The Decades of Evidence That Antidepressants Cause Mass Shootings
As we have seen with the vaccines, almost no social cost can keep a lucrative pharmaceutical off the market.
Note: This original version of this article (which has been revised and updated) was published a year ago, but sadly is just as pertinent now as it was then. Each time one of these shootings happen, I watch people get up in arms over what needs to be done to stop murdering our children, but at the same time this, the elephant in the room, the clear and irrefutableevidence linking psychiatric medications to homicidal violence is never discussed (which I believe is due their sales making approximately 40 billion dollars a year).
Many of the stories in here are quite heart wrenching, and I humbly request that you make the effort to bear witness to these tragic events.
Prior to the Covid vaccinations, psychiatric medications were the mass-prescribed medication that had the worst risk-to-benefit ratio on the market. In addition to rarely providing benefits to patients, there is a wide range of severe complications that commonly result from psychiatric medications. Likewise, I and many colleagues believe the widespread adoption of psychotropic drugs has distorted the cognition of the demographic of the country which frequently utilizes them (which to some extent stratifies by political orientation) and has created a wide range of detrimental shifts in our society.
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 (long-term 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 online, and the recent events in Texas [this article was written shortly after the shooting last year] are no exception.
Oftentimes, “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated as just another crazy conspiracy theory. However, much in the same way the claim “COVID Vaccines are NOT safe and effective” is typically written off as a 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 flexibility 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.
Note: I have received many similar comments from readers.
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 “get that mother******.” 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 phenomenon (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 to mention 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 known side effects 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.
From my own exploration of this topic, I have noticed that some individuals with cocaine intoxication (I have not yet examined a patient on the other drugs experiencing akathisia) have a characteristic (often porous) perturbation in their bio-electric field, which while very complex to describe, does resemble “frantic ants running all over the body,” and in theory could explain part of the akathisia experience.
As this idea is contained within a medical model most healthcare practitioners do not ascribe to, it has been difficult for me to evaluate the validity of this hypothesis. I have met a few other colleagues who made the identical observation, so this is a periodic topic of discussion amongst us as we believe there is significant value in developing a model that can explain this puzzling condition.
To further illustrate how perplexing the behaviors observed are on SSRIs consider this correspondence from a clinical investigator to Pfizer:
More importantly, consider Pfizer’s response:
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 this 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.
Much like the vaccine industry, 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 facts can be consistently found throughout the literature on akathisia homicides which Gøtzsche argues irrefutably implicate psychiatric medications as the cause of violent homicides:
• 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.
• The events were preceded by clear symptoms of akathisia.
• The violent offenders returned to their normal personality when they came off the antidepressant.
Numerous cases where this has 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 cases where this happened (all but one of these involved 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 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 (an 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 behavior were due to difficulties with her in-laws. She overdosed and was admitted to the hospital where her 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 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.
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 the time of their 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 an SSRI manufacturer for their actions while on the SSRI. Consider for example this report from one clinical trial:
When you consider these figures, it is important to remember that while a 0.1% death rate for a 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 the usage of SSRIs may be 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 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.
Gøtzsche likewise has located less biased sources of data on the violent risks of SSRIs:
As the published trial literature related to suicidality and aggression on antidepressants is unreliable, we looked at 64,381 pages of clinical study reports (70 trials) we got from the European Medicines Agency. We showed for the first time that SSRIs in comparison with placebo increase aggression in children and adolescents, odds ratio 2.79 (95% CI 1.62 to 4.81) (2). This is an important finding considering the many school shootings where the killers were on SSRIs.
In a systematic review of placebo-controlled trials in adult healthy volunteers, we showed that antidepressants double the occurrence of events that the FDA has defined as possible precursors to suicide and violence, odds ratio 1.85 (95% CI 1.11 to 3.08)(3). The number needed to treat to harm one healthy adult person was only 16 (95% CI 8 to 100).
Based on the clinical study reports, we showed that adverse effects that increase the risk of suicide and violence were 4-5 times more common with duloxetine than with placebo in trials in middle-aged women with stress urinary incontinence. There were also more women on duloxetine who experienced a core or potential psychotic event, relative risk RR 2.25 (95% CI 1.06 to 4.81). The number needed to harm was only seven. It would have been quite impossible to demonstrate how dangerous duloxetine is, if we had only had access to published research. In accordance with our findings, the FDA has previously announced that women who were treated with duloxetine for incontinence in the open-label extension phase of the clinical studies had 2.6 times more suicide attempts than other women of the same age.
Gøtzsche has also reviewed 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.
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