David Carmichael
During my SSRI Around-America Tour, which started on April 18, 2026 in Houston, Texas and is evolving without an end date, I will be delivering the 40-minute presentation How SSRI Antidepressants Cause Suicide, Homicide and Mass Shootings in communities throughout the United States, which includes me providing first-hand insight into how someone having an SSRI-induced psychotic episode can plan, appear normal and then calmly commit homicide, and how this is connected to mass shootings; a connection I described in this 2018 Mad in America blog post.
The presentation validates the (nonpartisan) need to study the connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shootings as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated in this short video clip before he was challenged by Senator Tina Smith at a confirmation hearing as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services on January 29, 2025 when she said that “the science shows that there is no link between school shootings and antidepressants.”
Senator Smith is wrong. Several of the side effects of the SSRI Paxil listed on this slide in my presentation, which are similar with all SSRI antidepressants, could be causal factors in mass shootings.
Most of the presentations I have delivered have been in support of people who have committed homicide shortly after starting or withdrawing from an SSRI antidepressant to help them (before their criminal trial starts), and their family and friends, understand how this catastrophic tragedy could have happened while they were being treated by a psychiatrist or doctor.
Contact me if you would like me to deliver the presentation in your community.
Insight into my homicidal psychotic episode
In this 9-minute opening segment of a 60-minute podcast interview in March 2025 with Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist and former medical officer in the psychiatry division at the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the United States, I provide insight into the homicidal psychotic episode I had in July 2004 shortly after starting the SSRI Paxil when I planned, appeared normal and then calmly took the life of my 11-year-old son, Ian, on July 31 in London, Canada.
Connection Between SSRI Antidepressants and Mass Shootings Needs to be Studied
For decades, there has been a need to study the connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shootings. In this 2-minute video, psychiatrist Peter Breggin and trial lawyer Andy Vickery talk about SSRI antidepressants, violence and a 1989 mass shooting involving Prozac, where Eli Lilly secretly paid the victims $20 million to exonerate the drug. And ever since, there has been little public discussion about the possible connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shootings.
SSRI antidepressants can cause mass shootings. It is not a conspiracy theory or myth, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been accused of peddling, including in this August 2025 article after a school shooting in Minnesota when he announced that the National Institutes of Health was “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.” He explains why in this 54-second video.
One of the likely reasons why the connection between SSRI antidepressants and mass shootings has rarely been discussed publicly and never studied in the United States is the powerful influence that pharmaceutical company paid lobbyists have in Washington, DC, which Vermont senator Bernie Sanders talks about in this 30-second clip from a 2023 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.