As US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has drawn a lot of attention for promoting pseudoscience and disproven theories, especially on vaccines. He is using that playbook on another major public health issue: gun violence, which remains the leading cause of death for kids in America. When it comes to school shootings and other mass shootings, here’s what RFK Jr. wants you to believe: It’s not the guns, he argues, it’s the pills.
The fringe theory that antidepressants can cause people to turn violent has been around for decades, focused primarily on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are the most common class of these drugs. But extensive research by mental health and violence prevention experts has found no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass shootings.
The generalized claim that SSRIs can make people violent—and that they supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—traces in part to an unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of Scientology and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory.
Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”
I swear these people are so hellbent on doing the exact opposite of what’s good for people that it feels like they actually know what’s right and are just choosing the opposite.
Sure, let’s get rid of all the antidepressants, stimulants for people with ADHD, send the autistic people to the camps, take lifesaving treatments away from children, etc. How can you be this fucking stupid?
I like the Project Looking glass conspiracy theory that many of the billionaires were able to use it to see in the future and found that there was an unavoidable global peoples revolution that starts in 2027 that they couldn’t change no matter what they tried to do. So now they are super nihilistic and trying to fuck shit up as much as possible before that happens.
Although other versions of this theory use a nuclear apocalypse… So that’s not as much fun.
When you are looking for rationalizations to reduce the population, getting rid of the mentally ill is an easier sale than many. So let’s not do anything to get in the way of that MAGA policy from the office of Stephen “PeeWee Himmler” Miller.
I swear these people are so hellbent on doing the exact opposite of what’s good for people that it feels like they actually know what’s right and are just choosing the opposite.
I think that comes part-in-parcel with being a reactionary.
Without medications the world would have to face the reality that being alive in a corrupt, capitalistic hellscape is the root cause of nearly every ailment of the mind. Ironically these meds are prescribed at insane numbers and are one of the largest profit pulls for big pharma.
Both pooty and p2025 want this, although for different reasons. Both have told you this, and both have published the plans for how to do it. How do you not know this ?
How do you not know this ?
Possibly an unending tsunami of billionaire-funded propaganda that reaches every citizen of the modern world almost 24 hours a day?
Srs, a shit ton of people who have specifically been shown this do not “know” about it. It’s the result of failing to understand and regulate media for 60 years.
It’s not stupidity. The people behind Project 2025 are competent. All of this is intentional.
Antidepressants are fake medicine though, they don’t work better than a placebo, 1% better, or subsequent trials that showed marginally better outcomes, surely pushed their by the researchers they pay to pass the trials.
The placebo effect is real, so it will help the people that experience that. But the drugs themselves don’t help.
Stimulant ADD drugs are a godsend for those that can get them. The puritans are trying to strangle the supply off, and only those with good insurance can really get it now in my state, you need to visit a psychiatrist for every refill, every month, an insurmountable obstacle paying out of pocket, bad insurance won’t hire any professionals that will write those scripts. If they give you lists in their network that would prescribe it, the lists are probably wrong. Medicaid is a joke for instance.
lol. Okay I’ll bite. So, hypothetically, antidepressants are no better than a placebo; I’ve been on almost every class of them over the last 5 years, trying to find a good fit. SSRIs, SNRIs, Tricyclics, MAOIs, SMS/MSAs.
Some (Tricyclics) worked extremely well, but they caused liver issues, so I had to quit them. Others, like MAOIs caused immediate and life threatening reactions in the form of bradycardia and hypertension.
I’m finally settled on a class that works well and doesn’t cause horrible side effects (SMS). There is no way in hell a placebo could have put my body through the hell I’ve experienced trialling all of these drugs.
Antidepressants are fake medicine though, they don’t work better than a placebo
This is patently false. Placebos work, medicine demonstrably works better.
The original claims that antidepressants don’t work better than placebos was originally reported on 24 years ago after some analysis said they were equally effective, however the trials used to measure these outcomes weren’t at all designed to mimic how antidepressants are actually used.
For example, you wouldn’t judge a cancer treatment by how well it reduced a tumor in 1 week of taking the medicine, if the medicine is meant to be taken for 6 months, would you? Nor would you judge a drug’s ability to eliminate cancer if it doesn’t work for one patient, and doctor’s recommend a different drug that does end up working, but the drug still works for others?
That’s what these reviews did.
Unlike how actual antidepressants are prescribed (many people have no success with their first antidepressants, switch to others later on that do work better), these studies just gave participants the one, in isolation, without the ability to switch to the new drug from another one that didn’t work. This means that participants were statistically likely to have the highest possible chance of that drug not working first try, whereas in the real world, drugs like that would be prescribed to people as an alternative, or a second attempt, where it is known to be more likely to be effective.
On top of that, they were only measured for a limited period. As previously mentioned, you wouldn’t judge a cancer treatment over a fraction of its intended use cycle, so why would you do that with antidepressants? The drug trials only measured usage at a single dose, for a set period of time, without long-term follow-ups.
Studies done even just a few years afterwards demonstrated actual correlations between antidepressants and placebos far different from the picture being painted, showing that antidepressants have an effect larger than placebos, (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19588448/) and even more recent analyses of broader swaths of scientific studies on the topic still shows them to be more effective than placebo. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-024-02044-5)
You say that, but those were double blind clinical trials.
It is pretty safe to presume these drugs are virtually worthless, that the companies pulling BILLIONS a year now from this perverted follow up studies to get it approved. The fda is led by former drug company officials and let the research firms stroke the follow up studies through.
1 percent better than placebo in double blind trials run by the firms they hired if anything is slanted to favour the drugs. Trusting their follow up, and excuses, is beyond ignorant of the way things are these decades.
You say that, but those were double blind clinical trials.
Yes. They were trials done to one of the highest standards we have for assessing the outcomes of drugs. Double blind studies help to prevent the biases you seem to think that type of study causes. Do you know how these studies even work or why we do them?
The fda is led by former drug company officials and let the research firms stroke the follow up studies through.
The FDA does not control if these papers get published or not, as PubMed has nothing to do with the FDA, and the FDA has no say in how follow-up studies are done on patients using already-approved drugs on the market.
1 percent better than placebo
Did you not even look at the resources I sent? Here’s the core piece I think you really need to actually pay attention to:
Pooled estimates of efficacy data showed an RR of 1.24, 95% CI 1.11-1.38 in favour of TCAs against placebo. For SSRIs this was 1.28, 95% CI 1.15 to 1.43.
The
1.24and1.28are the relative risk ratios for treatment with meds, vs placebo. Essentially 1.24 means 24%, 1.28 means 28%. Those percentages being… the likelihood the treatment would treat the underlying symptoms, relative to a placebo.24% and 28% are not 1%.
run by the firms they hired
The companies making these drugs did not hire these researchers. The closest thing they have to influence on their research is funding a conference-focused group that does outreach and education for researchers, which in turn derives only a portion of its funding from one drug manufacturer. (which you would know if you looked at the paper itself and read the clearly visible conflict of interest statement that all good researchers publish with their papers)
I don’t know about you, but if I’m a large group of independent researchers, I’m not going to collectively entirely fabricate fourteen studies over many years, fabricate the analysis in a metanalysis of those works, then publish it with my name attached… because I get to attend a conference for free sometimes and get pitched medical tools???
This isn’t justifiable criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, this is just anti pharmaceutical industry sentiment packaged in whatever words sound bad enough to you regardless of what is observably in reality. I have my problems with the pharmaceutical industry too, but that doesn’t mean I go around saying “all drugs are fake and you should just inject liquefied cilantro” or something crazy like that, since just because something is bad doesn’t mean that every possible bad thing that could be done, is being done.
Lies? On the Internet?! Surely you have better things to do than go online and tell lies.
How would you know? Another gifted individual that knows everything without ever having to learn it no doubt. How fortunate. But it’s not only reported on, it’s an ongoing controversy for a long time. A long time. So I don’t know if I can call your bullshit lies, you could believe your assumptions are true.
You made a pretty bold claim that’s shockingly easy to find academic research on. A meta-analysis involving 116,000 cases found that antidepressants work better than placebo in every case. Well outside of a 1% improvement.
You’re not just wrong, you’re as wrong as you can be while still forming coherent sentences.
It would have been less energy for you to put my comment in a search engine to find that Common Knowledge. Look it up , or don’t. I don’t care if a person that claims to know things they don’t admits they were wrong or as is always the case, doesn’t.
You’re suggesting that instead of looking for academic sources on the effectiveness of antidepressants, I copy paste your comment in to Google?
My guy. You’re an idiot.
RFK Jr is the dumbest fuck out of every dumbfuck who has ever live.
There is some really stiff competition in this administration though.
Hopfully some of the competition gets stiff all over really soon.
It’s not his fault, his mother didn’t know the dangers of Tylenol
Tbh there’s more than a few Kennedy men who seem to be a few bricks short of a load.
Taking antidepressants have caused me to be less angry about things. Worm brain can fuck off.
if you are worried about mass shootings you remove the guns
anything else is dancing the keltec boogie woogie
Keltec do like making weird firearms and I’m all for it.
I love my bullpup shotty.
_ Best we can do is bring back measles_
It’s always the most moronic things coming out of the US. Millions and millions of people are on anti-depressants, that means millions and millions of people should be dead by mass shootings. The problem isn’t these lies, it’s that a lot are too gullible.
Generations of kids going to schools which were designed to create quiet, obedient factory workers combined with a strong fascist, capitalist propaganda machine will do that.
No no no, it cannot be the fault of society that most people need drugs to deal with life.
Huh, my prescription bottle never came with a firearm, am I missing out?
Gotta move to Texas man. It’s a state law that all new prescriptions come with a gun and each refill comes with a box of bullets.
You’re paying all that money and not getting any ammo at all?
You need the Pharmacy Club card.
Let’s TAKE AWAY people’s Antidepressants and REPLACE Them with Guns and Stress!
-REALLY SMART Republicans!
Fascism causes mass shootings. So does conservative religion, whether Christian or Muslim.
I think access to guns is the cause
Brainworm McGee’s brainworm talking more dementia nonsense, as usual.
The thing you have to realize about antidepressants, they don’t work.
They beat a placebo by 1%, and you can be sure researchers doing the trial for the company pulled it there for them, and any subsequent trials.
Now placebo effects are real, for some people it actually even releases the body’s endogenous drugs if you think you got the drugs. The Power of Nothing, an article in the New Yorker over ten years back told of studies showing different color placebos were more effective for different conditions, but also that when recipients got a placebo opiate painkiller, and double blindly gave the naloxone, that antagonist, it reversed the effect. Rather proving they tricked their body to release it’s own endorphines.
So it will help some people to get those anti-depressants, not because of them though. I don’t know what rfk is talking about and he’s constitutionally full of shit, a manipulator of people for personal benefit. But anti depressants are fake medicine.
But anti depressants are fake medicine.
As you are a fake human being.
