This story discusses suicide. For anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide, help is available from the 988 lifeline.
A day after a shooting at a school in Minnesota, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed, as he has before, that certain antidepressant drugs, known as SSRIs, “might be contributing to violence” in such cases. Experts say there is no direct evidence linking SSRIs to mass shootings. He also falsely claimed SSRIs have black box warnings for homicidal ideation.
On Aug. 27, an assailant fired through the windows of the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing two students and injuring 21 others, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The suspect, identified as Robin Westman, was a 23-year-old former student of the school who in 2020 legally changed their name to reflect a female gender identity. Authorities have not yet identified a motive, although the Minneapolis police chief said Westman “clearly had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters.”
“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence,” Kennedy said. “You know, many of them … have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we need — we can’t exclude those as a culprit.”
“This kind of violence is very recent. It’s a new thing in human history,” he added. “There was no time in the past when people would walk into a church or a classroom and start shooting people. And it’s not really happening in other countries. It’s happening here. And we need to look at all of the potential culprits that might be contributing to that.”
