Prescription For Murder, BBC Panorama (2017) Could antidepressants induce suicide or mass murder?

Is it possible that a pill prescribed by your doctor can turn you into a killer? Over 40 million prescriptions for SSRI anti-depressants were handed out by doctors last year in the UK. Panorama reveals the devastating side effects on a tiny minority that can lead to psychosis, violence, possibly even murder. With exclusive access to psychiatric reports, court footage and drug company data, reporter Shelley Jofre investigates the mass killings at the 2012 midnight premiere of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado. A 24 year old PhD student James Holmes, who had no record of violence or gun ownership, murdered 12 and injured 70. Did the SSRI anti-depressant he had been prescribed play a part in the killings? Panorama has uncovered other cases of murder and extreme violence which could be linked to psychosis developed after the taking of SSRIs - including a father who strangled his 11-year-old son. Panorama asks if enough is known about this rare side effect, and if doctors are unwittingly prescribing what could be a prescription for murder. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n3ct3j4z Shelley Jofre investigates if a rare side effect of commonly prescribed anti-depressant SSRI has played a part in a number of killings, including the mass murder at the premiere of a Batman film in Colorado in 2012. The Batman Killer - a prescription for murder? By Shelley Jofre, 26 July 2017 James Holmes, a young man with no record of violence, murdered 12 people watching Batman in a Colorado cinema in 2012. Did an SSRI antidepressant, prescribed by a doctor, play a part in the killings? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/aurora_shooting He slumps wild-eyed across the desk from detectives, with a mess of badly dyed red hair, his clothes hanging off him. James Holmes looks every inch the monster who coldly executed 12 innocent people and injured dozens more at a midnight screening of the Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises. Holmes had carried out the killings with an arsenal of weaponry he had accumulated in the preceding weeks. He had planned the shootings down to the tiniest detail, even booby-trapping his own apartment with home-made bombs to divert police resources while he launched the attack. Watching a recording of his interview at the police station, conducted just hours after he carried out one of the worst mass shootings in recent US history, who could feel anything but loathing for this callous 24-year-old graduate student? When asked how to spell his surname, Holmes cockily replies, “Like Sherlock”. When left alone with paper bags on his hands to secure forensic evidence, he’s caught on camera using them to talk to one another, like sock puppets. The only hint he may have some inkling of what he’s just done is when he asks a detective, “There wasn’t any children hurt?” In fact, six-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan was the youngest of Holmes’s victims that night in July 2012 - killed as she watched the movie premiere with her mother at the packed cinema in Aurora, Colorado. Americans have become wearily accustomed to mass shootings. Usually, in the days and weeks that follow, some kind of warped explanation emerges - be it terrorism, revenge or a predisposition to violence. It’s highly unusual for the perpetrator to be taken alive. Usually they are killed or kill themselves at the scene. Holmes survived, and as the evidence stacked up it looked like another tragic collision of mental breakdown with America’s lax gun laws. Why else would a clever, shy guy with no history of violence, from a loving home, carry out such a heinous attack? Holmes had no enemies, no terrorist ideology to drive him on. But the student had been seeing a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Denver and this was no barrier to him buying a handgun, tear gas, full body armour and a semi-automatic rifle. Before he faced a court of law, Holmes was evaluated by a number of psychiatrists. No two doctors reached exactly the same conclusion. There were diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal disorder – or no diagnosable disorder at all. Some thought Holmes couldn’t legally be held responsible for his crime, on grounds of insanity. Others disagreed, arguing he still knew right from wrong when he carried out the shootings. When these questions came before a jury two years ago, the verdict was unanimous. Holmes was found guilty on all counts of murder and multiple counts of attempted murder. He was led from the dock to jeers of “loser”, as his bewildered parents Bob and Arlene looked on, to begin one of the longest prison terms in US history - 12 life sentences plus 3,318 years in prison. He only narrowly escaped the death penalty.... A class of drugs that are currently being prescribed to 9% of people in the UK and 12% of people in the USA.