For teacher Elisa Aroca, Sunday was the moment Spain lost the battle for the hearts and minds of 7.5 million people living in the Catalonia region.

Aroca intended to defend her Spanish roots and cast a ballot against Catalonia breaking away from the rest of the country. But when a squad of police in riot gear marched up, roughly tossed her and other voters aside and shattered the glass entrance of the Estel School in central Barcelona to confiscate ballot boxes, she felt something break inside her.

"I felt so angry and hurt inside that I thought, 'A country that hits me wants me to stay? You don't listen to me and on top of it you hit me?' For me that is abuse," she said a day later.
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"I was crying from rage," she recalled. "Now, I was going to vote no matter what. My husband and I didn't even have to talk about it, we just looked each other in the eyes and we knew that we had to vote. And that we had to vote 'yes' (for independence)."

Born of parents from other parts of Spain, Aroca, a 40-year-old mother of two, still wants to embrace a dual identity of both Spanish and Catalan. But she says the political crisis caused by a lack of dialogue between Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Catalan regional chief Carles Puigdemont has forced her to choose.

"All bonds have been broken. Not by the referendum, but by the police," Aroca said. "I feel rage and pain. I think that is how most people feel, seeing what people are chatting about, talks I have had at work. (Sunday) night I was very sad, truly sad that it has reached this point of me wondering what kind of country my daughters will inherit."

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The measures, similar to those in other European Union countries, also apply to visitors even though large numbers of Arab tourists holiday in the Alpine country.

The legislation was brought in by the outgoing centrist government of Chancellor Christian Kern.

The right wing Freedom Party is expected to gain seats in elections this month.

In 2011 France became the first European country to ban full face veils in public.

• Bradley Stone, a former Marine in suburban Philadelphia, shot and killed his ex-wife Nicole Stone, her mother and her grandmother, and he 'chopped' Nicole's sister, her husband and their 14-year-old daughter to death with an ax. Nicole Stone's 17-year-old nephew was the lone survivor of the three-home massacre. Stone was being treated for mental health issues. After the six slayings, he committed suicide with a lethal mixture of depressants, antidepressants and schizophrenia medications, his autopsy revealed. Police found Bradley Stone's body in the woods a week before Christmas, 2014, a day after he killed his six victims, police told the New York Daily News.

• Aaron Ray Ybarra, 26, of Mountlake Terrace, Washington, allegedly opened fire with a shotgun at Seattle Pacific University in June 2014, killing one student and wounding two others. Ybarra said then he "feels he identifies with one of the Columbine killers, whom he identified as Eric Harris," counselor Deldene J. Garner wrote later in a chemical dependency assessment filed in Edmonds Municipal Court. Ybarra had been referred to the counselor following his arrest in July 2012 for driving drunk on an Edmonds sidewalk. He reported "being diagnosed with Psychosis and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder," the report said. On occasion, "voices scared him," Ybarra told the counselor. He said he'd been prescribed with Prozac and Risperdal to help him with his problems.

• Jose Reyes, the Nevada seventh-grader who went on a shooting rampage at his school in October 2013 was taking a prescription antidepressant at the time, and had told a psychotherapist that he was teased at school, the Associated Press reported. Reyes, 12, opened fire Oct. 21 at Sparks Middle School, killing a teacher and wounding two classmates before committing suicide. His doctor had prescribed 10 mg of Prozac once daily, according to police reports. Toxicology reports indicated that at the time of autopsy the suspect had a generic form of Prozac, Fluoxetine in his system consistent with the prescription given.

• Reno Hospital shooter Alan Oliver Frazier, 51, killed his doctor and wounded one other person before killing himself in December 2013 in Reno, Nevada. Frazier took Prozac but didn't like being dependent on the medication and would sometimes stop using it, his ex-girlfriend told the Associated Press.

• Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis sprayed bullets at office workers and in a cafeteria on Sept. 16, 2013, killing 13 people including himself. Alexis had been prescribed Trazodone by his Veterans Affairs doctor. Trazadone is a generic antidepressant that is seldom used anymore to treat depression but is widely prescribed for insomnia, experts told the Washington Post.

• A 20-year-old woman accused of opening fire and shooting three people in a Gig Harbor, Washington, grocery was charged with murder in October 2012, after one of the victims died. Laura Sorenson appeared in Pierce County Superior Court, where prosecutors filed a charge of first-degree murder against her two months after the death of David Long, 40. Sorenson is accused of walking into the Peninsula Market just before 1 p.m. on Aug. 11, 2012 and firing at customers until she was tackled to the ground. Witnesses told police that Sorenson said something about "killing" people prior to pulling out a revolver from her purse and firing four to five shots. After the shooting, Sorenson revealed to detectives she has a mental condition and is on medication, court documents said, adding she wanted to kill herself and wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone else first, the Komo News reported.

• The mentally ill gunman who killed a worker and wounded several others at a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center psychiatric hospital in March 2012 had previously threatened staff at an affiliated hospital with a baseball bat. Medical records and other information show 30-year-old John Shick, held a grudge, believing he had misdiagnosed illnesses ranging from a bad ankle to pancreatitis to erectile dysfunction, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. said. Shick twice went to UPMC Shadyside hospital in February with the bat and threatened the staff, and yet Pittsburgh police were not called, Zappala told the Associated Press. Zappala said investigators hadn't yet determined why Shick targeted UPMC's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, where he was treated twice after he was kicked off the Duquesne University campus for harassing female students with repeated requests for dates. At the second visit, a clinic doctor urged Shick to resume medication for schizophrenia - after his mother told doctors he stopped taking it months before. Shick walked out and skipped a follow-up appointment in December." His contacts at UPMC began to get more serious and disturbing after that," said Deputy District Mark Tranquilli, who handles homicide cases for Zappala. In Shick's apartment, investigators found 43 drugs used to treat 20 conditions, from anti-depressants to medicines for intestinal worms.

• Mohamed Merah fell in a hail of bullets in a March 22, 2012 raid after shooting seven people at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, after telling police who sought his surrender that he regretted not "going back to the Jewish school" which would have enabled him to kill more children, according to comments reported by the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche. Merah had been prescribed psychotropic drugs and sleep aides "to calm his stress," a doctor said.

• It was reported in March 2012 that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales had killed 15 innocent civilians in Afghanistan, a horrific crime that men in his unit said went beyond the pale even for someone suffering from PTSD. It was later revealed by his wife that Bales was being treated with anti-depressants. She and her husband were both on antidepressants, "as is the rest of the army population....okay maybe not everyone. Just the ones that have been in for several years now, the ones who will actually admit when things are really screwed up," she told the Daily Beast.

• Anders Breivik, known as Norway's "laughing gunman," killed 77 people, many of them children, in 2011. Norway officials amassed pages and pages of analysis of the horrific crime, but almost nobody noticed that the smirking Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals, the Daily Mail reported. In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine. The authorities and most of the media were more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity, the Mail reported.

• Anabolic steroids were also used heavily by David Bieber, who killed one policeman and tried to kill two more in Leeds, England, in 2003, and by Raoul Moat, who last summer shot three people in Northumberland, killing one and blinding another. Steroids are strongly associated with mood changes, uncontrollable anger and many other problems.

• Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, California, in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban "semiautomatic assault weapons" in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.

• In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.

• 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.

• John Hinckley, then age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.

• Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children - aged 7 years down to 6 months - in the family bathtub near Houston. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates' longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: "She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession." And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: "What she described was feeling a presence ... Satan ... telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah," Ringholz said, adding that Yates' delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added "homicidal ideation" to the drug's list of "rare adverse events."