So you don’t believe him. I’m possibly with you there given his history.
But if it’s true it’s worth exploring, no?
Well, it's a pretty in-depth area, and I suspect there's a lot more invective around than fact.
I think it goes without saying that anyone who is willing to take a weapon and kill a large number of other people in these circumstances probably has something wrong with their thinking. It's not a huge leap on from there to surmise that some of those people may have sought treatment, and ended up on medication for their problem. There are many arguments to be had as to the efficacy of those medications, and there is a long history of "Prozac made me do it"-type claims, most of which are impossible to directly evidence.
There is some evidence to suggest that suicide risk, in particular, is somewhat increased after people commence on antidepressant medications, and that has been seized upon by the usual, ah, "special interest groups" as evidence that these drugs have murderous potential, but the likeliest reason is that people often find their motivation levels rise after commencing on ADs, quite often before their mood begins to lift...so you now have the combination of improved motivation and low mood - which would explain the potential increase in suicide attempts. Although it is possible that the picture is far more complex than that, especially given the role of things like placebo effect in medications of this type.
One thing that is definitely less than desirable is the reliance on medication alone. NICE guidelines in the UK recommend a combination of antidepressant treatment and talking therapies, but most GPs don't have access to the latter, and that's that - sadly, most patients on an AD prescription in the UK aren't really monitored or reviewed routinely unless they happen to have a particularly proactive and psych-aware GP.
However, squirrelp's ramblings are irrelevant to all of this. He's rushed off to Google and typed in "prove to me everyone who shot up a school was on psych meds" and grabbed the first link he saw which, probably without even reading it, he's posted up here.
As others have pointed out, the list includes people who weren't, as far as we know, on any kind of medication. And the list, which appears to be quite selective and from a group whose interest is in claiming a link between psychiatric medication and shootings, doesn't really tell us anything about causal factors. As others have pointed out, why does it have to be the medications that were responsible for the shootings - maybe it was the psychiatric condition the meds had been prescribed to treat? Or (more likely) the underlying social background and pathology of the people who committed the shootings.
But, for me, the real issue is that this looks very much like a continuation of the lazy tendency to "other" people with mental health conditions, and squirrelp, in trying to make this point, is using a cheap - but also extremely costly - trick to make his point.
We are fucking appalling at looking after people with mental health problems. We have reduced treatment almost to the absurd - we bung them some pills and tell them to get on with it, and we reserve the more involved interventions only for after-the-fact situations where they've been scaring the horses. Try and get an admission to an acute mental health ward because you fear that you are going to make an attempt on your own life, and you'll be lucky to be admitted; hell, if your subsequent suicide attempt isn't credible
enough you'll probably be sent home.
Meanwhile, the press continue to monster anyone with a "scary" mental health condition, and completely ignore the 99+% of those suffering in silence, with the result that the popular perception of mental illness is still the "loony psycho", optionally with weapons, who's going to kill us all in our beds. And idiots like squirrelp both swallow, and contribute to, this picture.
