Medication-Induced Violence Lawsuits

Advocating for Victims of Dangerous Psychiatric Medications and Other Drugs

Mass shootings, particularly school shootings, have tragically become a topic of everyday conversation in America – and invariably, people ask why the shooter was motivated to commit these crimes. Over the years, media reports have started to focus on one factor that has been associated with dozens of mass shootings in America: Psychiatric medication use.

Our nationwide firm is currently investigating the relationship between certain prescription drugs and medication-induced violence. We would like to hear from anyone who has been injured, or whose loved ones have been killed or injured, at school shootings or other mass shootings involving psychiatric medications.

Since the late 1980s, our Los Angeles-based team at Wisner Baum has litigated personal injury, wrongful death, and consumer fraud cases against major pharmaceutical companies. We believe an investigation into the link between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings is an essential step toward understanding the escalating violence we are witnessing in America.

You may contact our attorneys by filling out our contact form or by calling us at (855) 948-5098.

Psychiatric Medications and Violence

There is no question that many people use psychiatric medications, or give them to their children, and find them helpful. It is also true that children and adults experience extremely debilitating psychological states and need help.

There are two very good reasons to examine the issue of medication-induced violence:

• First, a growing body of research has already shown that certain psychiatric drugs can make people psychotic, aggressive, suicidal and even homicidal. These are proven drug reactions, not symptoms of a mental illness. Unlike symptoms of a disorder, these reactions often disappear when the drug is withdrawn, or the dose lowered, and reappear when the drug is resumed.
  • In healthy volunteer studies, where patients taking the drugs have no psychiatric disorder, volunteers frequently experience drug-induced reactions, ranging from suicidal thinking and aggressive thoughts, to episodes of violence. A third line of evidence comes from research on medications that affect the brain in ways similar to psychiatric drugs, but are prescribed for non-psychiatric disorders. They often create the symptoms of psychiatric disorders in people whose mental health is not in question.
  • These destabilizing effects are caused by several different classes of medications, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, opioids, sedatives, and drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
• Secondly, a great many school or mass shooters were taking or withdrawing from psychiatric medications at the time of their assaults. In other cases, the shooters had a long history of taking these medications, and appeared to worsen over time, but it is unclear whether they were under the direct influence of the drugs when they committed their crimes. The privacy of medical records is often a key barrier to uncovering the role psychiatric drugs played in the violence.

Both of these factors — the ability of psychiatric medications to induce violence and the fact that so many perpetrators of mass shootings took these drugs—demand that we investigate the possibility that these events were influenced by prescription medications.

Which Medications Can Induce Violence?

According to the non-profit parent rights organization AbleChild, there were nearly 15,000 reports to the FDA’s MedWatch system on violent psychiatric drug side effects between 2004 and 2012. This included “more than fifteen hundred cases of homicidal ideation and homicide, 3,287 cases of mania and more than eight thousand cases of aggression.”

So far, these destabilizing effects have been linked to many different classes of medications, including:

• Antidepressants (both SSRI and SNRI)
• Antipsychotics
• Opioids
• Sedatives
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs

ADHD Medication and Violence