during a Food and Drug Administration hearing in Washington.
"I took everything out on my grandparents, who I loved so very much," wrote Christopher Pittman. "When I was lying in my bed that night, I couldn't sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind, telling me to kill them."
Authorities say three years ago, Christopher, then 12, shot his grandparents as they slept in their rural home because they had scolded him for fighting on the school bus.
Joe Pittman thinks his son killed because his sense of right and wrong was clouded by the anti-depressant Zoloft. He spoke out against the drug in a hearing early this year. The boy, who had threatened suicide, was put on the drug three weeks before the slayings, and his dose was doubled just two days earlier.
But prosecutors and police say Christopher's actions during and after the November 2001 slayings show he clearly knew what he was doing was wrong.
For years I have been fighting the implied theories behind how pharmaceuticals are marketed - theories that dominate the scientific thought about the workings of the body and the brain. The health of many people has been compromised by the mistakes going on in medicine, and I have been forced to numb myself to the outrage this knowledge should inspire. But, today, I face another kind of outrage in how the mistaken notions of what these drugs can do to a life: in this case it is a legal problem.
This kid does not have a chance of avoiding a conviction according to the commentators on Court TV. I agree. The entire medical community is going to be fighting his argument that anti-depressants caused a mental breakdown leading to murder. To let him argue this truth is to argue for a new medical philosophy that fights the pharmaceutical companies.
Science and medicine have no idea how the brain does what it does, so the leading theory that fills this vacuum of ignorance is that the brain and body regulate everything through “chemistry” with the implication that “chemistry” or drug treatment of the kind currently used is the only way to deal with problems of the body and mood and behavior.
As I argue throughout this theoretical website, there is much more evidence that drug treatments decrease the health of the patients than there is evidence that drug treatments improve health.
These arguments are quite complicated and you will have to read many of my essays to get a notion of the kinds of arguments required to make my case.
But I know that this kid's behavior was seriously altered by the use of the drugs and that these drugs always increase the same kind of stress that causes the disorders to begin with.
The parts of the brain become more and more isolated from each other with age and the development that comes with age. These drugs work by increasing the stress of a subset of the brain that is already stressed and there is an illusion of improvement caused by causing that subset to go into a “coma” with an appearance of relief of some symptom. (Remember that these drugs improve far fewer aspects of life than they improve: one or two symptoms “improve” with twenty or thirty possible bad “side-effects.”)
Arguments for this take many forms: healthy people can be given the same disorder (depression) by taking the drug to deal with the problem (anti-depressants). The depression and other bad feelings such as anger/rage get worse for a period of time as the drug is being introduced (often a few weeks) until the bad feeling is replaced by what feels like relief but is actually a numbness to the bad feelings (the feeling of being “even” instead of depressed as the psychiatrists are trained to describe the results of these drugs). The drug has a therapeutic range which argues against these drugs replacing some kind of deficit as marketed: otherwise there would be improvement at the smaller dosages until balance is achieved and the level of drug in the brain is always greater than the norms (serotonin in the case of these anti-depressants).
The brain of a child is more connected (the different parts of the brain have greater influence on each other) than the brain of an adult. The mathematics is different and it is more likely that the child's brain is not stressed enough so that a subset is able to remain isolated and go into this subset of coma caused by the drugs. Therefore the child is more likely to respond to these drugs with decline in mood and logic than is the adult. That the adult seems to improve is an illusion anyway, much like the illusion of improvement that would occur if giving heroin to improve the bad symptoms of heroin withdrawal.
To understand the many shifts in perception and theory that would exonerate this boy is not going to happen in the medical industry and so the understanding of the danger of these drugs will not be communicated in time to let the world know that these drugs are a serious danger to mental health. At the least this change in thinking will not happen in time to help this boy.
This serious danger is also a serious danger to the financial well-being of the pharmaceutical companies so this boy's truthful defense is going to be fought by every gun of the drug companies.
I feel an enormous amount of empathy for this boy's plight in losing his grandparents and his freedom because of so many mistaken notions about what these drugs actually do.
[Note to attorneys (lawyers) dealing with cases concerning drug treatments: Several law school websites have already put up links to my theory website (www.stevenmichaelharris.com/theory) saying that there are good arguments in my essays dealing with a lot of medical and pharmaceutical malpractice cases. I recommend that any attorney involved in cases against drug companies read all of my essays as you will find ammunition in here to protect your clients' interests.]
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
