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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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