Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the well-heeled crackpot helming our nation's healthcare system, holds all kinds of screwball beliefs about pharmaceuticals — but his bizarre and incoherent opposition to depression-treating selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is perhaps the most indefensible.
Since at least 2023, when Kennedy first launched his long-shot presidential campaign, the conspiracy theorist has insisted there is some sort of link between SSRIs and school shootings. That summer, the political scion told Elon Musk during a livestreamed discussion on X-formerly-Twitter that although there are no studies on the matter, "there’s a tremendous circumstantial evidence [that] SSRIs and benzos and other drugs" are causing such violent events.
Last July, as it became clear that Donald Trump was about to again become the GOP's presidential nominee, Kennedy made an even wilder suggestion: that people on psychiatric medications like SSRIs and Adderall should be sent to taxpayer-funded "wellness farms" — which sound a lot like labor camps — to dry out.
Fast-forward to February 2025, when Kennedy, after being sworn in as Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, vowed to investigate that illusory link between antidepressants and school shootings — which has, contrary to his claim that there's no research on the topic, been all but disproven since 2019, when a study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Law journal found that most school shooters had no known history of taking psychiatric meds, and those who did showed "no direct or causal association" between the drugs and their acts of violence.
In the wake of yet another violent and senseless tragedy — this one at a Catholic church in Minneapolis, where a mass shooter murdered two children during their first week of school and injured 17 other people — the brainwormed health secretary is once again touting his nonsensical theory about SSRIs.
"We're 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," Kennedy told Fox News.
As if responding to this tragedy — which the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety marks at at least the 57th school shooting in 2025 alone — with a wild goose chase weren't insulting enough, it appears that vice president JD Vance might be cosigning it.
"We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America," the millennial VP said during a Wisconsin event after the Minnesota shooting, per NBC. "We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence."
While Vance's statement wasn't a direct endorsement of Kennedy's SSRI obsession, it certainly seems related. Conveniently, the VP's allusion to medication being a potential "root cause" of such violence also serves as a compelling distraction for the GOP electorate, which choose to elect pro-gun candidates and ignore how those policies lead to mass shootings, instead chasing strawmen every time another of these tragedies occurs.
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