Source: MidwesternDoctor.com
Story at a Glance:
•SSRI antidepressants have a variety of horrendous side effects. These include sometimes causing the individual to become agitated, feeling they can’t be in their skin, turning psychotic, and occasionally becoming violently psychotic.
•During these psychoses, individuals can have out of body experiences where they commit lethal violence either to themselves or others.
•As lawsuits later showed, this violent behavior (and the frequent suicides that followed it) were observed throughout the SSRI clinical trials, but were covered up by the SSRI manufacturers and then the drug regulators (e.g., the FDA).
•Once the SSRIs entered the market, there has been a wave of SSRI suicides and unspeakable acts of violence.
•Sadly, the idea that SSRIs could cause any of this has always been viewed as a “conspiracy theory” or “mistaking correlation with causation” because very few are aware of the extensive evidence linking SSRIs to violent and psychotic behavior—despite it now being on the warning label of those drugs.
Most holistic doctors consider Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) anti-depressants to be one of most harmful mass-prescribed drugs on the market (it typically makes their top 5). However unlike the other drugs, which are just unsafe and ineffective, SSRIs also have a fairly unique problem—they can kill people who are not even taking the drugs.
Note: other common contenders for that list are Statins, NSAIDs (e.g., ibuprofen), and acid reflux medications (proton pump inhibitors like prilosec). The harms and irrationality of those drugs are discussed here, here and here.
What follows is a revised and updated article summarizing the extreme dangers of those drugs I was requested by a few readers to write in light of recent tragic events.
Since SSRIs first entered the market, many have noticed the unusual correlation between their consumption and completely out of character violently psychotic behavior, such as extremely disturbing homicides or suicides being committed by the individual. As the years have gone by, more and more evidence has accumulated (e.g., through lawsuits against the drug companies) that SSRIs cause psychotic violence, and in parallel, as the usage of these drugs has spiked, more and more grisly killings have occurred.
Note: a minority of people who take SSRIs greatly benefit from them (particularly those who have deficient methylation), while others (particularly those who have excessive methylation or deficient liver metabolism of SSRIs) tend to have the worst reactions (e.g., violent psychosis). While this is relatively easy to screen for, because there is a general unwillingness to acknowledge that SSRIs could be dangerous, almost no one in the medical field assess for this prior to starting the drugs or changing their dosages. That subject is discussed further here.
As you might imagine, there are many taboo areas in medicine (e.g., suggesting that vaccines can cause neurological damage to children). However, out of all of them, I’ve found by far the most hostility is directed towards anyone who insinuates mass shootings may be linked to SSRIs (e.g., I got in quite a bit of professional trouble for doing this in the past).
One of the first articles I wrote on Substack (on 5-27-22) was about this topic. It went viral and since then I’ve noticed there has gradually been more and more people who have been willing to speak out on it. I attribute this to the current political climate (the Trump presidency and the vaccine mandates has made conservatives much more willing to question both big media and big Pharma) being one where this message wanted to be heard and other conservative commentators seeing a large audience for it existed .
Two months later (on 7-25-22), Tucker Carlson aired what I believe to be the first segment I’ve seen in the mainstream media discussing this taboo topic:
Note: I edited out the political commentary from this segment. The full version of it can be viewed here.
Since that time, other prominent conservatives have spoken out on this issue (e.g., Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene). Conversely, the horror of the “far-right hysteria against SSRIs” has become a talking point of the left (e.g., see this Huffington Post piece and this Slate piece)—something I suspect is due to the high rates of psychiatric medication usage in the modern left and big Pharma buying out the Democratic party during Obama’s presidency.
Fortunately, those attacks did not work, and the violent risks of SSRI’s have gradually become more acceptable to talk about (e.g., RFK Jr. has mentioned them during his presidential campaign and not backed down when challenged on the point).
In turn, each time a mass shooting happens, the same script is repeated (we need to ban all guns and have more mental health care [i.e. psyche meds] for everyone). Fortunately, this script is losing its appeal and SSRIs are more and more frequently being mentioned each time a mass shooting happens.
Recently Matt Walsh also did a segment on this topic, which like Tucker’s segment was seen by millions of people.
Note: the full version of this episode can be viewed here.
Having watched this dynamic play out for decades, it’s hard for me to put into words how monumental of a change this newfound awareness of the dangers of SSRIs is. The only comparable example I can think of are many people now being open to considering the dangers of childhood vaccination—something which has taken a century to bring into the public awareness (e.g., my friends who gave everything they had to speak out in the 1980s and 1990s on vaccine safety were almost completely alone and cannot believe just how much the public’s receptivity to this message has changed in the last few years).
One of the most common arguments used to dismiss the link between SSRIs and psychotic violence is that people who are mentally ill are more likely to be on psyche meds, so the “correlation” between psyche meds and psychotic violence is simply a product of pre-existing mental illness and would have happened independently of the psyche med.
However, while claiming “correlation is not causation” makes it possible to refute this link while sounding intelligent in the process, there are a few major problems with this argument.
First, there is a lot of evidence tying SSRI usage to these events, including clinical trial data that was hidden from the public. Since that evidence was not covered in Tucker or Walsh’s presentation, it will be the focus of this article.
Second, there is a black-box warning on the SSRIs for them increasing the risk of suicide, something which can only be possible if some degree of causation does in fact exist.
Third, these psychotic events are completely out of character for the individuals who commit them, and in many cases they report a very similar (and disconcerting) narrative of what they experienced prior to and during the shooting.
Note: Big Pharma,working hand in hand with the FDA fought tooth and nail for decades to prevent a warning from ever being added to the SSRIs. I believe this is in part due to how much money is made off of these drugs (presently their sales make approximately 40 billion dollars a year).
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have a similar primary mechanism of action to cocaine. SSRIs block the reuptake of Serotonin, SNRIs, also commonly prescribed block the reuptake of Serotonin and Norepinephrine (henceforth “SSRI refers to both SSRI and SNRI), and Cocaine blocks the reuptake of Serotonin, Norepinephrine, and Dopamine. SSRIs (and SNRIs) were originally used as anti-depressants, then gradually had their use marketed into other areas and along the way have amassed a massive body count.
Once the first SSRI entered the market in 1988, Prozac quickly distinguished itself as a particularly dangerous medication and after nine years, the FDA had received 39,000 adverse event reports for Prozac, a number far greater than for any other drug. This included hundreds of suicides, atrocious violent crimes, hostility and aggression, psychosis, confusion, distorted thinking, convulsions, amnesia, brain-zaps, a feeling that your brain longer works right, and sexual dysfunction (long-term or permanent sexual dysfunction is one of the most commonly reported side effects from anti-depressants, which is ironic given that the medication is supposed to make you less, not more depressed).
Note: I and many colleagues also believe the widespread adoption of psychotropic drugs has significantly distorted the cognition of the demographics of the country that frequently utilize them (which to some extent stratifies by political orientation), which in turn has created a wide range of detrimental shifts in our society.
SSRI homicides are common, and a website exists that has compiled thousands upon thousands of documented occurrences. As far as I know (there are most likely a few exceptions), in all cases where a mass school shooting has happened, and it was possible to know the medical history of the shooter, the shooter was taking a psychiatric medication that was known for causing these behavioral changes. After each mass shooting, memes illustrating this topic typically circulate online (often citing many of the same individuals in the picture in the previous section).
However, as mentioned above, the idea that “SSRIs cause mass shootings” is treated with widespread ridicule and animosity in a manner not that different from how anyone who claimed the “COVID vaccines were NOT safe and effective” was treated in 2020. For instance, the argument to debunk both was always “correlation is not causation” (e.g., the young healthy lady who had a fatal heart attack immediately after a vaccine might have had that happen anyways), and when data to support this contention is presented, it is always ignored by the other side.
Since there are many serious issues with psychiatric medications, to avoid being too long, this article will exclusively focus on their tendency to cause horrific violent crimes, something which was known long before they entered the market by both the drug companies and the FDA.
Note: A significant portion of this article came from the book Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Peter C. Gøtzsche (which builds upon the critical work Peter Breggin did to expose this issue). For those of you interested in learning more about this topic, I would strongly advise reading that book, as I can only scratch the surface of the issues with these medications within this brief article.
Lastly, for anyone who reads this article is presently taking an SSRI or SNRI, it is critically important to NOT suddenly stop taking them. These addictive drugs produce very strong (and longlasting) withdrawal symptoms that many of my readers have shared. More importantly, there are many cases of catastrophic events (e.g., a suicide or mass murder) that followed the abrupt discontinuation of an SSRI. If this is something you choose to do, you need to gradually taper down the dosage (sometimes to the point you use sandpaper to slowly shrink a pill) with a professional who has experience in this area.
However, since doctors who help can you safely withdraw from an SSRI are difficult to find, we put together a guide on the (incredibly unfair) withdrawal process which can be viewed in the second half of this article….