How antidepressants affect the brain and make people more likely to kill

‘Thinking back to all the different mass shooting cases we’ve covered over the years, you may have noticed that there almost always seems to be one common denominator: the use of psychotropic medications by the perpetrators. Brain-altering antidepressant drugs are so often linked to cases of extreme violence these days that these drug-induced stupors, if you will, have been officially pathologized under the name “akathisia.”
In Greek, the term literally means “inability to sit,” and is a neuropsychiatric syndrome characterized by “subjective and objective psychomotor restlessness,” according to Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen, M.D., a Fellow of Psychosomatic Medicine at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Put simply, akathisia is an unusually altered state of mind that, in some extreme cases, can cause an individual to become preoccupied with thoughts of violence, whether against himself or someone else.’
Read more: How antidepressants affect the brain and make people more likely to kill