Are antidepressants making Americans violent?
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School in Colorado, armed to the teeth, and set about murdering their fellow classmates and teachers. When the shooting was over, 12 children and one teacher lay dead. Harris and Klebold were dead, too, and 20 others were wounded. Within a little over a week of the atrocity, there was already speculation that psychotropic drugs might have been a factor, specifically the powerful and relatively new antidepressant Luvox (fluvoxamine), which Harris was known to have been taking. Fluvoxamine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a class of antidepressant medication that was first trialed in the 1970s and then brought to market in the US in the late 1980s.
