Researchers Agree with Secretary Kennedy's Call to Study Antidepressant Links to Violence

Citing a pharma-funded nonprofit, Senator Tina Smith spreads false information about the benefits of psychotropic medications, placing America's children at risk.

7 minute read

During Robert F. Kennedy’s confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senator Tina Smith asked if antidepressants cause school shootings. Kennedy responded that the issue “should be studied along with other potential culprits.” Senator Smith then cited selective studies as well as her own personal experience with these drugs to promote antidepressant use.

“I am grateful for that therapy,” Senator Smith said. “I am grateful for that experience and I think everyone should have access to that care and your job as Secretary is to expand access to care not to spread lies and misinformation.”

All of us should be grateful if Senator Smith herself would stop spreading lies and misinformation about the known links between antidepressants and violence, facts which anyone can find by reading the scientific literature and the FDA-approved labels for these medicines. As the former head of psychological assessment services at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters, in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, I have long been concerned about the dangers of psychotropic drugs (antidepressants, stimulants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers). Like Secretary Kennedy, I welcome more research in this area.

Two decades ago, the pharmaceutical industry influenced the shutdown of medical studies I was conducting at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Those studies showed that children in some areas of America, most especially in Hampton Roads, were being medicated with psychotropics at rates many times higher than leading pharma-funded experts claimed. And the outcomes for children on these prescriptions were not favorable. For conducting and reporting on this research, I was characterized as an anti-medication zealot and accused of scientific misconduct. I am not anti-medication and I have never engaged in scientific misconduct. And I remain alarmed that the media feeds the public a poor diet of unreliable information that downplays these drugs’ harms.

Both Mother Jones and USA Today have published false information that ignored the documented dangers of antidepressants to attack Kennedy’s testimony. Mother Jones reporter Keira Butler misled readers, writing that Secretary Kennedy made “baseless claims” that antidepressants cause violence. Meanwhile, USA Today’s Alyssa Goldberg falsely reported that antidepressants have “anti-violence properties.”

Poor journalism is compounded by misleading claims from academic experts such as Georgetown professor Adriane Fugh-Berman. She leads PharmedOut, an advocacy group with a record for exposing the influence of pharmaceutical industry marketing on the practice of medicine. But in a recent editorial, Fugh-Berman wrote that any link between school shootings and antidepressant use is “absurd.” Yet, Secretary Kennedy only said the matter should be studied.

In my experience, the pre-emptive dismissal of a possible connection between antidepressants and violence seems uncharacteristic of PharmedOut’s leader, staff, and those who attend the group’s conferences. Fugh-Berman invited me to speak at the 2023 PharmedOut conference and emailed me praise for my presentation.

Parents can watch my talk online which covered the overprescription of psychotropics in children. While some might find parts of my talk controversial, be forewarned that the FDA placed Black Box Warnings on all antidepressants two decades ago, in 2004. These are the agency’s strongest warnings, short of pulling a product from the market, and these labels note risk of suicidal thoughts, hostility, and agitation in children, teens and young adults.

Here’s some of the side effects found on those FDA labels:

Prozac: irritability, hostility, aggressiveness

Effexor: aggression and violent behavior

Celexa: aggressive reaction, depersonalization, hallucination, paranoid reaction.

Shortly after FDA mandated these warning labels, scientists called for more research in 2006, just like Kennedy has. They also said that study results should be made public and used to create “good descriptions of the adverse outcomes of treatment.” Otherwise, courts will continue to encounter violence linked to psychotropic drug use, forcing judges to demand access to hidden data.

“The problem is international and calls for an international response,” researchers wrote.

In January 2023, a six-year old shot and seriously injured his first grade teacher at Richneck Elementary, a public school in Hampton Roads, Virginia, the same area where I practiced and conducted research for over a decade. This was the third gun violence incident in the school district within 17 months. The following month, police were called to another public elementary school in Hampton Roads, Little Creek School, because another six-year-old had brought a gun to school. Due to their young age, the students were not criminally charged but their parents were charged and convicted.

While parents are increasingly held to account for gun violence committed by their children, the established connection between psychotropics and violence has repeatedly been downplayed or dismissed.

Compared to the rest of the country, in the 1990s and 2000s, Hampton Roads medicated a much greater portion of children for ADHD, and the region medicated them at younger ages and with more drugs. Combining multiple types of psychotropics to treat ADHD was still rare, but 28% of the region’s ADHD-medicated elementary school students were already on two or more psychotropics — most often stimulants such as Adderall and antidepressants such as Prozac.

Nobody has studied the safety and efficacy of such drug combinations.

According to a special grand jury report, the Richneck shooter was started on ADHD medication with input from school personnel. The previous school year he had been “reckless, physically aggressive, used profanity toward the teachers and even choked another student.” Yet the school failed to afford the child the benefit of standard nondrug interventions, including a functional behavioral assessment, a behavioral intervention plan, an individualized educational plan, consideration for placement in an alternative school, or placement in a classroom for emotionally disturbed students.

Furthermore, the grand jury found that these nondrug interventions “may have better addressed the child’s behavioral issues.”

When it comes to medicating kids with multiple psychotropics—what is known as polypharmacy—Hampton Roads is no longer our nation’s outlier. Today, 40% of ADHD-medicated American youths are on untested and unsafe psychotropic drug cocktails, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Pediatrics. Yet, compared to adults, children experience more adverse reactions to psychotropics and more severe reactions occur with psychotropic polypharmacy.

Violence is an uncommon response to prescribed stimulants, but stimulant-induced aggression does occur, and it can lead to violence. The FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) data are telling. For one of the most popular ADHD medications (Adderall) during the years 1992 through 2024, adverse events that involved “aggression,” “increased irritability” and “exacerbation of the condition” comprised 45% of the 2,316 voluntarily submitted reports. These numbers lowball the magnitude of the problem because they concern only one of the many prescribe stimulants and the FDA estimates that FAERS reports capture as few as 1% of actual adverse events.

Moreover, these reports tells us nothing about risks associated with stimulants prescribed in combination with antidepressants.

Violence is an underreported and understudied adverse drug reaction because it involves other people, not just patients. Yet, research has linked violence toward others with 11 different antidepressants. Among healthy volunteers, antidepressants double the risk of violence and suicide. Why would people be afraid of more research?

Right after Kennedy’s confirmation, Trump released an executive order that calls for an assessment of the prevalence and threat posed by antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and stimulants. This triggered Senator Smith to send a letter on March 20 to Secretary Kennedy. In her letter, Senator Smith alleges, “For individuals living with moderate or severe depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or other conditions, medication can relieve symptoms so they can function normally and have improved quality of life.”

Senator Smith’s citation for this claim is a statement posted on the website of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI.)

The New York Times exposed NAMI in 2009 for its “lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.” According to Senate investigators and documents obtained by The New York Times, drug makers from 2006 to 2008 contributed nearly $23 million to NAMI, about three-quarters of the nonprofit’s donations.

Secretary Kennedy is wise to question the rise in psychotropic prescribing and school shootings. Eli Lilly already has paid an estimated $50 million across 300 lawsuits linked to Prozac-related homicides, suicides, and suicide attempts. The published research and FDA warnings make clear that their use is linked to violence. So why would any scientist or elected official oppose further scientific investigation, especially given our country’s ever-rising reliance on these medicines?

Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson of Virginia Beach is a clinical psychologist, academic affiliate of the University of South Carolina, and member of the Southern Network of Adverse Event Reporting (SONAR). Learn more about her at her website.