Robert F. Kennedy: It Looks Like Almost Every Mass Shooter Is On SSRI Drugs and NIH will not study that because it will offend the pharmaceutical industry.”

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[–]Zapped 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Is it the drugs or is it that people who do mass shooters (minus the gang-bangers) have a history of mental illness and therefore have been prescribed SSRI's?

[–]MuskyIndependent 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Tagging u/Phooey so he'll see when RFK Jr copies my next hot take: there's really no such thing as mental illness as we understand it. It's all a hardware problem and/or a natural response to the environment. They're all natural responses really, because the alternative would be some unnatural response. Accepting that undesirable behaviors are still totally natural for people is a step in the right direction to providing a way for these people to function in society, or at least not have society victimized by the extreme cases. I.e. the crazy subway dudes are never going to be normal. There isn't an illness to cure, that's just how they are.

Also, viruses play a larger role I suspect than is currently accepted in causing alterations to our brains that result in the so-called mental illnesses.

Anyways, so some people are just more likely to be capable of these things, their temperament predisposes them, but normally there's a check on that sort of behavior through empathy -- these terms are imprecise btw, and the SSRIs dampen that emotional balance. They numb you.

So some small amount of people, to whom getting a high body count before being checking out of life is appealing, find themselves on drugs that take away the last reason for not actually doing it.

Anti-depressants are a failed class of medication.

[–]StillLessons 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

there's really no such thing as mental illness as we understand it.

A very interesting statement, but difficult to analyze because of exactly the lack of precision you are pointing out: "as we understand it". "Mental illness" is a free-for-all term. I myself have been using it far too freely in my comments recently in just this fuzzy way that your comment is correctly skewering.

What I see in our society is the "educated" class throwing themselves headfirst - and hard - against the wall of reality on a range of issues. Their ideals are turning out not to be in alignment with human behavior, but rather than adjust their ideals accordingly, they double, triple, quadruple down on the mandates to conform to concepts that manifestly don't work. This is causing, no surprise, tremendous stress, especially among the younger generations, as they try to wrap their heads around the fact that everything they are being taught is "right" cannot actually happen because people are not who they think we are. They seek relief from this stress through medication, because that's also what their teaching is telling them: mental distress is caused by their own wiring; it cannot be that their ideals are wrong, so they must have something wrong with them. The chemical alteration then makes things even worse.

The "mental illness" crisis that so many are talking about (including, I am embarrassed to admit, me) is actually a behavioral culture crisis being amplified by poorly understood and utilized psychoactive medications. It doesn't help that the medical profession is one of the most profoundly affected communities when it comes to this mismatch of ideals versus the reality of human behavior.

Thanks for a great comment.

[–]Alphix 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Wow, if we could give awards, I'd give you all of them. Your insight is so bright and strong, I think I'm going blind.