USA Today Demonstrates the Mess We’re In

The “fact-checking” of RFK Jr. shows journalists’ roles in psychiatric coercion--and how public dialogue is becoming more coercive, too

I delayed completing and posting this because I did not want to seem like I was weighing in on Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s nomination for heading the federal Health and Human Services Department. Kennedy has now been confirmed, so we’ll see what happens. Briefly, there are things Kennedy says that I agree with, and things I don’t. He also seems to me to have an unfortunate tendency to talk loosely when expressing his views on important scientific issues, only to try to clarify later—which feeds the sensationalist news cycle for his often equally scientifically sloppy critics.

Case in point: Kennedy’s confirmation hearings brought out the worst from a lot of his strongest critics among journalists. And that is what I want to discuss. The situation aptly illustrated how much “informed consent” on mental health issues is being eroded, how journalists help justify coercion, and the even bigger mess we’re collectively in as a society as “fact-checking” exercises operate more like character assassination and public manipulation.

During Kennedy’s recent confirmation hearings, an article in USA Today—one of the five most widely read newspapers in America—was headlined “RFK Jr.'s misinformation on antidepressants matters. Here's what to know.” (The article was also syndicated further.)

So, it was a fact-checking article—written by USA Today staff journalist Alyssa Goldberg.

Let’s review the facts she “checked.”

Our factaloydums prove Kennedy is not just wrong, but wronger than wrong!

Goldberg notes that Kennedy has often speculated that the use of antidepressants and other psychotropics may have contributed to the increase in mass shootings, especially among youth in schools. Goldberg writes that this idea is utterly “scientifically-unfounded” and there’s “no evidence” of any causal link or even of any “association” between antidepressants and shootings.

Goldberg’s proof to support this thrashing? She cites this study.

The study, and the implication that the mere suggestion of any possible link is preposterous, has been going the rounds among Kennedy-critics. For example, Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler described Kennedy as a misleading liar, and cited the same study, claiming it provided “reams of evidence” showing antidepressants are not linked to shootings. Emphasis on reams! And Georgetown University professor Adriane Fugh-Berman wrote that Kennedy’s suggestion of a potential link between antidepressants and violence is flat out “absurd.” Fugh-Berman went on to deliver a mocking lecture about first-year medical science.

It’s this core, repeating assertion that I find so concerning: that Kennedy’s statements about antidepressants are not simply incorrect placed against the balance of evidence, but instead are so non-scientific and outside of reality they are worthy of nothing but mockery. It sets an extremely manipulative tone, encouraging people to ignore him and his ideas altogether, and certainly not stop, research, and truly consider any evidence.

But what happens if we do stop and consider?

When we promoted the science, we didn’t expect anyone to actually follow the science!

The paper that Goldberg and Butler cite is titled, “The myth of school shooters and psychotropic medications.” The title and abstract were obviously constructed as all-too-many “science-y” public relations efforts targeting journalists are these days. That is, constructed to serve the exact purpose Goldberg and Butler use them for—to give an extremely opinionated claim an “aura” of scientific legitimacy, while banking that no will take the time to read the whole paper.

However, if we do download and read… The paper tells a different tale.

The authors of “The myth of school shooters and psychotropic medications” actually found that a staggering 47% of school shooters “had been prescribed a psychotropic medication or were probably prescribed… a psychotropic medication.” (Of these, notably, antidepressants were present about four times more often than any other major class of psychotropics. That said, the authors clarify that they usually couldn’t determine for certain if, for example, these drugs were definitely still being taken at the time of the shooting, if the person might have stopped taking them, if the person could have been experiencing drug withdrawal, etc.)

The authors then try to downplay their own finding by saying that 47% is not, after all, “the majority” of shooters, as some people might claim. Which, technically, uh, is correct. But is that really the issue?

Meanwhile, what about the other 53%? The authors state that they were not able to establish that ANY of them had NOT taken psychiatric medications. This is because they only searched readily available public records and, frequently, the authors noted, shooters’ mental health records were unavailable or deliberately sealed by courts.

As for Goldberg’s claim that this study also proved there was no causal link or even a correlation between psychotropics and shootings, the authors themselves again say otherwise: they write that “there may be a correlation.” And while they state they did not find a “causal” association, that was only because their study was not designed to look for one; however, the authors included in their paper an eleven-item questionnaire for future researchers to use to help investigate such possible causal links. Finally, despite their provocative title, the authors admit that “empirical research” on the links between psychotropics and shootings “is limited.”

So in summary, far from proving Kennedy is completely outside scientific norms, even the study explicitly cited by these journalists gives a fairly strong endorsement to Kennedy’s suggestion that there could be a link between psychotropics and violence and the issue needs more study.

It’s demonstrably factish: All psychotropics induce specific peaceful actions upon your brainaloids!

Goldberg then quotes Columbia University psychiatrist Ragy Girgis stating, “SSRIs, and psych meds in general, are not responsible for mass shootings or violence in any way. These psych meds have specific anti-violence properties.”

Citations are nowhere to be found in Goldberg’s article for this astounding, all-encompassing assertion. And that’s because there aren’t any. If any study had proven all psychiatric medications had specific biochemical properties that caused everyone to instantly become non-violent in every way, the discoverer would have gotten Nobel Prizes for both medicine and peace, and gawd knows how many political lobbies would be pushing to put these drugs in whose drinking water.

I contacted Girgis, and he emailed me two studies to back his statement. This study found that the SSRI antidepressant fluoxetine diminished feelings of aggression and irritability in 46% of the participants. In this study, researchers found that people taking antipsychotics or mood stabilizers committed 45% and 24% fewer crimes than the same people did when they were not taking the drugs.

The design and bias problems with both studies are enormous—nevertheless, even if we completely accepted their findings at face value, they still merely suggest that taking some psychiatric medications appears to be correlated with slight reductions in certain types of aggression or crimes by some people. (Would that we had a drug that cured ruthless hedgefund managers, exploitive landlords, scientists doing brutal cosmetics experiments on animals, and corporate polluters, but these studies never define those kinds of acts as violent!)

Perplexed, I got Girgis on the phone and we spoke for nearly an hour. None of it is worth quoting. Suffice to say, I pointed to the FDA drug labels for countless psychiatric medications that warn about studies finding adverse reactions, such as:

• “agitation,” “hostility,” “aggressiveness” (antidepressant Prozac)

• “psychotic,” “paranoid,” “aggressive” (antidepressant Celexa)

• “aggression and violent behavior” (antidepressant Effexor)

• “aggression,” “homicidal ideation,” “hostility,” “aggressiveness,” “acting on dangerous impulses” (antipsychotic Abilify)

I pointed to extremely addictive psychiatric drugs like benzodiazepines and their predictable links to heightened aggression much like addictive recreational drugs, the well-known problem of violent paradoxical reactions to psychiatric drugs, the well-established understanding that antidepressants and antipsychotics very commonly induce akathisia which, when intense, can lead to violence.

Although our conversation was polite, no matter how many ways we approached it or how much of this and more evidence I presented for consideration, he did not wish to amend or soften his USA Today quote. And no matter how much I tamped down my own view, I could not get Girgis to agree, or say somehow in his own words, simply that there is at least a little evidence to suggest that some psychiatric medications might possibly induce adverse, violent reactions of some kind in rare cases in some people.

He would never give an inch in that direction; I can only speculate as to why.

But to reiterate: I’m not trying to win a debate about whether psychotropics do or don’t cause more or less violence in more or fewer people—all I’m trying to show is that it’s certainly not “scientifically unfounded” and pseudoscientific and “absurd” for Kennedy to suggest that some psychotropics could cause some people to have violent reactions, and that this is worthy of more study.

And indeed, Kennedy is hardly as far from scientific norms as these critics suggest. Here’s just a quick sampling of scientific studies in medical journals that have delved into the question of psychotropics and violence, and found links:

Healy D, Herxheimer A, Menkes DB. Antidepressants and violence: problems at the interface of medicine and law. PLoS Med. 2006 Sep;3(9):e372. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372. PMID: 16968128; PMCID: PMC1564177.
“…suggest an association in a small number of cases between antidepressant treatment and aggression and violence.”

Sharma T, Guski LS, Freund N, Gøtzsche PC. Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports. BMJ. 2016 Jan 27;352:i65. doi: 10.1136/bmj.i65. PMID: 26819231; PMCID: PMC4729837.
“…in children and adolescents [taking selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors] the risk of suicidality and aggression doubled.”

Eikelenboom-Schieveld SJM, Fogleman JC. Psychoactive Medication, Violence, and Variant Alleles for Cytochrome P450 Genes. J Pers Med. 2021 May 18;11(5):426. doi: 10.3390/jpm11050426. PMID: 34069803; PMCID: PMC8157279.
“There is an association between prescription drugs (most notably antidepressants and other psychoactive medication), having variant alleles for CYP450 genes, and altered emotional states or acts of violence.”

Tiihonen, J., Lehti, M., Aaltonen, M., Kivivuori, J., Kautiainen, H., J. Virta, L., Hoti, F., Tanskanen, A. and Korhonen, P. (2015), Psychotropic drugs and homicide: A prospective cohort study from Finland. World Psychiatry, 14: 245-247.
“The results of this prospective study show that antidepressant use per se was associated with an only modestly increased risk of committing a homicide, with borderline statistical significance. Benzodiazepine and analgesic use was linked with a higher risk of homicidal offending, and the findings remained highly significant even after correction for multiple comparisons.”

Rouve N, Bagheri H, Telmon N, Pathak A, Franchitto N, Schmitt L, Rougé D, Lapeyre-Mestre M, Montastruc JL; French Association of Regional PharmacoVigilance Centres. Prescribed drugs and violence: a case/noncase study in the French PharmacoVigilance Database. Eur J Clin Pharmacol. 2011 Nov;67(11):1189-98. doi: 10.1007/s00228-011-1067-7. Epub 2011 Jun 8. PMID: 21655992.
“Dopaminergic agonists, benzodiazepines and serotoninergic antidepressants are the main pharmacological classes able to induce aggressive behaviour.”

How did fact-checking journalists and editors at USA Today, Mother Jones, and many other publications miss all of these?

And all of this is actually downright dangerous. Psychiatrists like Girgis, and news articles like these, leave the public completely unaware of the risks of certain psychotropics, and hence utterly unprepared to recognize and take safety steps if a serious adverse reaction does start to emerge in themselves or someone close to them.

Stop misinformation! Antidepressants correct people’s biochemical imbalances!

In her article, Goldberg stops responding to anything specific Kennedy said—and proceeds simply into countering the damage to the reputation of antidepressants which she believes his “misinformation” has done.

Goldberg advises us—citing the Cleveland Clinic—that antidepressants effectively treat depression, and they do so “by increasing levels of serotonin.”

In fact, all of the drug labels for antidepressants clarify that the mechanism by which these drugs appear to work is “unknown” or “unclear.” But more significantly, ever since the 2022 Moncrieff study appeared, showing definitively (yet again) that there’s no evidence serotonin levels are linked to depression, we’ve been deluged in the public space with psychiatrists claiming they never seriously believed or promoted this bogus theory, anyhow. For example, a Columbia University psychiatrist was quoted in Rolling Stone “explaining” that the notion that serotonin is linked to depression is so juvenile, pseudoscientific, and laughably out of date that Moncrieff’s study was like “the discrediting of the black bile theory of depression.”

And yet, here we are again, Cleveland Clinic and USA Today.

It’s factolicious: Psychiatric drugs save lives like insulin for diabetes!

Goldberg then writes that these serotonin-balance correcting antidepressants “can be life-saving”—and again provides no scientific reference at all. And I’m not aware of any study that’s ever demonstrated that fewer people die as a result of taking antidepressants. Meanwhile, there have been studies suggesting these drugs, in the aggregate, appear to worsen suicidal feelings and suicide rates.

But at this point, Goldberg makes abundantly clear the manipulative, coercive intent of this whole, purported “fact-checking” exercise.

Goldberg quotes another doctor: “People are made to feel inadequate or stigmatized because they’re on a particular medication. It does require a clear explanation for the utilization of these messages and normalizing mental health so that people don’t see it as any different from hypertension or diabetes, or any other medication or any other disease.”

And here we have it: The core message the public needs to get is that antidepressants treat depression like insulin treats diabetes.

This oft-used comparison represents the very height of medical misinformation about depression and antidepressants—it’s genuinely difficult to find a more extreme example.

In fact, depressed feelings, even intense ones, are in no meaningful medical way similar to a physical condition that can put a person in a coma within minutes if they don’t get an injection. And a drug that blocks basic functions of key neurotransmitter communication systems in the brain is in no meaningful medical way similar to an essential hormone in the human body.

Yet here we are with our USA Today fact-checkers.

The mess we’re in

To reiterate, I’m not endorsing Kennedy or even trying to definitively prove anything in particular about psychiatric drugs—rather, I’m just trying to show that Kennedy is raising some reasonable issues and questions, while the “fact-checking” by one of America’s most prominent “reputable” news outlets is itself extreme misinformation.

And this is important. After all, it isn’t just a case of an isolated journalist messing up a few facts here and there—that can happen to anyone, and I’ve done it, too. This is fundamentally different. This is a major national publication engaged in a fact-checking exercise on the statements of a politically prominent figure during Congressional and Senate hearings, about an issue with significant impacts on vast swaths of the population. How could such a mess happen?

This USA Today article—all the more because it poses as fact-checking—decimates the very possibility of informed consent. It makes any average, non-knowledgeable reader a victim of psychiatric coercion. And it makes that reader, in turn, a likely purveyor of coercion upon others—perhaps, for example, pressuring a child into taking psychotropics like getting a child insulin for their diabetes.

And this is but one aspect of the key role that journalists have played, and continue to play, in the expansion of psychiatric coercion currently occurring across our society. (As an aside, it’s also a prime example of why it’s becoming so difficult for journalists like me to publish in places like USA Today—and why PsychForce Report exists. So, a big, heartfelt ‘thank you’ to you subscribers helping grow it!)

But even more, I worry as you may be worrying if you follow the news much, that this is but a small example, a single symptom of something much bigger—a signal of how we’re losing grounding as a society.

I saw stories in a dozen publications that were nearly as bad as this one. This suggests an underlying, systemic set of problems broadly affecting journalism—but the upshot is, if our major news outlets are so factually unreliable even as they mock the factual unreliability of others, how can we hope to become reasonably informed on current affairs and have reasonable public debates on any issues, let alone forge reasonable solutions together in the public sphere?

Opinions will differ, and any alleged facts can be reasonably questioned and challenged. But it’s vitally important that we’re always trying to find and establish shared facts. Shared facts create at least a little common ground between diverse people, and help provide a meaningful counter-balance to voices of extremist generalizations and political polarization. Shared facts provide a public service.

But when facts don’t truly matter anymore, inevitably, those voices that are simply buttressed by the most power will win out and dominate society. Not only psychiatry, but society itself becomes more coercive.

Banyen Books is hosting me for an online presentation and discussion on Thursday, March 13, at 7pm pacific time. Info and link to register here. (For those interested, I’ll be giving some extra focus to involuntary commitment in British Columbia and Canada.)

A Disorder For Everyone is hosting me for an online presentation and discussion on Tuesday, March 25, at 6pm London, UK time. (That’s 11am pacific, 2pm eastern.) Find the link to register, and read my email interview with Jo Watson in Mad in the UK here.

Please join us!