ABUSE CASE REPORTS �Help� Becomes Betrayal

As early as 1975, the journal, Comprehensive Psychiatry , reported that akathisia, a �frequent side effect of neuroleptic drugs,� was associated with �strong effects of fright, terror, anger or rage, anxiety and vague somatic complaints.�

In this context, The American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry reported the case of a 23-year- old man injected with a major tranquilizer in the admissions room of a psychiatric unit. After the injection, the man escaped, ran to a park, disrobed and tried to rape a woman. The article further described how, �[H]e proceeded down the street, broke down the front door of a house where an 81-year-old lady was sleeping. He severely beat her with his fists � following which he found knives and stabbed her repeatedly, resulting in her death.�

The article continued, describing how he then ran up to another woman who was with her child and �repeatedly stabbed the woman � whereupon he moved onto the next person he encountered, a woman whom he severely assaulted and stabbed.�

The report described four other cases of violence attributed to akathisia induced by the same neuroleptic. In one case, a 35-year-old man, �had been receiving [the drug] as an outpatient for approximately four months and described how progressively his head was rushing, that he felt speeded up, that he was in great pain in his head and had an impulse to stab someone to try and get rid of the pain.�

A report published in The Journal of the American Medical Association also exemplified the tremendous agitation which often accompanies akathisia. Four days after a man described in the report had started taking a neuroleptic drug, �[h]e became uncontrollably agitated, could not sit still, and paced for several hours.�

After complaining of �a jumpy feeling inside and violent urges to assault anyone near him,� the man assaulted and tried to kill his dog. The researcher noted the irony that the neuroleptic caused violence, �a behavior the drug was meant to alleviate.�

In his 1991 book, In the Belly of the Beast, Jack Henry Abbott described how akathisia could turn one inside out: �These drugs � do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. They attack from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain. � The muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside of your mouth and your jaw locks and the pain throbs. For hours every day this will occur. Your spinal column stiffens so that you can hardly move your head or your neck and sometimes your back bends like a bow and you cannot stand up. The pain grinds into your fiber. � You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go in pain you cannot locate, in such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed, because you cannot get relief even in breathing.�

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