Anti-Depressants Often Found But Not Reported in Shootings

Are psychiatric drugs ticking time bombs that explode in mass murder?

Why did twenty year old Adam Lanza open fire on a helpless kindergarten class last week, killing twenty kids and six adults? Why has America been forced to endure a steady stream of such incidents over the past twenty years, from Columbine to Tucson, to Virginia Tech to Aurora?

While the corporate media continues to explore certain answers to this question while avoiding others, many believe the real explanation begins with the sad experience of a certain Mrs. Kinkel in June of 1996. While on vacation in Costa Rica that year, she could often be heard bragging that, “The Prozac is working,” referring to the antidepressant her teenage son Kip had been put on by psychiatrists.

Sometime later, a fifteen year old Kip used a 9mm Glock and a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle to murder both his parents, before killing two and wounding twenty-four others at nearby Thurston High School.

In fact, the link between the epidemic of mass murders over the past twenty years in the US and the widespread prescribing of antidepressants coinciding with this phenomenon has been widely written about. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and Congressman Dennis Kucinich have both been pioneers in bringing the issue to the attention of the public.

A study done by Cardiff University in Wales concluded that, “… school shootings are almost always carried out by children who are taking antidepressants. We know that (these drugs) cause children to disconnect from reality. When you combine this with a propensity for violence, you create a dangerous recipe for school shootings and other adolescent violence.”

So why haven't we heard anything about these issues during the mainstream media's wall-to-wall coverage of the Newtown tragedy?

Some think this may have to do with the pharmaceutical industry's propensity for non-stop TV advertising campaigns, spending between $2.4 billion and $3.1 billion annually in the last five years. Since our multi-million dollar check from Big Pharma has apparently been lost in the mail, we are free to tell you the truth...The only problem is where to start.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Cho Seung Hui, who shot and killed thirty-two fellow students at Virginia Tech, was on antidepressants at the time of his killing spree. New River Community Services on the campus kept re-filling his prescriptions over and over again.

James Holmes, the Batman shooter, who murdered twelve and wounded thirty-eight in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater earlier this year was being treated by a team of psychiatrists for a condition called “dysphoric mania.” Holmes was known to be on antidepressants, though we don't know which ones.

Before he started off on his deadly killing spree, Holmes mailed burnt currency to his University of Colorado psychiatrist.
The medical records of the Columbine murderers are still sealed to this day.

As for Lanza, we know he had been diagnosed with a “personality disorder,” a psychiatric term, the use of which makes it virtually certain that he was being treated by a psychiatrist. Treatment by a psychiatrist almost always includes being prescribed antidepressants and/or other psychiatric drugs.

In any case, the drug industry kingpins have been less successful at covering up the antidepressant use of less well-known mass murderers.

For example, when twenty-seven year old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five and wounded twenty-one in a Northern Illinois University auditorium, his girlfriend told reporters he had been taking Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien. When twenty-two year-old culinary student Matti Saari killed nine students and teachers in Finland, he was taking an SSRI and benzodiazapine.

When sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandparents and then went to school on the Red Lake, Minnesota Indian Reservation, killing seven and wounding seven more before killing himself, he was on Prozac.

Fortunately, not everyone is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric establishment, with which it works hand-in-hand.

As Huffington has written: “We need to begin to ask questions about the harmful effects of antidepressants. The lives of our children could be riding on the answers.”