Mass Shooting and Psychiatric Medications
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Here are a few short excerpts from a Midwestern Doctor’s excellent article at Substack titled The Decades of Evidence That Antidepressants Cause Mass Shootings. I strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in the topic, read the entire article. All of the excerpts below are from the article.
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 (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) 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.
- 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.
(Note: The author includes many more examples that I will omit here for length.)
With the recent school shooter Audrey Hale, most of the focus has been on the shooter presumably taking testosterone, as this can trigger aggression. While like many things, this potentially explains what happened, in the reports I found where testosterone led to homicidal behavior, it required a pre-existing psychiatric illness (which would typically be treated with a violence inducing psychiatric medication) to also be present. Since a clear link has already been established to psychiatric medications causing this behavior (and based on the shooter’s background it is likely some were prescribed), I would suggest that until more information becomes known, the standard psychiatric medication violence it is a more probable explanation for the recent tragic events….
How could these drugs have possibly been approved and kept on the market?
In the previous series on the (proven) corruption in the COVID-19 response, I tried to illustrate that the conduct of the federal government was beyond egregious and that they were following a very similar corrupt playbook that existed long before COVID-19. Both the vaccines and 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. Psychiatric medications and the COVID-19 vaccinations represent two of the most lucrative fulfillments of these business objectives. I believe that the extreme potential profit they hold incentivized and enabled their pharmaceutical manufacturers to remove all regulatory obstacles to these drugs entering widespread adoption…..
Prior to the Covid vaccinations, psychiatric medications were the mass-prescribed medication that had the worst risk-to-benefit ratio on the market. … there is a wide range of severe complications that commonly result from psychiatric medications. ... the widespread adoption of psychotropic drugs has distorted the cognition of the demographic of the country which frequently utilizes them … and has created a wide range of detrimental shifts in our society….
Image: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
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…
SSRI (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) homicides are common, and a website exists that has compiled thousands upon thousands of documented occurrences. As far as I know…, 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 online, and the recent events in Texas … are no exception….
There are many serious issues with psychiatric medications… 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….
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….
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 this happens, many antidepressants now have a black box warning from the FDA for the occurrence of suicide. The side effects were definitively 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. …
As we have seen with the vaccines, almost no social cost can keep a lucrative pharmaceutical off the market.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All images in this article are from TUR