ABLECHILD: Kennedy’s Summit Flips the Script – Congress Demanded Apology, Now Faces Calls for SSRI Hearings on Violence

In light of the recent mental health summit in which the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, announced initiatives to reduce overprescribing of psychiatric drugs, AbleChild couldn’t resist a second look at the 2025 letter to the HHS Secretary from 26 Members of Congress “demanding” Kennedy rescind several statements about mental health.

Specifically, the Congressional Press Release suggests Kennedy’s statements “stigmatize mental health treatment” and “include misinformation such as falsely linking Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI’s) to school shootings…”  The Release further explains that Kennedy’s “statements about certain mental health medications aren’t just unhelpful but dangerous.”

First, AbleChild would suggest that rather than apologize for making a connection between antidepressants and mass violence, the Secretary should immediately set up a commission to review the numerous instances of mass violence perpetrated by too many on psychiatric medications.

For instance, in 1989 Joseph Wesbecker shot twenty coworkers, killing eight of them before killing himself. Wesbecker had been on Prozac for a month prior to the shooting. Andrea Yates, a 36-year-old mother and registered nurse drowned her five children while on a cocktail of Haldol, Cogentin, Effexor and Wellbutrin. Then there is 16-year-old Jeff Weise from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota, who shot his grandfather and girlfriend then killed 7 people at Red Lake High School before committing suicide. Weise had been on Prozac. And, finally, it is important to remember James Holmes, the Aurora Colorado theatre shooter who killed 12 and injured 70 while on Zoloft.

Of course, these are just a few of the numerous mass shootings that have occurred while the perpetrators were taking the very “medications” the Congressmen and women are so eager to protect. But it actually is more than that. AbleChild would suggest that these Members of Congress should consider what is known and not known about the psychiatric “medications” they so desperately want to protect.

For instance, the Members of Congress may find it interesting that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not have a clue how exactly any of the prescribed psychiatric drugs “work” as “treatment” for any psychiatric diagnosis.

Further, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) uses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which was created by literally voting by a show of hands for each of the diagnoses in the book. There is no science to support any abnormality in the brain that is any psychiatric diagnosis. Worse, the long reporter “chemical imbalance” was thoroughly debunked in 2022 by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff who made it clear in her peer-reviewed study that the “chemical imbalance, “specifically low serotonin, is a myth not supported by scientific evidence.”

Even the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Thomas Insel, had the integrity to admit that he had spent 13 years at NIMH “really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders…and I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” Yes, Insel spent an admitted $20 billion that Congress appropriated and got nothing in return except, according to Insel “lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs.”

Now let’s consider the nuts and bolts of the psychiatric drug “medications,” antidepressants, that Congress is so emotionally attached and how the HHS Secretary’s concerns about violence associated with the “treatments” is worthy of serious consideration.

Let’s review the possible side effects associated with Prozac, the first SSRI antidepressant. Anxiety, confusion, difficulty with concentration, mood or behavior changes, amnesia, hyperkinesia, sensory disturbances, depression, dyskinesia, memory impairment, abnormal dreams, agitation, emotional lability, hostility, hypomania, mania, personality disorder, thinking abnormal, depersonalization, paranoid reaction, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and behavior and suicide attempt to name a few.

In fact, all of the SSRI antidepressants carry similar possible adverse events and the FDA black box warning for suicidality. This is the most serious warning the FDA produces before pulling drugs from the market. Certainly, these lawmakers must be aware that with the increase in prescribing antidepressants comes an increase in suicides among the nation’s youth. And let’s not be confused about suicide as it is very much a violent act.

Certainly, these Members of Congress crying for apologies from the HHS Secretary for his concerns about violence being connected to psychiatric medications must acknowledge that the mental health crisis is getting worse. In fact, every year the number of Americans being diagnosed with a mental illness and prescribed mind-altering drugs as “treatment” is increasing. The fact that nobody is getting better is clear based on the yearly increase in psychiatric drug prescriptions.

And, at the end of the day, Congress must take some responsibility for the mental health crisis as it is the nation’s federal lawmakers who opened the mental health flood gates by enacting the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which allows mental illness to be covered at parity with medical and surgical care. It, apparently, never occurred to Congress that there is no way to diagnose a mental abnormality like a doctor would diagnose cancer. You know X-rays, CAT scans, urine tests, etc. There also is no measurable brain abnormality that is any psychiatric diagnosis, making mental health diagnosing grossly open to fraud.  Is it any wonder, also, that mental health conditions account for roughly 60% of all Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients under the age of 65.

AbleChild would remind these Members of Congress that a Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, awaits trial for the murder of her three children.  Lindsay, suffering from postpartum depression, was prescribed 13 mind-altering drugs (several of which were antidepressants) by two psychiatrists in a three-month period.

AbleChild wonders whether these 26 Members of Congress question a link between psychiatric drugs and violence in this case. Lindsay was happily married, a registered nurse and, by all accounts, a loving mother. Lindsay never had a violent moment in her life until she was prescribed these drugs.

Secretary Kennedy is right to question if there is a connection between violence and psychiatric drugs.