I completely understand that take. However...for me, it's the increase in these types of crimes in the past couple decades that might poopoo that theory. Back in the 70s how many of these school mass shootings did we have? If memory serves me, zilch. It was the increase in the use of these drugs that accompanied this maniacal behavior... Yet, we've always had mentally ill people.

Product monographs for almost every antidepressant to reach the market now carry "black box" warnings to the effect that one of the potential "side effects" is suicidal or homicidal ideation in people who have not had such thoughts before. This "side effect" may occur in up to 3% of those taking the drug.

Also rarely mentioned is that newer antidepressant are de facto addictive and have a "discontinuation syndrome" which can last over a year. In some cases, discontinuation or even a reduction in dosages, can lead to psychotic and at times violent behavior in people who have not exhibited it before.

The first thing I learned in graduate school was that people taking antidepressants typically are more likely to commit suicide or exhibit violent behavior just as they begin to feel better. Generally, depression leads to feelings of powerlessness, as well as lack of energy or motivation. Hence, while the condition has not yet been fully alleviated, the patient then has sufficient energy to harm self or others.

As to medications used to treat psychotic conditions--well, if properly diagnosed, such persons were psychotic, after all, which may cause some to be more prone to such behavior.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? While I do believe that almost all of these killers were taking the drugs, I haven't yet seen enough evidence that says the drugs caused this behavior, or if the behavior was natural to begin with and the drugs were just along for the ride.

Another issue may come up on drug use that will tie to the VA. It seems that the VA likes to use drugs to resolve many problems. Like you said, an after effect of "death", who would take that? I refused such a drug even before I read about the death part, I refused at the part about sexual dysfunction. Who needs that?

This is a key question and demonstrates why the linked "analysis" is invalid.

The approach linked looks at a subset of the population taking the drugs in question. This is now how to determine the effectiveness or the dangers of said drugs. In order to do that you have to look at the entire population and look for patterns.

While the report is a few years old, it shows enough to demonstrate the problem: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/...

According to this about 10% of Americans 12 and older are on this class of drugs. If these drugs were the cause, mass shootings would be common, not rare. Even if 99% of users were not medicated into mass shootings it would still mean hundreds of thousands of people were.

Another issue with the OP's article is it says one thing but ignores it in it's listing. One person shooting one other person is not a mass shooting. Approximately two-thirds of their "list" are not mass shooting, and around half of those were suicides without inflicting violence on others.

It is a characteristic of all extremely rare random events that they do not have predictable causes. There is no "silver bullet", if you'll pardon the phrase, to preventing these mass shooting incidents. Looking at what they have in common is fine, provided you then follow that up with applying the proper reasoning to what you think is the cause. Correlation is not causality.

After all, they all had water in the previous 72 hours as well.

That is a healthy theory. Have you heard of the problems with merely taking NSAIDS? Scary. I filled a prescription once in my life. It was after tooth extraction and I never used the drugs. I shudder to think how many drugs other items take to make up the high average.

We don't know which way the causal vectors go. Maybe people took psychotropic meds and they didn't work or didn't work well enough. Probably most people who present at a clinic with a serious illness attempted to treat it with OTC pain relievers first.

Focusing on mass shootings is focusing on the wrong problem. They're very rare. Most shootings involve one or two victims. Even if laws geared toward stopping mass shootings were effective, it would be a small change in the overall number of shootings.