Epoch Times - Is there a link between mass shootings and antidepressants? Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring explains.
Aired: 2025-10-28
Duration: 04:28


=== Antidepressants and School Shootings (03:47) ===

[00:00:00]  This is a very controversial area that does not get a lot of coverage.
[00:00:05]  And this has turned up in a lot of discussions about school shootings, actually, that they notice that school shooters are taking SSRIs.
[00:00:17]  And so I want to unpack that.
[00:00:19]  But I want to start by saying this.
[00:00:21]  I'm not trying to say that every single school shooter or mass shooting event is due to SSRIs.
[00:00:28]  I think Clearly it's a multi-factorial problem.
[00:00:31]  That said, the role that these antidepressants play has to be considered.
[00:00:39]  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.
[00:00:47]  There can't be a link here.
[00:00:48]  If you just look at the drug labels for Adderall and Ritalin, in the warnings and precautions, it already lists aggression and hostility.
[00:00:56]  This is where they put the most important risks.
[00:00:58]  If you look at SSRIs, it already lists there in the label that they increase the risk of suicidal behavior.
[00:01:04]  It lists hostility, agitation, and violence.
[00:01:08]  If you look at Abilify, which is an antipsychotic, homicidal ideation is already in there.
[00:01:13]  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.
[00:01:23]  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?
[00:01:34]  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.
[00:01:43]  And perhaps the most well-known case of this was a case in Wyoming, and it involved a gentleman called Don Schell.
[00:01:51]  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.
[00:02:01]  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.
[00:02:09]  Now, this shouldn't have happened given he already had a bad experience to the same drug class.
[00:02:15]  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.
[00:02:26]  I mean, an unspeakable tragedy for the family.
[00:02:31]  Now, the surviving son-in-law, his daughter's husband and the father of the grandchild that he lost, brought suit against SmithKline.
[00:02:44]  This is before GSK had formed.
[00:02:47]  And this was heard out before a jury in Wyoming, and they ruled in favor of Tobin.
[00:02:54]  That was the name of the son-in-law who survived.
[00:02:56]  He was given a million-dollar verdict.
[00:02:58]  It was for failure to warn.
[00:03:00]  SmithKline appealed it.
[00:03:03]  It did not change the verdict.
[00:03:04]  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.
[00:03:13]  The same thing happened in Australia.
[00:03:15]  A man strangled and killed his wife during a bad reaction to Paxil again.
[00:03:21]  And the judge ruled there as well.
[00:03:25]  If not for the drug, this wouldn't have happened.
[00:03:28]  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.

=== Drugs and Violence: The Suppressed Link (00:56) ===

[00:03:43]  And so this is already happening.
[00:03:45]  I know we don't like to talk about it in the media.
[00:03:47]  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.
[00:03:56]  What we know is that many of the mass shooters are exposed to antidepressants.
[00:04:03]  In the case of some who are trans, there's also hormone medications as well, which can have a mood destabilizing effect.
[00:04:11]  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.
[00:04:22]  That can lead to or precipitate violence.
[00:04:25]  Now, the problem is that we're really not looking at it.