Distinct and alien species? Peter, that's a bit too much to swallow. The trend towards evasion of responsibility is driven by the legal profession, and the willingness of ordinary citizens serving on juries to allow themselves to buy into sob stories and to favor individual defendants over faceless corporations. Are you saying that we should have never started down the path of treating depression, which is often the result of an imbalance of brain chemistry, with chemistry? Should we go back to exorcisms and shamanistic rituals?

Robert:

We've been here before. Depression is a disease of varying degrees of severity and persistence. If we can treat it, great. But we don't seem to have much of an an idea of the line between treating the ill and coddling the unhappy. Both the definition of emotional disorder and the chemical treatments being prescribed are expanding at great pace and, as with a lot of medicines, we are discovering problems after the fact, as with children.

Mood-altering is mood-altering. Take alcohol. We no longer excuse people for drunkeness, but that is because we want to discourage drunkeness, see no benefit to it and want people to be frightened of it, not because we don't recognize it may change perceptions, personalities, etc. If we actually thought drunkeness was medically beneficial and prescribed it, there would be all kinds of findings of diminished responsibility as there used to be, for the obvious reason that peoples'sense of responsibility and perception of reality is actually diminished. They are no longer in a state where we feel we can judge their actions, except to say it makes no difference and they will be treated like irresponsible fools and held to sober standards.

If I were on a jury and an accused child's lawyer argued he was under the malevolent influence of a prescribed mind or mood-altering drug, I would listen. How could we do otherwise? If drugs can take people from misery to contentment, surely it is not farfetched to argue they can take us the other way.

Canada no longer allows claims of diminished responsibility due to alcohol? Those rightwingers!

Here in liberal Hawaii, being drunk will get you off a murder rap, easy

You have to ask why the boy was on anti-depressants to begin with. Obviously he was troubled to begin with. It is possible that his homicidal tendencies were there to begin with, or that the drug brought it on. But it is a sensational, but rare, anecdotal case. It is not a reason to suspend the expectation of personal responsibility for the vast majority of people who take antidepressants.

Most people who take antidepressants are helped by them. It is misleading to state that since they alter moods, that antidepressants put people in an unnatural state of mind that is not comparable to a "normal", unmedicated individual's state of mind. For a person who is chronically depressed or overly prone to depression and anxiety, their "normal" state of mind is outside of what most non-depressed people see as normal. For these people, anti-depressants actually bring their moods closer to the normal.

Maybe that is bad from a societal standpoint. Maybe depressed people serve an important societal role, acting as a reality check to their over-exuberant brethren. Maybe too much "normal" will lead to bad results in the end. Gee, doesn't the rise of the stock market to bubble proportions correspond with the rise of anti-depressant use?

Robert:

I don't doubt you for a moment when you say anti-depressants bring most people closer to "normal" if that means functional. Certainly I would take them if prescribed by a doctor I trusted and if I were in the state of some I've seen. But we are in the hands of experts here and, as a group, these experts have widely differing ideas of what good emotional health is and what conditions merit treatment. The rest of us defer to them as we generally are coming to believe no pain should be suffered if it can be alleviated and we surrender our critical judgment to the medical expetise because it is all too technical for us to understand.

There seems to be a current scare about anti-depressants given to children. I have a very hard time believing something that is dangerous for children is benign in adults. But I allow it is just as possible that the scaremongers are out to lunch and that in a few years we'll see antidepressants like we see aspirin or antibiotics. But that isn't the way they are seen today.