We Need to Talk About 'Antidepressants'

If you don't want the plot of this month's most fashionable film release (the week after next, I think) spoiled, don't read another word.  If you've read the book, then please be indulgent to me, as I haven't. Those who have read the book 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' are ahead of me here.  Whatever this article will be, it cannot discuss how faithful the new film ( dominated by the stark features of Tilda Swinton) is to the book of the same name.

In fact I will be most grateful for the thoughts of those who know the book well, if they wish to tell me that the novel deals in a different way with the central subject I wish to address below.

For those who have neither read the book (by Lionel Shriver, the only female Lionel I've ever come across) nor seen the film, it is about the perpetrator of a High School massacre in a fictional American town.

The killer-to-be, the Kevin of the title, is followed through childhood and early adolescence, as he grows more and more sinister and unappealing. Then he kills a lot of people, and is locked up, leaving his mother living a besieged and burned-out life, wondering if it was all her fault. I'm a bit baffled by the way the parents of Kevin's victims persecute her. Is there any evidence that people do this in real life? I should have thought a sort of shattered pity would be more likely than a relentless, vengeful hate.

Not since that brilliantly menacing film 'The Omen' have I seen any child portrayed with such malevolence as is the young Kevin. I do hope the child involved banks his cheque and stops acting now. Playing that role again will surely be bad for him.

Kevin is every mother's nightmare. The book has been described as a long propaganda treatise against giving birth at all.  The one genuinely funny scene in the film shows his sleep-starved mother, haggard and utterly exhausted by the baby Kevin's incessant screaming,  deliberately parking baby and pram next to a pneumatic drill at full volume, presumably so she can't hear the screaming any more. Yet faintly, through the roar and rattle of the drill, Kevin's lusty yells can still be heard. Nothing will stop him. Nothing short of nuclear war can drown him out.

Many parents who have experienced such things will see this as an exaggerated portrayal of the problems of babies who won't sleep and like to scream. Others, whose babies slept sweetly, will not.

Later Kevin spitefully vandalises his mother's beautifully-decorated study, and wages a long, revolting war over what may be delicately described as potty training.

He finally gives in on this matter,  after his mother, moved to rage by his behaviour, lashes out and accidentally breaks Kevin's arm, also scarring him.

This is a very odd moment. The hospital never suspects that the break is anything other than the accident Kevin convincingly tells them it was. He subsequently blackmails his mother at every turn by simply pointing to the scar. Yet the violence changes his behaviour. From then on, he goes to the lavatory in a normal way. This isn't quite consistent, in my view. It may also be an unintentional argument for old-fashioned smacking, that unspeakable sin.

There are various other clashes, including a very nasty set of scenes involving his little sister (realising what was bound to happen next, I squeamishly left the cinema for five minutes during one of these. Those who remained told me that it wasn't as bad as I had feared, but I'm still not sorry)

In the film, we see remarkably little of Kevin's more general childhood. What is his school like? Is he disruptive there?  Is he packed off to nursery at an early age? Is he sat in front of the TV all the time? Does he play computer games a lot? (he's seen doing so once, with his half-witted father, who never seems to grasp how monstrous his son is). At one stage (and this will be important later) he's shown willingly and indeed enthusiastically allowing himself to be read a rather archaic and wordy version of the Robin Hood story, behaviour that doesn't fit at all with the rest of his character.

I ask these questions about his upbringing because – trespassing on an old controversy -  the fictional Kevin strikes me as exactly the sort of child who would be 'diagnosed' with the fictional complaint 'ADHD' or even the five-star version 'ODD' and then dosed into compliance by American or British doctors with methylphenidate or dextroamphetamine, the powerful mind-altering drugs used on either side of the Atlantic to 'treat' this alleged condition , for whose existence there is no objective evidence (see index under 'ADHD') .

There's no mention of any such 'diagnosis' in the film. And in the one scene that addresses the subject, it's left unclear whether Kevin (who is 15 when he commits his crime) has been taking illegal drugs in his early teens. I'd guess from the scene that we are supposed to think that he has been, but the makers of the film don't think it that important. I glanced at the book to see what it said about the subject and it appeared to suggest that Kevin's parents had been pretty relaxed about illegal drugs themselves.

However, we are left in no doubt that Kevin has been taking SSRI 'antidepressants' - though we do not learn this (as I'll explain) until he is in custody after his crime.

During a visiting-time conversation with his mother, she suggests, and isn't contradicted by him, that he has made cynical use of this fact, in his trial, to plead diminished responsibility. We also learn that his mother regards this as a smokescreen for the boy's wickedness.

He is said to have come up with the correlation between SSRI drugs and rampage killings, in conversations with his defence attorney, and to have had all the case histories at his fingertips. This suggests that this pre-cooked excuse might even have been part of his plan for the massacre. The whole implication of this is that it has nothing to do with his crime, which has its origins in his character – which has its origins, perhaps, in his parents or their way of life. It is not for a moment suggested that he might have been impelled from mere nastiness into mass homicide by taking mind-altering drugs. That, of all things, is more or less ruled out.

I've mentioned here before (see index) the extraordinary correlation between such killings and SSRI 'antidepressants'. (Yes, I know correlation isn't causation. That is precisely why I call repeatedly for a proper investigation into the apparent link). I've also mentioned the growing doubts (see index, under 'antidepressants')  among doctors about the nature and real effect of these drugs, notably the powerful articles by Dr Marcia Angell, of the Harvard Medical School, recently published in the New York Review of Books.

It seems to be to be a great shame that this film lightly dismisses Kevin's acknowledged use of SSRI drugs as no more than a cheap defence attorney's get-out. Once again, is there any evidence that this has ever happened?  There seems to me to be more evidence the other way. Whatever other feelings I may have about this sombre, gruelling but potent film, this seems to me to be its greatest fault.