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|---|---|
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Antidepressants and School Shootings
00:03:47
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| This is a very controversial area that does not get a lot of coverage. | |
| And this has turned up in a lot of discussions about school shootings, actually, that they notice that school shooters are taking SSRIs. | |
| And so I want to unpack that. | |
| But I want to start by saying this. | |
| I'm not trying to say that every single school shooter or mass shooting event is due to SSRIs. | |
| I think Clearly it's a multi-factorial problem. | |
| That said, the role that these antidepressants play has to be considered. | |
| And I want to talk a little bit about the drug labels quickly before I go into this, because I know some people, they hear this and they go, this is quackery. | |
| There can't be a link here. | |
| If you just look at the drug labels for Adderall and Ritalin, in the warnings and precautions, it already lists aggression and hostility. | |
| This is where they put the most important risks. | |
| If you look at SSRIs, it already lists there in the label that they increase the risk of suicidal behavior. | |
| It lists hostility, agitation, and violence. | |
| If you look at Abilify, which is an antipsychotic, homicidal ideation is already in there. | |
| And so what I want people to be aware of who are listening to this is these risks are actually already in the drug labels from the manufacturers. | |
| Now the question is, okay, sure, maybe there's some violence, maybe you can have homicidal ideation, but can this actually, you know, has this been linked to actual homicides? | |
| And time and time again, we've seen this go through the court system, and judges and juries have found that this has been involved. | |
| And perhaps the most well-known case of this was a case in Wyoming, and it involved a gentleman called Don Schell. | |
| He was an older man, and he had been exposed to Prozac in the past, an SSRI, and he had an agitated response to it, and they stopped it quickly. | |
| His next doctor, who did not know that he had that history in the past, gave him a drug called Paxil, which is an SSRI. | |
| Now, this shouldn't have happened given he already had a bad experience to the same drug class. | |
| And so they, so Don's new doctor put him on Paxil, and within a week, he killed his wife, he killed his daughter, and he killed his granddaughter, and then he shot himself. | |
| I mean, an unspeakable tragedy for the family. | |
| Now, the surviving son-in-law, his daughter's husband and the father of the grandchild that he lost, brought suit against SmithKline. | |
| This is before GSK had formed. | |
| And this was heard out before a jury in Wyoming, and they ruled in favor of Tobin. | |
| That was the name of the son-in-law who survived. | |
| He was given a million-dollar verdict. | |
| It was for failure to warn. | |
| SmithKline appealed it. | |
| It did not change the verdict. | |
| And so we already have court cases where judges, juries have heard the information and said, you know, if not for the drug, this wouldn't have happened. | |
| The same thing happened in Australia. | |
| A man strangled and killed his wife during a bad reaction to Paxil again. | |
| And the judge ruled there as well. | |
| If not for the drug, this wouldn't have happened. | |
| And there's been many other cases that have been described in a paper by David Healy, who really is the big expert on this, called Antidepressants and Violence, Intersection with the Law. | |
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Drugs and Violence: The Suppressed Link
00:00:56
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| And so this is already happening. | |
| I know we don't like to talk about it in the media. | |
| It's something that's very suppressed, but the courts are already dealing with this, and they are finding that these drugs are playing a role. | |
| What we know is that many of the mass shooters are exposed to antidepressants. | |
| In the case of some who are trans, there's also hormone medications as well, which can have a mood destabilizing effect. | |
| And so there is potential there that you get someone who is already unhappy and you put them on a medication that's known in rare instances to cause these issues. | |
| That can lead to or precipitate violence. | |
| Now, the problem is that we're really not looking at it. | |