RFK Jr.’s Call to Investigate SSRIs, Adolescents, and Mass Shootings

By Frances Scott, The Kennedy Beacon

“The National Institutes of Health should … do real studies on [school shootings], and they won’t, because they don’t want to offend the big shots, video game companies, the cell phone companies, telecommunication industry or the pharmaceutical industry.” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Of all the atrocities we’ve lived through and grieved, mass school shootings committed by kids themselves are especially horrific. Being aware that it likely will happen again feeds our collective fear. As our minds race, our gut tells us this is no way to live.

The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 wasn’t the first in America, but it’s the first I think about when someone mentions school shootings.

 

Columbine High School Shooting 

I’d just started my career in TV news. I was cutting through the engineering room on my way to the studio when an image on one of the screens caught my attention. A lanky high school student in a white t-shirt and dark pants flopped out of a window like a rag doll. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Later, we learned the boy’s name, Patrick Ireland. Though shot three times, he survived. 

A coworker behind me said, “A shooting … at a high school.” Others gathered around, watching video sent by satellite. 

“They’re shooting the kids,” a voice behind me said. None of us imagined the shooters were kids themselves – seventeen and eighteen.

We watched on, in horrified silence, as students ran for their lives. I started feeling sick.

Soon, speculation began about the causes and solutions.

“There are just too many guns.”

“Guns are for the military, not average Joes.”

“It’s the bullying.”

“It’s the first-person-shooter video games.”

We also wondered about depression, mental illness, abuse, neglect, poor parenting, divorce, drug use, violent video games, and unrequited love. We understood we’d probably never know why it happened.

Nine days after the shooting, CNN reported that one of the shooters was on Luvox, an antidepressant in the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) category, and I took note. SSRIs had been on the market for about a decade by then. 

Disclosures: I’ve Taken SSRIs Myself

At the time, I did not suspect that any FDA-approved drug could cause serious problems. I had taken SSRIs myself.

In graduate school in the mid-1990s, after diagnosing me with an eating disorder and anxiety, a school doctor prescribed an SSRI, which allegedly worked by preventing serotonin from being reabsorbed by neurons so that it stays active in the synapse. I took it a few years and felt like it had helped. Many of my friends and loved ones credit SSRIs as critical tools in fighting depression and improving the quality of their lives. Some members of my extended family struggled with anxiety, depression, and addiction or had even committed suicide, and I’d read that mental health problems were possibly hereditary. I figured being under a doctor’s care and taking the FDA-approved medicine was better than ending up like many I had known. But after that story about the Columbine shooter, I decided not to take the SSRI anymore, unaware of the dangers of abruptly stopping an SSRI medication. Fortunately, I had no side effects.

I started taking an SSRI again a decade later, when my obstetrician recommended it to prevent postpartum depression. With two-year-old twins and a third baby on the way, I felt thankful my OB had warned me I was at higher risk than most for developing PPD. 

Another doctor put me back on an SSRI years later, when I was in chronic pain due to a failed double hip replacement. But when I began to learn about the Food and Drug Administration’s lax regulations for implanted medical devices like the hips I’d been given, I began to trust the FDA and Big Pharma less. I stopped the SSRIs a final time 10 years ago. 

Are Guns the Problem?

Conversations about school shootings frequently turn into debates over gun control. Though I grew up in a region where hunting and guns were part of the culture, I’d always been terrified of guns. But as an adult, two incidents that posed a direct threat to my family and to me – a stalking and someone trying to break into our house while we were there – taught me why people want guns. During the most recent incident I called 911. The dispatcher assured me officers were dispatched, but they were 20 minutes away. At that moment, I was thankful that someone in my home owned guns (secured in a safe) and had been training regularly with them for decades. Though I never want to shoot a gun – or, like some of my friends, concealed-carry one – the nights when my family was in danger helped me understand why some people are very concerned when they feel their right to own a gun could be under threat. Sadly, talk about mass shootings tends to ignore the possible role of medications and becomes a fiery debate over gun control, which only ensures that we, as a nation, remain eternally distracted and unable to find solutions. 

Taboo Questions

The second I hear about any school shooting, probably like you, my heart leans toward the grieving people I see on TV, crying between parked cars and school buses. I can’t imagine what it would feel like, losing someone so unexpectedly like that – especially a child.

After decades of incident after incident, it’s starting to feel pointless to ask questions anymore. Our worst nightmare appears to be stuck on repeat. We are convinced it’ll happen again, a fact that feels so ridiculously wrong. 

Independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is asking the obvious question and taking flak every time he does. “Big Pharma does not want to hear about any problems with SSRIs,” he’s said, “but I will do studies immediately, when I get into office, and we’re going to get to the truth, right?”

That Kennedy would dare discuss SSRIs in the context of school shootings grabbed The New York Times’ attention. In its piece, “5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Promoted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” a reporter claims Kennedy had “endorsed the false notion that antidepressants are linked to school shootings.”

When you listen to Kennedy, especially in long-form interviews, it’s clear he’s not claiming that antidepressants have caused school shootings; he’s saying we need to look into it. The fact that suicidal and homicidal ideation and violent behavior are well-documented potential adverse side effects of SSRIs is reason enough for an objective investigation into the issue. The authors of a 2010 study of adverse events reported to the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System over a five-year period found “1527 cases of violence disproportionately reported for 31 drugs,” 11 of which were SSRIs. The risks are clear enough that suicide and other violent behaviors are listed as potential side effects on the Prozac insert. 

Iatrogenic Illness, Big Pharma, and Touching the Third Rail

We want a president brave enough to initiate third-rail discussions. Kennedy believes that the US government should have long ago sponsored large studies exploring possible links between SSRIs and mass violence. He says that once he’s elected president, he’ll make sure it’s done.

Scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process. We’re forever figuring out that we used to be wrong about some medicine or another. And what your kindergarten teacher said is true: there are no dumb questions. This holds true especially in the realm of iatrogenesis: sickness caused by medical interventions. Remember, doctors didn’t used to wash their hands between delivering babies. They used to say smoking was healthy, while suppressing studies that said otherwise, and it took 40 years for the truth about that to come to light. Doctors used to lobotomize patients. Researchers said it worked. 

A leader is someone who’s less concerned about being wrong than most of us, who instead remains true to his conscience, asking the hard questions, no matter how many scoff, point, and laugh. It’s ironic he is assailed as anti-science when he is, in fact, thoughtful and methodical in his pursuit of the truth, in much the same way a scientist or doctor works to discover ways to heal people.

As a successful environmental attorney, Kennedy spent his legal career evaluating peer-reviewed data published in scientific journals. He mastered the ability to critically examine how a study was both funded and conducted.

Few are as well versed as Kennedy in distinguishing the credible studies from those funded by industry stakeholders who have a vested interest in the promulgation and proliferation of pharmaceuticals. Over decades of litigating, proving to jurors that corporate defendants have harmed plaintiffs, Kennedy has learned that results not helpful to a pharmaceutical company’s bottom line are often terminated early, quietly shelved, or have their end points changed to produce more favorable results. As president, Kennedy will ensure that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates some of its $48 billion budget to investigating these critical issues. 

In his 2021 best-selling book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health and his 2023 best-seller The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race, Kennedy offers an explanation. Big Pharma has so heavily funded (i.e., captured) the health agencies, lawmakers, nonprofits, and journals that, in essence, the pharmaceutical industry decides which research will be funded and which won’t. Kennedy argues that Fauci served Big Pharma interests by publishing biased research while suppressing research that could have had an adverse impact on the bottom line.

Sins of Omission

There are no US laws requiring drug companies to publish everything their research seems to uncover. As a result, most never publish results that could harm their shareholders’ interests. As Eliot Marshall in Science explains, when findings unfavorable to a drug company’s bottom line arise, they are frequently managed through defunding the study, changing endpoints, and not publishing conclusions. 

A review of decades’ worth of studies of SSRI use in young patients, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2020, concluded that “many additional RCTs [randomized controlled trials] for youth depression had been conducted, but their results were not published, likely because no efficacy was found for SSRIs. In addition, RCT data (again, much of which was unpublished) were raising concerns among regulatory agencies regarding potential antidepressant-induced suicidality (suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and attempts).” 

In 2001, The BMJ (British Medical Journal) reported that GlaxoSmithKline had been found by a jury to be 80% responsible for the murder of several people and for the suicide of the killer, who had been taking the company’s SSRI, Paxil. As the authors of the Frontiers in Psychiatry paper cited above recount, research published shortly after SSRIs became widely used prompted the FDA to order a “black box” warning on all SSRI labels starting in 2005. A year later, the NIH announced that it would be funding five studies exploring the fact that the “use of SSRIs in children and adolescents has become controversial.” 

Clicking the NIH link for that NIH-funded research today, though, leads to a “404 error,” indicating that the page has been removed, renamed, or no longer exists. 

In 2012, the US Department of Justice announced the largest health care fraud settlement in history related to an SSRI. GlaxoSmithKline, it said, had failed to disclose to doctors that Paxil was not effective at reducing depression symptoms in young patients and could lead to suicidal thoughts. 

As many news agencies have done over the decades since Columbine, a BBC documentary broadcast in 2017, A Prescription for Murder?, investigated police records and court documents related to several American mass shootings and concluded that SSRIs could, in a “tiny minority,” lead to “psychosis, violence, possibly even murder.” 

A 2018 FDA safety presentation mentioning the use of Lexapro in pediatric patients who became violent while taking it includes links to FDA documents, purportedly linking SSRIs to a few cases of violent behavior, which now lead to Page Not Found messages as well.

Consider the Source

“Big Pharma does not want to hear about any problems with SSRIs, but I will do studies immediately when I get into office, and we’re going to get to the truth, right?” 

– RFK Jr. 

Nothing brings on the flak faster than a public statement critical of Big Pharma. 

When discussing mass school shootings on Bill Maher’s podcast, Kennedy said, “We’ve always had guns. When I was a kid, there were schools that I went to where we had shooting clubs, and the kids brought their rifles to school and practiced. Kids always had access to guns.” 

In 2015 in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Edmund Pigott reanalyzed decades of SSRI studies and found that most had not been conducted following strict scientific protocol, which could be construed as fraud. A 2023 systematic umbrella review of numerous SSRI studies published in Molecular Psychiatry concluded that there is “no consistent evidence … that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.” SSRIs’ supposed benefit appears to be due to a placebo effect, according to Pigott.

Moreover, a 2024 meta-analysis found that exercise is more effective at treating depression than SSRIs. Following Kennedy’s promotion of exercise as a health benefit, American Values 2024, the super PAC that funds The Kennedy Beacon, has launched the America Moves campaign to encourage people to take an active role in their health.

Kennedy is right. To get to the truth, we must allow even the most difficult questions to be asked. Something has changed over the past few decades, and we are being told not to do the responsible thing. It’s not a crazy thing to investigate potential links between widely prescribed antidepressants and violence. It’s crazy that so few studies have looked into it.

We must explore every factor that could have played a role in our nation’s most horrific tragedies.

There’s no harm in asking.

 

Frances Scott is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, a health freedom and medical device safety advocate, and co-host of The Kennedy Beacon podcast, found weekly on this platform.