You may have seen articles this week about a TV-star chimpanzee who was shot by police and died of his injuries, after mauling his owner’s 55-year old friend in north-eastern USA. I caught this one in the Metro yesterday but what really got me was that the chimp had got a medical disease and his owner gave him Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. He promptly went loopy and left the 55-year old woman in a life threatening condition. What’s the significance of the drug?
Clinical psychopharmacologist and psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin wrote in his book, Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (1997):
“[B]enzodiazepines [a class of drugs that includes Valium and Xanax] can produce a wide variety of abnormal mental responses and hazardous behavioral abnormalities, including rebound anxiety and insomnia, psychosis, paranoia, violence, antisocial acts, depression, and suicide.”
For an anti-anxiety medication, it’s pretty worrying that possible adverse reactions to the drug would include anxiety! Furthermore, its listed side effects also include anxiety among the more concerning ones, like “liver problems” and “memory impairment”. If a person is anxious, what the hell are they doing taking something like this?
Chimps are some of our closest relatives, taxonomically speaking. Travis the chimp, who lived in Connecticut, USA, was raised by his owner Sandra Herold, now 70 years of age, as if he was a human child. Seldom causing any trouble in the past, 15-year old Travis was normally mild-mannered and did many things just as humans do, including getting in and out of cars and his house, dressing himself and eating at the table. One day he takes Xanax and flips out. How does that bode for our own race? Well judging by the above, it’s a pretty dangerous narcotic. So “not very well” is the answer as far as anyone prescribed Xanax should be concerned.
It’s beyond me why drugs would be prescribed for this kind of thing anyway. The Scientology Handbook, based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard, shows one source of anxiety (in humans of course) to be the environment in which we live. Solutions for a Dangerous Environment is a chapter and booklet from the Handbook that shows you how to deal with feeling afraid or helpless, as if you can’t do anything about the things going on around you, like the rapes, murders, robberies and so on that you see, read or hear about in the news. And let me assure you there are no drugs involved.
Psychiatrists will prescribe the most random drugs for situations the likes of which occur to many people at some time in their life. Why must every facet of human nature be labelled as a “disorder”? It mustn’t. Don’t let them get away with it. Get the facts; fight back—visit CCHR.org and find out how you can help eradicate psychiatric abuse and clean up the field of mental health.