Ever since Robert F Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be President Donald Trump’s Secretary of HHS (Department of Health & Human Services), Mr. Kennedy’s past views on a number of health-related issues have been met with justifiable skepticism.
On several of these issues, Mr. Kennedy may be wrong. But on one important health-related subject, RFK Jr. has been consistently right: the potential link between SSRI antidepressants and mass school shootings.
Two recent widely viewed public discussions on this fraught subject are worth noting.
The first example occurred on January 30, 2025, at RFK Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearing, during which Mr. Kennedy was subjected to a grilling on this subject by Senator Tina Smith (D Minnesota).
SENATOR SMITH: In an interview in 2023 and 2024, you blamed school shootings on antidepressants. You said—and this is a quote: “There is no time in American history—or human history—that kids are going to shoot schools… and shooting their classmates. It really started happening coterminous with the introduction of these drugs… With Prozac and with other drugs.”
So, do you believe that as you’ve said, that antidepressants cause shootings? This should be a simple question [to answer].
RFK JR: I don’t think anybody can answer that question, and I didn’t answer that question… I said that it should be studied… because there’s no science on that, Senator.
SENATOR SMITH: There is, Mr. Kennedy. Science shows that there is no link between school shootings and antidepressants. In fact, most school shooters were not even treated and with those that were, there was no evidence of association…
RFK JR: I don’t think you can say… that, Senator. Because of HIPAA rules, nobody knows.
A second public dialogue on RFK Jr.’s assertions about antidepressants occurred on November 14, 2024, during CNN’s OutFront show. Host Erin Burnett began the discussion by playing for her audience an audio clip of RFK Jr. saying the following:
KENNEDY: Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost no—none of these events in our country, and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a school room of children or strangers and start shooting people.
“All right, there’s no evidence of that,” Ms. Burnett told her audience. “Study after study has not found a link between antidepressants and school shootings.”
Ms. Burnett then turned to CNN’s resident medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, to get his reaction to what RFK Jr. had said.
GUPTA: The problem is the second part of what you were talking about, there’s so many things that he contorts to his version of the truth. He takes these little—these little correlations and turns them into true causations—the antidepressants and the school shootings for example.
Prozac came out in 1987. School shootings have been happening since the ’60s, number one. Number two, I don’t know how many of these children that we’re talking about were on Prozac—[how many of] these school shooters or whoever they were, were actually on this [antidepressants].
I share Erin Burnett and Dr. Gupta’s skepticism about Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s veracity on a number of health-related subjects. However, on the specific subject of SSRI antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, and their link to school (and other) shootings, RFK Jr. has a point. Indeed, there are numerous documented cases that show a link between SSRIs and school violence. Following are just three examples.
In the aftermath of the horrific 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting, medical records revealed that Eric Harris was taking the SSRI antidepressant Luvox at the time of the killings. Prior to that, he had been prescribed Zoloft. One of Dylan Klebold’s friends later recalled that he had witnessed Dylan taking Paxil and Zoloft. Dylan Klebold’s medical records remain sealed.
On March 21, 2005, 16-year-old Jeffrey Weise went on a killing spree at two different places on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Weise first shot and killed his grandfather, an Ojibwe tribal police sergeant, and then his grandfather’s girlfriend at their home. After taking his grandfather’s police weapons and bulletproof vest, Weise then drove his grandfather’s police vehicle to Red Lake Senior High School, where he had been a student some months before.
Weise shot and killed seven people at the school and wounded at least nine others. The dead included an unarmed security guard at the entrance of the school, a teacher, and five students. After the police arrived, Weise exchanged gunfire with them. After being wounded, he shot and killed himself in a classroom. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in the United States since the Columbine High School massacre. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in Minnesota history.
According to one source, Weise’s doctor had recently increased his dosage of Prozac to 60 milligrams/day. His aunts said they were concerned about the increase in his dosage.
On November 7, 2007, eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen of Tuusula, Finland, armed with a .22 caliber pistol, walked into Jokela High School where he was a senior and proceeded to shoot dead the headmistress, the school nurse, and six fellow students. He then shot himself in the head.
Auvinen’s friends later told authorities that they perceived him to be “a normal student who was pretty happy.” But at age seventeen, Auvinen started taking antidepressants, and in the months leading up to the massacre, his friends noticed changes to his behavior.
Members of the U.K. parliament were shocked and outraged by what they had learned about the Jokela High School mass shooting, and on November 13, 2007, the following motion was put forth with eighteen MPs as signatories:
“That this House is horrified at the recent increase in school shootings; is puzzled that the English language media failed to mention that in the Finnish tragedies, Mr. Pekka-Eric Auvinen said that he ‘ate SSRI anti-depressants’ which, he said, made him feel ‘aggressive’; notes that the perpetrators of 28 other school shootings, including at Columbine and in Minnesota, were also on anti-depressants; notes that anti-depressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been proved to both sweep away self-regulating internal inhibitions while triggering explosive acts of violence and murderous behaviour; and calls for a study of the links between SSRI use and almost all school shootings and a rethink on the wisdom of the mass prescribing of anti-depressants to young people.”
Finally, the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting by Adam Peter Lanza bolsters RFK Jr’s assertion that HIPAA is part of the problem. In the aftermath of Lanza’s merciless massacre of twenty defenseless children and six school employees, Able Child, a non-profit organization for parents, caregivers, and children’s rights, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of Lanza’s medical records.
At a hearing, Patrick B. Kwanashie, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Connecticut, argued against the request, claiming that the release of such information could “cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications.”
So how could so many otherwise well-informed people be so misinformed on this important subject? I believe that I know the answer.
For decades, pharmaceutical behemoths like Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline—the makers of Prozac and Paxil, respectively—have successfully suppressed mountains of clinical trial data that establish a link between SSRI antidepressants and suicidal and homicidal ideations and, in rare cases, murder and mayhem. And early on, the FDA was duplicitous in burying these negative clinical trial results.
It is high time that more politicians, journalists, health officials, physicians, psychiatrists, and patients were made aware of this potentially lifesaving information.