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Anti-Depressants and shooting sprees

I discussed this issue with a psychiatrist several years back. What he told me was that the majority of the patients who were treated with SSRIs and went on to commit suicide or homicide were people who were profoundly mentally ill. He said the riskiest time for these patients was usually when they were initially being treated with antidepressants. When someone is profoundly depressed, they are typically unable to muster up the motivation to commit violence against themselves or others. But as their depression reduces, they regain some motivation and may act on the violent impulses that they already have. That period when they are still depressed but not at the bottom of their depression is the most dangerous. He said SSRIs don’t take normal but depressed people and make them suicidal or homicidal.

People always want to find simple answers to complex problems. A lot of folks want to find one thing to point to and say ”this caused that person to kill people”. Blaming violence on SSRIs is looking for a convenient scapegoat — the problem is a lot more complex than that and wasn’t caused by SSRIs.
 
beaker said:
threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @Inversionism on Thread Reader App

@Inversionism: While the MSM gaslights you about there not being a connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shooters, they're not telling you that in 2004, the FDA was forced to put a black box warning on...…
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
Click to expand...
“Within the expanded “warnings” section, the label explains “unusual changes in behavior” further, adding“ anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”

Oh! Is that all??
 
The "hard" science is rather squishy, unfortunately.


These guys clearly don't know what guns are...

US-based mass shooters were more likely to have legal histories, use recreational drugs or misuse alcohol, or have histories of non-psychotic psychiatric or neurologic symptoms.US-based mass shooters with symptoms of any psychiatric or neurologic illness more frequently used semi-or fully-automatic firearms.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The myth of school shooters and psychotropic medications - PubMed

There has been an assertion in certain parts of the media, especially social media, that the majority of individuals who have engaged in a school shooting were prescribed psychotropic medications prior to the event. To determine if there is any validity to this assertion, the authors of this...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

These guys use a poor source...

"There has been an assertion in certain parts of the media, especially social media, that the majority of individuals who have engaged in a school shooting were prescribed psychotropic medications prior to the event. To determine if there is any validity to this assertion, the authors of this article reviewed publicly available information regarding individuals involved in "educational shootings" per FBI publications for active shooters from 2000 to 2017. Sources of information included news reports with official citations, official reports regarding events, available court records, and FBI Freedom of Information Act requests. Secondary data-points were also collected, such as location, number of weapons used, number of victims, legal outcome, and whether the shooter committed suicide. From the information obtained, it appears that most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications - and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found."

www.rand.org

Mass Shootings in the United States

There is no standard definition of what constitutes a mass shooting. Media outlets, academic researchers, and law enforcement agencies frequently use different definitions when discussing mass shootings, leading to different assessments of the frequency with which mass shootings occur and about...
www.rand.org www.rand.org

These guys are on to something...

"The rare nature of mass shootings creates challenges for accurately identifying salient predictors of risk and limits statistical power for detecting which policies may be effective in reducing mass shooting incidence or lethality."
 
safetyfirst2125 said:
“Within the expanded “warnings” section, the label explains “unusual changes in behavior” further, adding“ anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”

Oh! Is that all??
Click to expand...
pharmaceutical-journal.com

Antidepressant prescribing increases by 35% in six years

The number of antidepressants prescribed in England rose by 5.1% in 2021/2022 compared with the previous year — the sixth annual increase in a row. The latest increase means that the number of antidepressant items prescribed over the past six years has increased by 34.8%, from 61.9 million items...
pharmaceutical-journal.com pharmaceutical-journal.com

With ~70 million on antidepressants, there's a lot more to it...

"The latest increase means that the number of antidepressant items prescribed over the past six years has increased by 34.8%, from 61.9 million items in 2015/2016 to 83.4 million items in 2021/2022.
 
One thing to be careful of is seeing correlation and assuming it is causation. On the first day of statistics 101 we are taught that correlation is not causation. For example, nearly everyone who dies drank water — that is an almost perfect correlation. Did drinking water kill them? In 99.9% of deaths, drinking water was not the cause of death.

When it comes to suicide, were most people who committed suicide depressed before committing suicide? Most likely yes. What is the front line treatment for people who are depressed? SSRIs. So I suspect that a high percentage of people who committed suicide were on SSRIs. Did the SSRI cause them to commit suicide? Probably not, but you can see the likely correlation between SSRI use and suicide.

I think there is likely to be a similar correlation between mass shooters and SSRIs. People don’t decide to commit mass murder because they are happy. They are likely profoundly unhappy, depressed, and mentally ill. What’s the frontline treatment for someone who is profoundly depressed? SSRIs. So I suspect that a high percentage of spree killers were on SSRIs. Did the SSRI cause them to commit mass murder? I think that is highly unlikely.
 
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All I can say is if the guy in the next lane at the range began exhibiting anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, or mania….

I’d be OUTTA there.
 
safetyfirst2125 said:
All I can say is if the guy in the next lane at the range began exhibiting anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, or mania….

I’d be OUTTA there.
Click to expand...
There are tens of millions of people in the US on SSRIs. The rate of those extreme side effects is very low.
 
When I was living in a group home there was a huge black 16 year old girl who was on ssris and somehow managed to get her hands on some kind of nose candy and she went into a violent rage. It took a lot of cops to get her out of the house and into an ambulance.

This girl had caused problems for everyone before. A violent sociopath. So she had the predisposition for involuntary rage, was on ssris, was under huge stress being locked up, and on top of that managed to ride a rainbow into space. No idea how she got the dope, always suspected it was one of the "counselors".
 
M1911 said:
I discussed this issue with a psychiatrist several years back
Click to expand...
a family we know - a 47yr old father offed himself in the forest, left a note - when wife was with 2 kids in mexico. after he went off those very meds.
so, yeah, it is quite there. those damn guns, darn them.

once chemicals f#ck up the brain, it seems to be quite a thing, so, well, good doctors would never lose their income.
 
M1911 said:
I think there is likely to be a similar correlation between mass shooters and SSRIs. People don’t decide to commit mass murder because they are happy. They are likely profoundly unhappy, depressed, and mentally ill. What’s the frontline treatment for someone who is profoundly depressed? SSRIs. So I suspect that a high percentage of spree killers were on SSRIs. Did the SSRI cause them to commit mass murder? I think that is highly unlikely.
Click to expand...

This. Depressed people harm themselves and sometimes others. Depressed people also take SSRIs.
 
paul73 said:
a family we know - a 47yr old father offed himself in the forest, left a note - when wife was with 2 kids in mexico. after he went off those very meds.
so, yeah, it is quite there. those damn guns, darn them.

once chemicals f#ck up the brain, it seems to be quite a thing, so, well, good doctors would never lose their income.
Click to expand...
You are blaming the SSRIs. Do you know the diagnosis that he was given? How mentally ill was he? Do you know whether he was following doctor’s orders when he discontinued the SSRIs? Did he taper off them as directed? Or did he stop them cold turkey? Was he suicidal before this event?

A lot of folks who are depressed for many years are very good at hiding it. He might have looked fine but was profoundly depressed and chose the moment when his family was gone to commit suicide. I think your assumption that he would have been fine without the SSRIs may be incorrect.

SSRIs have lots of issues — I think the largest one is that they often don’t work for many people. There may be better ways to treat depression than SSRIs but behavioral change is hard.
 
M1911 said:
You are blaming the SSRIs. Do you know the diagnosis that he was given? How mentally ill was he? Do you know whether he was following doctor’s orders when he discontinued the SSRIs? Did he taper off them as directed? Or did he stop them cold turkey? Was he suicidal before this event?

A lot of folks who are depressed for many years are very good at hiding it. He might have looked fine but was profoundly depressed and chose the moment when his family was gone to commit suicide. I think your assumption that he would have been fine without the SSRIs may be incorrect.

SSRIs have lots of issues — I think the largest one is that they often don’t work for many people. There may be better ways to treat depression than SSRIs but behavioral change is hard.
Click to expand...
difficult to tell, presumably there were some unopened boxes that were supposed to be used up, but, it is not a topic to discuss about, and information is limited.
 
beaker said:
threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @Inversionism on Thread Reader App

@Inversionism: While the MSM gaslights you about there not being a connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shooters, they're not telling you that in 2004, the FDA was forced to put a black box warning on...…
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
Click to expand...
So maybe there is a connection- but one would wonder:

Do anti depressants push you to be so depressed in some cases you go kill a bunch of people before yourself.

Or

Are some people so depressed that they're willing go kill themselves and take other people who have made them miserable taking anti depressants?

This is like milk in prison:

Does excess milk intake make for felons, or do felons drink a lot of milk?

The answer is felons drink a lot of milk, the reasoning is pretty sound- it's healthy and good for bones and muscle growth and working out is one of the few things you can do in prison.
 
safetyfirst2125 said:
“Within the expanded “warnings” section, the label explains “unusual changes in behavior” further, adding“ anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”

Oh! Is that all??
Click to expand...
Big Pharma's attorneys told them to insert that verbiage to cover themselves legally.
 
SavageShooter said:
Big Pharma's attorneys told them to insert that verbiage to cover themselves legally.
Click to expand...
Black box warnings on medications are warnings ordered by the FDA. Pharma doesn’t choose to place a black box warning on a medication nor are they allowed to choose the wording of that warning. They place a black box warning on the medication because they were ordered to do so by the FDA and that order from the FDA included the required wording.
 
I think the bigger issue is untreated mental illness. Unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where we see drugs as the cure-all. But in many cases, yet small in number relative to the population, people need more than drugs and occasional therapy. They need to be placed in a long-term program, monitored, etc. The societal will and funding to do this is gone. SSRIs are a class of drugs but each products has different impacts on different people. Psychiatry is a "throw it at the wall and hope it sticks" profession. It's as much of an art form as it is a science to get someone on the right medication, with the right dosage, and for the right duration.
 
Dangerous line of thinking, OP. I dated a girl for years who was on Zoloft and never once did I feel threatened she would cap me with one of my guns in my sleep or take one of my guns to go on a spree. This kind of talk will just add to the anti's goal of expanding the red flag auto-disqualifiers for gun possession. If being treated for depression means your gun rights are permanently gone, we are all f00kd.
 
michaelpelosillc said:
I think the bigger issue is untreated mental illness. Unfortunately, we've gotten to the point where we see drugs as the cure-all. But in many cases, yet small in number relative to the population, people need more than drugs and occasional therapy. They need to be placed in a long-term program, monitored, etc. The societal will and funding to do this is gone. SSRIs are a class of drugs but each products has different impacts on different people. Psychiatry is a "throw it at the wall and hope it sticks" profession. It's as much of an art form as it is a science to get someone on the right medication, with the right dosage, and for the right duration.
Click to expand...
This.

We used to have large, state-run mental hospitals across the US. Before the 1970s, people who were mentally ill were involuntarily hospitalized. The good part of this is that they were no longer a threat to society. The bad part of this is that there were cases of terrible abuse. There were sane people involuntarily hospitalized. There were patients who were sexually or physically abused. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did a terrible disservice by painting the staff as evil and the patients as harmless, which is something that the mental health advocates have bought into. Then the mental health profession and pharma oversold the effectiveness of psychoactive medication.

Those large hospitals were closed with the promise that they would be replaced with community-base facilities that would provide better treatment. Those community-based facilities were, of course, never built. So we ended up with much fewer mental health beds for inpatient treatment. Court action has made it almost impossible to involuntarily hospitalize someone.

The result is that when someone is in a mental health crisis, at best they are involuntarily hospitalized for a few days for “evaluation“. Over the course of 72 hours, the doctors diagnose them as having a health insurance deficiency, prescribe a psychoactive medication, give them a follow up appointment, and discharge them. The patient doesn’t return for the follow up, doesn’t take the medication, lather, rinse, and repeat.

I don’t know what the answer is other than to say that our current lack of a working mental health treatment system is profoundly broken.
 
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safetyfirst2125 said:
Safe and effective. Per the FDA.

Got it.
Click to expand...
It's like any medication. It isn't 100% effective. In fact, any individual SSRI works probably less than 1/2 the time, which is why a psychiatrist will typically try several on a patient before finding one that works. And like any medication, it has risks.

So you can trust people with decades of training and experience, who have read the peer reviewed journal articles and reviewed the risks. Or you can trust some anonymous untrained individuals on the web.
 

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