Bob Unruh wrote in an Aug. 28 WorldNetDaily article:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced that there will be launched new studies into the effects of some anti-depressant drugs, and their use by those who turn out to be killers.
The announcement comes in the aftermath of this week’s mass shooting at a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis that left two dead and more than a dozen more injured.
[…]The shooting attack this week, by a transgender individual, a man who claimed to identify as a woman, came “two years after another trans-involved shooting spree in Nashville,” the report said. There was no immediate confirmation on any medications taken by the Minneapolis shooter.
“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 on there have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation.”
Since Unruh is a propagandist, not an actual reporter, Unruh censored the other side of the story, which is that the vast majority of actual medical professionals believe that antidepressants are almost entirely safe and do not influence massacres.
Having fearmongered about transgender people, Unruh then moved to baselessly pushing a link between antidepressants and violence:
It was in a column posted on WND that commentator Barbara Simpson, several years ago, commented on the shooting by Nikolas Cruz at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 were killed.
She wrote, “We were told Nikolas was on medication. What medication? Who prescribed it? Was he being supervised? Was he under the influence at the time of the crimes? Is this important? Consider that almost all mass murders over the last years have involved the killers being on prescribed SSRI antidepressants – drugs we know can cause murderous violence in the patient. Drug companies pay out millions in lawsuits from such instances.”
And she cited the research by David Kupelian of WND who found connections between drugs and killers:
As we pointed out at the time, Kupelian is simply fearmongering and indulging in the correlation-equals-causation fallacy.
Speaking of whom, Kupelian wrote a Sept. 4 column endorsing Kennedy’s fearmongering:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced that his agency would be “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [antidepressant] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.”
The announcement came one day after the Aug. 27 mass shooting of children in a Minneapolis Catholic School. Kennedy specifically said HHS would investigate whether drugs taken by transgender mass-shooter Robin Westman played a role in his church attack, during which Westman murdered 2 children and wounded 18 other people, 15 of them children.
Immediately, the establishment media went into high gear defending both the controversial drugs and transgenders with headlines like this from MSNBC: “RFK Jr. is propagating a dangerous myth about mental health treatment and violence.” And the Washington Post led its coverage with, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that psychiatric drugs may have played a role in the Minnesota Catholic school shooting – a statement widely criticized as unsupported by science.” Likewise, Google’s search AI is entirely dismissive of RFK Jr.’s commitment to research the obvious link, denigrating the HHS secretary as a conspiracist and skeptic, whose “decision to launch the investigation has drawn sharp criticism. Opponents argue he is using a tragedy to promote disinformation and attack a vulnerable population.”
In reality: 1) Individuals identifying as transgender very commonly are prescribed antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs due to high levels of anxiety and depression stemming from their “gender dysphoria”; and 2) Putting people on a regimen of powerful cross-sex hormones in a vain attempt to change their gender – something that is scientifically impossible – is well known to create havoc in both body and mind.
Kupelian went on to claim that “there is a shocking and near-total correlation between psychiatric medications – particularly so-called SSRI and SNRI antidepressants – and America’s most infamous and gruesome mass shooters in recent decades.” Note that he doesn’t assert or prove causation. He then cited one of his favorite go-to examples:
Andrea Yates, in one of the most horrifying and heartbreaking crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child:
“What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.
Yates had been taking the SNRI antidepressant Effexor. (SNRIs, short for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are similar to SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, in that both chemically elevate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain). In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her five children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (since acquired by Pfizer) quietly added “homicidal ideation” – that is, murderous thoughts and feelings – to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.”
As we detailed way back in 2010, when Kupelian first glommed onto this example, Yates and her husband were in thrall to fundamentalist Christian preacher Michael Woroniecki, who demanded that women be subservient to their husbands and attacked mothers who were purportedly too permissive. In service to Woroniecki, the Yates family sold all its possessions and lived in a bus, and Andrea believed his teaching that it was better to kill oneself than to mislead a child in the way of Jesus. Kupelian always leaves out that part of Yates’ story, which is a much more likely explanation for what happened.
Another one of Kupelian’s examples:
John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.
But Valium is not an antidepressant, which blows a hole in his conspiracy theory.
Kupelian is just happy that RFK Jr. has chosen to feed his conspiracy theories, even though they have been repeatedly discredited. That makes his WND a propaganda mill, not a “news” organization.