This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced that his agency would be "launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [antidepressant] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence."
The announcement came one day after the Aug. 27 mass shooting of children in a Minneapolis Catholic School. Kennedy specifically said HHS would investigate whether drugs taken by transgender mass-shooter Robin Westman played a role in his church attack, during which Westman murdered 2 children and wounded 18 other people, 15 of them children.
Immediately, the establishment media went into high gear defending both the controversial drugs and transgenders with headlines like this from MSNBC: "RFK Jr. is propagating a dangerous myth about mental health treatment and violence." And the Washington Post led its coverage with, "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that psychiatric drugs may have played a role in the Minnesota Catholic school shooting – a statement widely criticized as unsupported by science." Likewise, Google's search AI is entirely dismissive of RFK Jr.'s commitment to research the obvious link, denigrating the HHS secretary as a conspiracist and skeptic, whose "decision to launch the investigation has drawn sharp criticism. Opponents argue he is using a tragedy to promote disinformation and attack a vulnerable population."
In reality: 1) Individuals identifying as transgender very commonly are prescribed antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs due to high levels of anxiety and depression stemming from their "gender dysphoria"; and 2) Putting people on a regimen of powerful cross-sex hormones in a vain attempt to change their gender – something that is scientifically impossible – is well known to create havoc in both body and mind.
Indeed, as summarized below, there is a shocking and near-total correlation between psychiatric medications – particularly so-called SSRI and SNRI antidepressants – and America's most infamous and gruesome mass shooters in recent decades.
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*"When I was lying in my bed that night, I couldn't sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them."
The words are those of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, struggling to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he'd ever known in his turbulent life. He was angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them.
"I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger," he recalled. "Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can't do anything to stop it."
His lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of "involuntary intoxication," since Pittman's doctors had him taking the powerful antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.
Paxil's known "adverse drug reactions" – according to the drug's FDA-approved label – include "mania," "insomnia," "anxiety," "agitation," "confusion," "amnesia," "depression," "paranoid reaction," "psychosis," "hostility," "delirium," "hallucinations," "abnormal thinking," "depersonalization" and "lack of emotion," among others.
Pittman, who was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison for murdering his grandparents, would later "transition" to the female gender and change his first name to Kristen. "I, as well as my family, know that I have identified as a 'female' most of my life," Pittman wrote in a lawsuit against South Carolina prison officials, "but due to my incarceration at twelve (12) years old I was not able to take the steps of transition that I needed over the years."
* Andrea Yates, in one of the most horrifying and heartbreaking crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. 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 SNRI antidepressant Effexor. (SNRIs, short for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are similar to SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, in that both chemically elevate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain). In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her five children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (since acquired by Pfizer) quietly added "homicidal ideation" – that is, murderous thoughts and feelings – to the drug's list of "rare adverse events."
And what exactly does "rare" mean in the phrase "rare adverse events"? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year a staggering 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means over 19,000 Americans might have been experiencing "homicidal ideation" as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug during that time period.
* Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Paxil and Zoloft (and trendsetter Prozac) a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves.
Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials 4% of children and youth taking Luvox – that's 1 in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.
The inescapable truth is, perpetrators of many of the most horrendous murder rampages in recent years were taking, or just coming off of, prescribed psychiatric drugs.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers are nervous about lawsuits over the "rare adverse effects" of their powerfully mood-altering medications. To avoid costly settlements and public relations catastrophes – such as when GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay $6.4 million to the family of 60-year-old Donald Schnell who murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage shortly after starting on Paxil – drug companies' legal teams have quietly and skillfully settled hundreds of cases out-of-court, shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to plaintiffs. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fought scores of legal claims against Prozac in this way, settling for cash before the complaint could go to court while stipulating that the settlement remain secret – and then claiming it had never lost a Prozac lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the list of killers who were taking prescribed psychiatric medications is long and chilling. Some prominent examples most people will remember:
* Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old former student who in 2018 murdered 17 people – 14 students and 3 staff members – at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was on psychiatric medications "to deal with his emotional fragility," his mother's sister, Barbara Kumbatovich, told the Miami Herald.
* In 2017, Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock had benzodiazepines (e.g. Valium and similar anti-anxiety drugs) in his system when, out the window of his 32nd-floor hotel room, he shot 58 people to death and wounded hundreds more in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
* Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, which became the catalyst for the 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.
* Adam Lanza, the school shooter who massacred 26 people – 6 teachers and 20 first-grade children – at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2013, was on psychiatric meds, according to Mark and Louise Tambascio, family friends of Lanza and his mother. As Louise Tambascio told correspondent Scott Pelley on CBS' "60 Minutes," "I know he was on medication and everything, but she (Cruz's mother) homeschooled him at home 'cause he couldn't deal with the school classes sometimes, so she just homeschooled Adam at home. And that was her life." Tambascio likewise told ABC News, "I knew he was on medication, but that's all I know."
* Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
* 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.
* In Paducah, Ky., in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school's lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.
* In 2005, 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.
* Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh's description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder sounded strikingly similar to that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who had shot his grandparents while on psychiatric meds. "I didn't realize I did it until after it was done," Danysh said. "This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun."
* John Hinckley, 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.
* In still another famous case, 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, Ky., killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors. Since then, Eli Lilly has reportedly paid out an estimated $50 million to settle 300 lawsuits filed as a result of homicides, suicides and suicide attempts connected with use of Prozac.
These are just some of the better-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their horrendous crimes – there are many others.
Today, despite the fact that literally all modern antidepressants prescribed for Americans carry an FDA-mandated black box warning of increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior ("behavior," of course, meaning actually killing oneself, or trying to), antidepressants are nevertheless wildly prescribed to the American public. As psychiatrist and antidepressant expert Josef Witt-Doerring, M.D., recently explained to Tucker Carlson, approximately 1 in 5 Americans are currently taking SSRIs.
