Another mass shooting.....

[paulpablo]

I just watched a documentary about James Holmes and the SSRI drugs he was taking.

I think it's difficult to tell if they do result in the kind of behavior that results in seemingly senseless killing, as in it's difficult to tell if correlation equals causation.  I imagine the kind of person to do a shooting in the first place would be the kind of person to be depressed and be given those pills.

It may sound weird but I'd love to try the drug to see what it does for myself.  The columbine killers were on the same drugs and I think a few others were but can't remember off the top of my head which ones.

Given the relative rarity of such events and the ubiquity of SSRI prescriptions, establishing causation seems like a fools errand.  Some mentally ill people commit acts of violence, many mentally ill people take psychiatric medication.  If there's a causal relationship, it appears to me it's the mental illness, not the medication.

In the panorama documentary I watched there were some professionals in the field of psychology who believed that if Holmes hadn't taken that medication he wouldn't have killed, also Holmes himself wrote in his diaries about what the drugs were doing, saying things along the lines of he now has no fear of consequences, no anxiety, and so on.

That doesn't mean it would have the same result on everyone who takes it, just when certain people take it.  But this is just me paraphrasing a documentary I saw.