Antidepressants and Shootings

Before 1999, the year Columbine happened, mass shootings were almost unheard of. Today they are almost commonplace, most being committed by young adults on antidepressants or anti anxiety medications. Coincidentally, young adults 18-44 are now the biggest users of prescription antidepressants and pain relievers (Link), with 18-34 year-olds leading in fatal OD's (Link). One common side effect of these medications is psychosis.

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. And for most antidepressants or similar medications, the list of side effects is similar. For example, some of the possible side effects of Valium include "Anxiety, panic, irritability, aggressiveness / aggression [and] paranoid psychosis" and "outbursts of anger" (Link).

The following list contains offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes. Unfortunately, this list is longer than is mentioned here.

- Regarding the 2019 mass shooting in Dayton Ohio, "The coroner said cocaine, antidepressants and alcohol were found in Betts’ system at the time of the shooting. A pipe device and a clear baggie carrying cocaine was found on Betts’ body." (Link)

- "In the case of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old Florida mass-shooter, his mother’s sister, Barbara Kumbatovich, told the Miami Herald that she believed Cruz was on medication to deal with his emotional fragility" (Link)

- The Las Vegas killer who killed almost 60 people was taking prescribed Valium (Link). Some of the possible side effects of Valium include "Anxiety, panic, irritability, aggressiveness / aggression [and] paranoid psychosis" and "outbursts of anger" (Link).

- "The officer noted that [Dylan] Roof was becoming increasingly nervous. He searched Roof and found "orange strips" that Roof said were 'suboxone,' a Schedule 3 narcotic [prescription medication]. Roof was arrested and his 2000 Hyundai Elantra was towed" (Link). Dyllan Roof slaughtered 9 African Americans in a church in June of 2015.

- "German investigators found antidepressants in the apartment of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz this week, according to published reports" (Link). Andreas Lubitz purposefully crashed the plane he was piloting, tragically ending the lives of 150 people on board.

- Many people are probably wondering, why didn't Elliot Rogers receive any medical treatment prior to his horrific murders of 7 college students in California? The answer is, he was already taking Xanax and Vicodin. As he wrote in his journal, "To end my life, I will quickly swallow all of the Xanax and Vicodin pills I have left, along with an ample amount of hard liquor" (Link).

- "Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley acknowledged that Fort Hood gunman Ivan Lopez was taking psychiatric medication before the shooting, underscoring yet again the clear and consistent connection between mass shooting incidents and SSRI drugs" (Link).

The below article is pasted from www.wnd.com: (Link).

- "Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug 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 percent 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.

- Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., 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.

- 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 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.

In 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.

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 is chilling: “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.

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 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 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.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well-publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.

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 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug.

Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues.

One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been 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.” Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.

For a bigger list, click here