The Horrific Tragedies Caused by Antidepressants (SSRI and SNRI Medications)

Again, pharma knowingly promoting killer drugs. Trials showed a % of healthy participants would become violent or suicidal on these medications, yet manufacturers continuously deny as deaths rise.

BS”D

Two unfathomable tragedies involving families in my orbit have left me very deeply shaken.

The commentaries I’ve read about these mind-numbing incidents - one a suicide, one a homicide - both absolutely astonishing, as they involved loving mothers - catastrophically miss the point. The call is for “increased awareness of mental health.” How ironic that commonly used mental health interventions - specifically, antidepressants - are exactly what cause these horrific and sudden psychotic episodes.

We MUST wake up the world to the truth about the monstrous drugs that can make sweet people do unspeakable things to themselves or others - before anyone else is hurt. These incidents can happen OUT OF THE BLUE, and the perpetrator acts totally out of character, completely under the influence of the drug-induced psychosis. A tragedy (suicide or homicide) can occur very soon after beginning the drug, after changing dosing, - or even after being on the medication for a while - as well as after stopping suddenly.

(To anyone on the medications now, DO NOT stop cold turkey - that can be catastrophic. Get a doctor to help you taper off properly, under supervision.)

I apologize for the trauma the stories in this article will cause. But there is no choice other than publicizing this information - how else can we prevent future prescription-drug-induced suicide and homicide?

Please watch this very short video so that you can truly understand what we are speaking of. Here, a crying father tells how he killed the son he dearly loved - while in an antidepressant-induced psychosis which caused him to believe his son was better off dead (!!!)

The following article contains the documentation you need to understand the truth. You will see that the tragedies that occurred recently have ample precedent. The exact same scenarios of loving parents suddenly acting in unimaginable ways have replayed themselves over and over in the decades since SSRIs were introduced, but the truth about the dangerous drugs has still not become widely known - as the drugs’ manufacturers continuously lie and deflect blame.

This article was written by one of the greatest doctors I know, who calls himself “A Midwestern Doctor,” two years ago. I just discovered it now in my quest for understanding what recently occurred. I’m republishing most of the article - minor edits were made in wording which do not change any meanings.

The takeaway messages you must know are that these tragedies did not occur because of “stress” or “lack of support.” The responsibility for these devastating deaths rests solely on the manufacturers, promoters and prescribers of the antidepressant drugs which have an established history of causing sudden psychosis. A critical related point is that a healthy person who is placed on one or more psychiatric drugs will often develop bonafide symptoms of mental illness, (which will typically be unrecognized as being side effects from the medication), and with additional medications then added, can rapidly spiral downward into becoming non-functional.

My heart is shattered for the families who are left reeling, and for those who are gone.

The Evidence for Antidepressants Causing Mass Shootings

By A Midwestern Doctor, May 27, 2022

Until recently, psychiatric medications were the mass prescribed medication that had the worst risk to benefit ratio on the market.  In addition to rarely providing benefit to patients, there are a wide range of severe complications that commonly result from psychiatric medications.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have a similar primary mechanism of action to cocaine. SSRIs block the reuptake of Serotonin, SNRIs, also commonly prescribed block the reuptake of Serotonin and Norepinephrine (henceforth “SSRI refers to both SSRI and SNRI), and Cocaine blocks the reuptake of Serotonin, Norepinephrine and Dopamine.  SSRIs (and SNRIs) were originally used as anti-depressants, then gradually had their use marketed into other areas and along the way have amassed a massive body count.

Once the first SSRI entered the market in 1988, Prozac quickly distinguished itself as a particularly dangerous medication and after nine years, the FDA received 39,000 adverse event reports for Prozac, a number far greater than for any other drug. This included hundreds of suicides, atrocious violent crimes, hostility and aggression, psychosis, confusion, distorted thinking, convulsions, amnesia and sexual dysfunction (longterm or permanent sexual dysfunction is one of the most commonly reported side effects from anti-depressants, which is ironic given that the medication is supposed to make you less, not more depressed).

SSRI homicides are common, and a website exists that has compiled thousands upon thousands of documented occurrences.  As far as I know (there are most likely a few exceptions), in all cases where a mass school shooting has happened, and it was possible to know the medical history of the shooter, the shooter was taking a psychiatric medication that was known for causing these behavioral changes.  After each mass shooting, memes illustrating this topic typically circulate.

Oftentimes, “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated as just another crazy conspiracy theory. If you go past these labels and dig into the actual data, an abundantly clear and highly concerning picture emerges.

There are many serious issues with psychiatric medications. For brevity, this article will exclusively focus on their tendency to cause horrific violent crimes.  This was known long before they entered the market by both the drug companies and the FDA. While there is a large amount of evidence for this correlation, it is the one topic that is never up for debate when a mass shooting occurs.  I have a lot of leeway to discuss highly controversial topics with my colleagues, but this topic is met with so much hostility that I can never bring it up. It is for this reason I am immensely grateful to have an anonymous forum I can use.

A significant portion of this article came from the book Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Peter C. Gøtzsche.  For those of you interested in learning more about this topic, I would strongly advise reading that book, as I can only scratch the surface of the issue with these medications within this brief article. 
Note: When the work of Gøtzsche or another author is directly quoted, those quotations may include my own minor changes to improve the wording.

Lastly, for anyone who reads this article that is presently taking any SSRI or SNRI, it is critically important to NOT suddenly stop taking them. These addictive drugs produce very strong withdrawal symptoms, and there are many cases of catastrophic events that followed the abrupt discontinuation of an SSRI.  If this is something you ever wish to do, you need to gradually taper down the dosage with a physician who has experience in this area.

Akathisia

One of my relatives grew up in a big city during a particularly bad crime wave. One of his most notable memories from the time was looking up and seeing a man who was screaming “the ants are trying to get me” frantically tying bedsheets together (so he could flee down the fire escape) as armed men were rushing to his location yelling. My relative ran out of the area to avoid getting shot, but from the brief look he had at the fleeing man, was almost certain that man was high on cocaine.  Coke (or crack) bugs, one form of Akathisia, are a well documented phenomena (and like many of you, I have seen my fair share of cases where this happened).

Akathisia, an extreme form of restlessness is defined as a psycho-motor disorder where it is extremely difficult to stay still.  What this definition omits mentioning is that akathisia is incredibly unpleasant to the degree that many individuals who experience it frequently commit suicide or homicide (or both).  One of the earliest reports from patients with drug induced akathisia was: “They reported increased feelings of strangeness, verbalized by statements such as ‘I don’t feel myself’ or ‘I’m afraid of some of the unusual impulses I have.’”

Akathisia is much more common than most people realize. To share a personal anecdote: I occasionally discuss this topic with medical students and a few medical students have confided they previously experienced akathisia after using a psychiatric medication and it was so excruciating that one told me they seriously contemplated suicide at the time.  

Akathisia (and psychosis) are a known side effect of cocaine, methamphetamine, SSRIs, antipsychotics, and ADHD stimulant medications.   However while the common triggers have been identified, the actual mechanism for akathisia is still poorly understood and theorized to result from alterations in the center of the brain involved in movement.  These behavioral changes are so unusual and disturbing there are often simply described as the individual appearing to be possessed.

Akathisia Homicides:

This section will list some of the evidence substantiating the link between psychiatric medications and horrific homicides. When you review this type of information, it is very easy to intellectually disassociate from what’s contained within it. For that reason, I would like to request you first watch the two minute video of one father who has to live with knowing he killed his child he still loves from the bottom of his heart. He was ultimately not criminally convicted, however most individuals in these circumstances typically are.

(BW: I placed that video at the beginning of the article. If you have not yet viewed it, please go back and watch it if at all possible. If you can’t, unfortunately there are also many written stories in this article of the same exact occurrence.)

The psychiatric industry will always try to absolve their dangerous medications of responsibility and will aggressively gaslight their victims. Despite these criticisms, there are three strong facts that can be found throughout the literature on akathisia homicides that, Gøtzsche argues, irrefutably implicate psychiatric medications as the cause of violent homicides:

1) “These violent events occur in people of all ages, who by all objective and subjective measures were completely normal before the act and where no precipitating factors besides the psychiatric medication could be identified.”
2) “The events were preceded by clear symptoms of akathisia.”
3) “The violent offenders returned to their normal personality when they came off the antidepressant.”

Numerous cases where this is happened are summarized within this article from the Palm Beach Post.  In most of those cases, a common trend of these spontaneous acts of violence emerges: the act of violence was immediately preceded by a significant change in the psychiatric medications used by the individual.  In one case, shortly before committing one of these murders, one of the perpetrators also wrote on a blog that, while taking Prozac, he felt as if he was observing himself "from above." 

Individuals with a mutation in the gene that metabolizes psychiatric drugs are much more vulnerable to developing excessive levels of these drugs and triggering severe symptoms such as akathisia and psychosis. There is a good case to be made that individuals with this gene are responsible for many of the horrific acts of iatrogenic (medically induced) violence that occur, however to my knowledge, this is never considered when psychiatric medications are prescribed. Gøtzsche summarized a peer-reviewed forensic investigation of 10 of cases where this happened (all but one of these was an SSRI or an SNRI):

Male, 18 years, Prozac, sister was comatose after a car crash, violent akathisia for 14 days, killed his father four days after he ran out of pills.

Male, 35 years, Paxil, distressed by “on and off” relationship with mother of his child, stabbed former partner 30+ times to death after 11 weeks of akathisia.

Male, 46 years, Paxil, anxiety about not making enough money to support the family, killed his son in a manic-shift akathisia and delirium after 42 days.

Male, 16 years, Zoloft and Prozac, depressed, struggled at school, and the girlfriend left him, attempted suicide on both drugs, killed therapist in hospital after 11 weeks.

Male, 50 years, Effexor, distress over divorce, shot a stranger four days after stopping drug.

Female, 35 years, nortriptyline, distress due to husband’s drinking, killed teenage daughter in toxic delirium after three days.

Male, 24 years, Lexapro, anxiety and illicit substance use, several suicide attempts and assaults, nearly killed partner, 12 years in jail for attempted murder.

Female, 26 years, several SSRIs, difficulties with in-laws, two attempts to kill her two children.

Female, 52 years, Paxil and Celexa, harassment at work, suicide attempt and tried to kill her two children.

Female, 25 years, Celexa and Effexor, marital distress, several suicide attempts on both drugs, jumped in front of a train with her child while on citalopram.

There are many other sad cases of akathisia homicides.  One detailed by Gøtzsche is representative of the pharmaceutical injuries that gaslighted psychiatric patients often experience. When reviewing the story, keep in mind that the FDA insert explicitly lists the following as side effects of Effexor (a SNRI): intentional injury, malaise, suicide attempt, depersonalization, abnormal thinking, akathisia, apathy, ataxia, CNS stimulation, emotional lability, hostility, manic reaction, psychosis, suicidal ideation, abnormal behavior, adjustment disorder (which became a psychiatric diagnosis for her, although it was a side effect), akinesia, increased energy, homicidal ideation, and impulse control difficulties.

“A 26-year old woman tried to kill her two children on two occasions. She was prescribed Paxil for stress but experienced an episode of rage and attempted suicide by inhalation of carbon monoxide, and then stopped taking the drug. Despite this, she was prescribed Paxil again and reassured about its safety two years later. This time she experienced intense restlessness, surges of rage and anger, panic attacks, impulsive spending sprees, and constant suicidal ideation. She reasoned that her low self-esteem, insomnia, and suicidal behaviour were due to difficulties with her in-laws. She overdosed and was admitted to hospital where Paxil was increased. She tried to kill herself again and was diagnosed with an “adjustment disorder.”

She was switched to Effexor, which was increased over three months until the dose was eight times higher than the initial dose. Each dose increase occasioned a week spent in bed with exhaustion, as she was unable to get up (akinesia). Her mental state deteriorated and violent outbursts and suicidal ideation became frequent and severe. Unable to stay in one place, she drove several hundred miles with her children and tried to kill them and herself by car exhaust. A few days later she tried to kill her children and herself again.”

Evidence for SSRI Suicides

Violent psychotic reactions from SSRIs can manifest as both suicides and homicides. There is extensive documentation to support the occurrence of SSRI suicides, and while the psychiatric profession still uses an endless litany of excuses to deny that this happens, many antidepressants now have a black box warning from the FDA for the occurrence of suicide. The side effects were clearly known to result from SSRIs as far back as their early clinical trials (which were of course hidden from everyone) and a mountain of evidence proving this regularly occurs has accumulated since these drugs entered the market. 

There are a large number of studies showing the link between SSRIs and suicide (especially those kept secret by the pharmaceutical industry). These will not be discussed as they are not the main focus of this article, but to provide some context on the issue, I will briefly discuss a microscopic and macroscopic study examining this picture.  First to quote this peer-reviewed case series’s abstract:

“Six depressed patients free of recent serious suicidal ideation developed intense, violent suicidal preoccupation after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine treatment. This state persisted for as little as 3 days to as long as 3 months after discontinuation of fluoxetine. None of these patients had ever experienced a similar state during treatment with any other psychotropic drug.”

Second, the CDC has a system for reporting violent deaths that have occurred, and one subset of those deaths are suicides (which may be associated with a homicide or a concurrent suicide).  3616 of these deaths were evaluated for the presence of an antidepressant, and 35.3% tested positive for one at time of her death.  A large number of individual mood altering substances were tested for, and the only one that had a higher positive test rate than the antidepressants was alcohol (38.2%), although only 26.9% of those tested had enough alcohol present to be considered legally drunk.  In the general population, between 11-13.2% of adults use antidepressants, which suggests there is a note-worthy correlation here.

Evidence for Akathisia Homicides:

Most of the placebo controlled data which is available showing the instances of homicidal behavior after taking an SSRI is available because of court orders from lawsuits where someone sued a SSRI manufacture for their actions while on the SSRI.  When you consider these figures, it is important to remember that while a 0.1% death rate for drug is tragic (but typically deemed acceptable within medicine), it is incomparable in consequence to a 0.1% homicide rate for a drug.

As millions of children are given SSRIs, even numbers that small mean homicides will regularly occur.  I can’t even guess how low a risk would constitute an acceptable threshold, but for the sake of conveying other points in this section, I will describe it as 0.1%. In reality, any elevated risk in this regard should be viewed as unacceptable without any exceptions. I am emphasizing this point because I have never seen it considered by proponents of psychotropic drugs. 

An excellent paper reviews private pharmaceutical research made public through litigation. The paper discusses internal company documents that compared 9219 research subjects (many of whom had pre-existing psychiatric diagnoses) that received Paxil, to 6455 research subjects (also with pre-existing psychiatric conditions) that received a placebo; 0.65% of the patients in clinical trials became hostile on Paxil compared with 0.31% on placebo. The highest risk for hostility on Paxil was for those who also had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (0.34% is more than the 0.1% threshold)

The authors of this paper hypothesized that the violent actions following usage of SSRIs are explained by their tendency to trigger akathisia, emotional blunting, and manic or psychotic reactions. I will quote a few select passages from that paper:

“In healthy volunteer studies, hostile events occurred in three of 271 (1.1%) volunteers taking Paxil, compared with zero in 138 taking placebo.” (1.1% is more than 0.1%)

“In data from sertraline pediatric trials submitted by Pfizer, aggression was the most common cause for discontinuation [removal from the trial] from the two Zoloft placebo-controlled trials in depressed children. In these trials, eight of 189 patients randomized to Zoloft were discontinued for aggression, agitation, or hyperkinesis (another term for akathisia frequently used to conceal it), compared with zero discontinuations for these reasons in the 184 patients on placebo…When discontinuations for any manifestation of treatment induced activation (suicidal ideation or attempts, aggression, agitation, hyperkinesis, or aggravated depression) were considered, there were 15 discontinuations on Zoloft compared with two on placebo, which meant this was 7.3 times more likely to happen when on sertraline.” (8.9% is more that 0.1%., 7.3 times more likely likewise is also unacceptable).

“In pediatric trials of Effexor, two percent of children dropped out because of hostility, more than double the rate of dropout on placebo.”

“After a program on Paxil in 2002, the producers of the BBC television programme Panorama received 1,374 e-mails from viewers, mostly patients. Researchers then analyzed the full set of these responses. Many respondents linked emotional storms and thoughts and acts of violence or self-harm to Paxil, both to starting drug treatment and to dosage change.

These were not simple anecdotal reports, in that the analysis clearly pointed to a linkage with dosage. Second, they were self-reports of violence from patients with no apparent background of violent behavior. Third, the analysis was consistent with an analysis of reports of thoughts and acts of violence or self-harm on paroxetine that doctors had sent to the MHRA (England’s FDA) about other patients between 1991 and 2002.

In both patient and medical reports, severe mood changes were commonly associated with changes of drug dosage during the first week of treatment, with later dosage increase, or with dosage decrease or drug withdrawal. The accounts reported in both the medical and the patient series had much in common, including time frame and a linkage to dosage.”

BW: The journal article that AMD linked and quoted from above was so powerful that I took screenshots of many of the pages and highlighted key parts for you to see. I urge you to read closely:

BW: What is particularly tragic in the detailed case histories you read in PLoS Medicine above, is that people who committed SSRI-induced murders had been medicated for either extremely minor issues or for problems that were very small in comparison to the severe disorders the medications caused. For example, people were put on these life-destroying drugs because of an argument with a family member, a death in the family, “nervous problems” with which they had nevertheless been functioning for many years, sporadic panic attacks triggered by having gone through a very stressful life experience, or previous anxiety/depressive episodes which had self-resolved, with no history of violence. In every case, the “cure” was much worse than the “disease” itself. When the people became agitated, more anxious, or aggressive on the prescribed medication, the medical practitioner’s response was almost always NOT to recognize that the DRUG was the PROBLEM. Instead they upped the dose, or switched the individual to a different SSRI - resulting in horrible tragedy. (There were also cases in which the SSRI was discontinued but then subsequently restarted by another doctor.)

Back to AMD’s article:

Gøtzsche has also summarized some of the key legal cases regarding SSRIs:

“Akathisia homicides have been defended as instances of involuntary intoxication both with and without genetic evidence, and some people have succeeded in receiving damages from the manufacturers for failure to warn…the filings in a case on Paxil against SmithKline Beecham [now named GSK] included an unpublished company study of incidents of serious aggression in 80 patients, of which 25 resulted in homicide. In one case, a man aged 74 strangled his wife, and another was 66 when he became delusional on Prozac and killed his wife who was found with 200 stab wounds.”

“In 2001, for the first time, a jury found a pharmaceutical firm liable for deaths caused by an antidepressant. Donald Schell, aged 60, had been taking Paxil for just 48 hours when he shot and killed his wife, his daughter, his granddaughter and himself.  

Central to the case were SmithKline Beecham internal documents showing the company was aware that a small number of people could become agitated or violent from Paxil. Despite this knowledge, paroxetine packaging deliberately did not include a warning about suicide, violence or aggression.

The internal documents, stamped “confidential,” list the results of tests involving more than 2,000 healthy volunteers taking either Paxil or placebo. Some volunteers experienced anxiety, nightmares, hallucinations and other side effects – definitely caused by the drug – within two days of taking it. Two volunteers attempted suicide after 11 and 18 days, respectively…Ten years after the verdict, GSK still denies that Paxil can cause people to commit homicide and suicide and that there are withdrawal problems.”

Typically, American courts are more likely to rule in favor of the pharmaceutical company, and Donald Shell was a lucky exception.  For example consider the three following cases:

“Christopher Pittman became manic and shot his two grandparents to death two days after his dose of Zoloft had been doubled. Despite being only 12 years old when he did this, he was sentenced to 30 years of prison.”

“David Crespi was on Prozac and three other drugs, which he had taken for a couple of weeks, when he killed his two twin daughters with a knife. He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and got a life sentence with no chance of parole, although he became his old self after coming off the drugs.”

“Kurt Danysh was 18 years old when he was inappropriately prescribed Prozac by a general practitioner .  He became restless and violent and shot his father, the person he loved the most, 17 days later in a totally out-of-character mood. Kurt had no history of violence prior to Prozac, but in 1996, he was convicted of murdering his father and sentenced to 22.5 to 60 years in prison. During this case, Eli Lilly lied in court, and claimed that Prozac would not cause aggressive behaviour resulting in his conviction. Later in 2004 when it was exposed Lilly had concealed data from 1988 showing Prozac caused violence, the FDA recognized that SSRIs can cause violent behaviour, particularly in children and adolescents. Despite these events and dozens of cases of homicide linked to Prozac that had subsequently been reported to the FDA, the judge has dismissed all appeals, and it took 24 years of legal work and petitioning for Kurt to finally be released from prison.”

Gøtzsche also notes the Canadian court system is more considerate of pharmaceutical homicide. For example:  “In 2011 a Canadian judge ruled that Prozac induced a 16-year old boy to commit murder; he knifed a friend to death. In another case David Carmichael, who killed his 11-year old son while on antidepressants, was ruled “not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder,” and today, Carmichael writes and speaks on the dangers of antidepressants.”

This comment from a reader after the article was published highlights why I have repeatedly emphasized the importance of not not abruptly discontinuing a SSRI:

“In the early 90’s (can’t remember the exact year) I personally knew and was involved with the family of the 66 year old man you mentioned that stabbed his wife over 200 times then killed himself. We were all members of a small community church and we used to go to their house for Bible study. His children sued Eli Lilly (not for the money, they became quite wealthy) but to have Prozac labeled with all these warnings. The saddest thing was that if they knew there was any chance this could happen when he stopped the drug, they would have hired round the clock in home care to be sure he was doing ok. They had the means to do whatever it would have taken to be safe during that time but they just didn’t have the knowledge. It was the saddest time that will always be with me.”

BW: Note on recent community tragedies

There are two sorts of responses that can follow terrible occurrences in a community, the likes of which we have just been describing. The uninformed response is a cry for “more education and awareness of mental health.” More funding, more programs, more being on the lookout for symptoms of “mental health problems” in people around you, so they can be “caught early.” This, of course, typically means MORE SSRIs prescribed. Ironically, this response is asking for more of the same tragedies, G-d forbid.

The informed response would be public recognition of the TRUE cause of the tragedy - the horrific effects of SSRIs. Campaigns to raise public awareness of the dangers of the drugs, as well as to remove them from the market, are actions which would actually lead to less unnecessary tragedy. Certainly, at the same time, we should be raising awareness of methods to help suffering individuals in real ways which address the underlying causes of their symptoms, and do NOT involve drugs. (For example, too few people know that B12 deficiency, such as from an inadequate diet, or destruction of intestinal bifidobacteria, such as from antibiotic use, can result in anxiety or depression.)

Back to AMD article:

Mass Shooting and Psychiatric Medications

In the 1990s, school shootings transitioned from being very rare to a frequent facet of American life. As this timeline overlaps with the entrance of SSRIs to the US market, many articles have evaluated the link between mass shootings and psychiatric medications.  I will quote a one of the more comprehensive summaries (written in 2013) which attempted to analyze all known mass shootings:

•Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and one teacher and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public. [A detailed summary of the clear contribution of the psychiatric medication's to their mass shootings can be found here]. 

•Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. Ten dead, 12 wounded.

•Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

•Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

•Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire, killing two classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

•Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

•A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed standoff at his school.

•Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded.

•Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding ten others.

•TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.

•James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

•Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

•Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California

•Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported having been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

•Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for his conditions.”

•Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed nine students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

•Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

•Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

•Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

•Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

The article also discussed a few recent school shootings where the information to determine if a psychiatric medication was used was not available:

•What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21…… killed six people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, Az? [I was unable to locate any information on this case]

•What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24….. killed 12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora Colorado? [Holmes was on Zoloft, which likely triggered violent behaviors in him in the weeks preceding the mass shooting, all of which his psychiatrist ignored.]

•What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on, age 20, Killed 26 and wounded 2 in Newtown Ct.? [Lanza was later confirmed to have been prescribed Celexa in the past and was on a questionable antipsychotic, fanapt, known for inducing violent behavior at the time of the shooting]

Since the time this article was published, there have been four additional large school shootings:

•Christopher Harper-Mercer (2015) who killed 10 was likely on psychiatric medication but there is no definitive proof.

•Nikolas Cruz (2017) who killed 17 was likely on on psychiatric medication but there is no definitive proof.

•Dimitrios Pagourtzis (2018) who killed 10 was probably not on a psychiatric medication. His attorney said he was not (which may have been a deceitful legal maneuver, but most likely was the truth), while the president of the NRA said he was (and I was not able to determine his basis for this assertion).

Lastly, for Salvador Ramos (2022) who recently killed 22, there have been many posts stating he was on antidepressants, but while there is some circumstantial evidence suggesting this, there is presently no reliable information to confirm or deny it. For a more detailed summary of my thoughts on this matter, please see this comment.

Conclusion:

While the tendency to provoke violence towards others is a major concern with SSRIs and other related medications, it is rarely considered as a side effect for these drugs. One reason for this is because the other severe adverse effects from these medications are much more common (for example, SSRIs are the most common cause of bipolar) and as a result occupy a disproportionate focus when discussing their toxicity. In addition to being extremely damaging, it is very questionable if these drugs have any benefit beyond statistical artifacts created by biased corporate research studies. To illustrate how illusory the benefits are: John Virapen, the pharmaceutical executive largely responsible for bringing these drugs to market, later revealed Prozac was originally intended to treat obesity, but then re-marketed for depression once Eli-Lilly realized that was a more profitable use of the drug.

This then raises the question: how could these drugs have possibly been approved and kept on the market?

Prozac (and their subsequent iterations) should have never been approved, but they were approved due to an incestuous and meticulously woven web of corruption that went to the very top of the federal government.

The number one goal of the pharmaceutical business is to produce markets for expensive drugs which will be indefinitely taken by the majority of the population. It is my belief that the extreme potential profit they hold incentivized and enabled their pharmaceutical manufacturers to remove all regulatory obstacles to these drugs entering widespread adoption.

The primary reason we know most of the harms associated with SSRIs is because they were toxic enough to severely harm a large number of people who subsequently were sufficiently motivated to fight the drug companies in court (very few drugs have caused enough damage to mobilize this type of response). With these drugs, because of a courageous whistleblower (John Virapen) and documents released in court, it is possible to gain an intimate understanding of how these companies operate and the specific forms of fraud they commit.

Extensive bribery, deliberate falsification of clinical trail data, the highest leaders within the government being quarterbacks for these drugs and the FDA doing everything it could to conceal adverse events has been proven to have occurred for the SSRIs and is discussed in part 2 of this series:

How the FDA Buried the Dangers of Anti-Depressants

Lastly, I know this is already been stated, but do not attempt to stop taking an SSRI without the assistance of a physician who understands how to taper them. Very bad things can happen if you do not follow that advice.

Postscript:

Since the time this article was published, leaders in the conservative media have began to discuss the subject of the connection between SSRIs and Mass Shooting. This is very encouraging and it is my hope we may at last be starting to move towards addressing this issue.

A Major News Network has Finally Explored the Link Between Mass Shootings and SSRIs

Link to A Midwestern Doctor’s original article:

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-evidence-for-antidepressants

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