Fact check: Post falsely links antidepressant use to school shootings

Hannah Hudnall, USA TODAY
Updated ·6 min read
2

The claim: 90% of school shootings linked to antidepressants

A March 30 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) features a screenshot of a 2012 article written by conservative journalist Jerome Corsi.

"Psych meds linked to 90% of school shootings," reads the article's headline.

The body of the article says "some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade have been linked to a widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs."

The post garnered more than 1,000 likes in less than two weeks.

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Our rating: False

Researchers have not found any link between antidepressants and school shootings. Available studies suggest a minority of school shooters were prescribed medication prior to committing their crimes.

Experts found no causal link between shooters and medication

The shooter who killed three children and three staff members at a Nashville elementary school on March 27 was being treated for an emotional disorder before the attack, according to local police.

This revelation led some social media users to blame mental illness, and even medication, for school shootings.

The post shared on Instagram focuses on SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a commonly prescribed type of antidepressant used to treat depression and anxiety disorders.

But Dr. Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the lead researcher of a 2022 study on mass murders, told USA TODAY there's no evidence of a link between medication and shootings.

"SSRIs, and psych meds in general, are not responsible for mass shootings or violence in any way," Girgis said in an email. "Not only are a small minority of mass shooters ... taking therapeutic doses of these medications at the time of the mass shootings, but these psych meds have specific anti-violence properties.

"What that means is that, if a mass murderer happens to be taking a psychiatric medication, the medication was probably incidental, as is nearly all mental illness when present among mass murderers."

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Daniel Mears, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, likewise pushed back on the notion that SSRIs are linked to school shootings.

"I am unaware of any consistent, credible accounts that provide strong evidence regarding the prevalence of SSRI usage in cases involving school shootings or a causal relationship between SSRIs and school shootings," Mears said in an email.

James Densley, the co-founder of the Violence Project, which tracks mass shootings in the U.S., told USA TODAY that the small percentage of school shooters being prescribed SSRIs isn't proof of a causal link.

"All because someone was prescribed an SSRI doesn’t mean (a) they were taking it and (b) the SSRIs caused them to perpetrate their crime," he said. "This is a case of correlation, not causation, and one factor of many in the life histories of mass shooters."

Article exaggerates rate of shooters on medication

Between 2015 and 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 13.2% of American adults over 18 had taken antidepressants in the last 30 days. The percentage of school shooters who were taking antidepressants before their attack isn't much higher, according to several small studies.

The Violence Project created a Mass Shooter Database, which compiles data from all mass shootings in the U.S. since 1966. It shows only three of the 15 mass shooters who targeted a primary school had been prescribed SSRIs.

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On a broader scale, only 23% of all mass shooters in the U.S. were taking psychiatric medication before their attacks, according to a Voice of America article based on the database.

Psychologist Peter Langman, author of "School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators," discovered similar results when he studied a sample of 68 school shooters. Only eight of the 68 were using psychiatric medication at the time of their attacks.

Langman also found that many of the school shooters assumed to be taking psychiatric medication during their attacks had stopped using them before the shooting.

For example, Adam Lanza, who is heavily referenced in the article cited in the Instagram post, had only taken antidepressants for three days before quitting them five years before his attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to his medical history. His autopsy showed no drugs were found in his system at the time of his death.

A 2019 study published by the National Library of Medicine examined news reports, court records and FBI Freedom of Information Act requests and found that most school shooters weren't treated with psychotropic medication before their attacks.

"Even when they were, no direct or causal association was found," reads part of the study's abstract.

The 2022 study led by Girgis and a research team at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute examined 82 mass murders in academic settings using data from the Columbia Mass Murder Database.

"Severe mental illness – e.g., psychosis – was absent in the majority of perpetrators," reads a Columbia University analysis of the study. "When present, psychotic symptoms were more often associated with mass murders involving means other than firearms."

USA TODAY reached out to the users who shared the post for comment.

Lead Stories debunked this claim as well, and PolitiFact previously debunked a similar version of the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: No link found between antidepressants and school shootings