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Editor: Robert Binstock
Profession: Paxil Side Effect Attorney

Category: Side Effects

There is a growing trend of gruesome murders being committed by those taking many antidepressant medications. Many describe the acts that they committed as being out of their control and claim that the medications are the reason that they have lost touch with reality on such an unbelievable level. Andrea Yates was taking the antidepressant Effexor when she ruthlessly drowned all five of her children. Eric Harris, one of the crazed killers of Columbine was taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), in the same class as Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac, when he went on the 1999 killing spree. This is just the tip of the iceberg when talking about antidepressants and murder.

A 12-year-old boy was on the prescription medication Paxil when he shot his grandparents in the head with a shotgun. He described the event as being like a television show where you know what is going to happen but have no control over it. The boy's attorneys argued that he was victim of "involuntary intoxication" as he was taking both Paxil and Zoloft prior to the murders.

Paxil's known "adverse drug reactions" - according to the drug's 2001 FDA-approved label - include "mania," "insomnia," "anxiety," "agitation," "confusion," "amnesia," "depression," "paranoid reaction," "psychosis," "hostility," "delirium," "hallucinations," "abnormal thinking," "depersonalization" and "lack of emotion," among others.

The drug Effexor did add "homicidal ideation" to its "rare adverse events" list in 2005, four years after the Yates murders. The FDA classifies "rare" as less than on in 1,000. So with millions of prescription being filled each year for Effexor and other similar antidepressants there could literally be thousands of Americans living with "homicidal ideations."

The inescapable truth is, perpetrators of many of the nation's most horrendous murder rampages in recent years were taking, or just coming off of, prescribed psychiatric drugs.