Mass Shooters: Looking for a Motive in All the Wrong Places

     Three days ago in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, eighteen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed her mother and stepbrother at home and then went to the nearby secondary school and killed a teacher and three students. Then she shot herself fatally. 

     Police say they are looking for a motive.

     Instead, they should be looking at her antipsychotic medication. Yes, she was known to be a troubled teen. Yes, the local cops had been called to her house several times for mental wellness checks. Yes, she and her family had an extensive gun collection – as most residents in this remote community have. Yes, she had begun transitioning from female to male six years earlier, when she was only twelve. Yes, she had a history for visiting some of the darkest, violence filled websites on the internet.

     Far more significantly, she had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward at least once, and she had been prescribed a number of antidepressants and antipsychotic medications that she had been taking, per her on-line posts. 

     Antipsychotics and antidepressants are both known to cause akathisia, a “distressing” movement disorder that causes constant pacing and marching in place along with extreme panic, anxiety, or irritability. It sparks an extreme mental anguish in a person and can lead to aggression or suicide.

     The person is utterly out of control and acts on drug-induced, automatic pilot. They are no longer themselves.

     There is no such thing as a rational or irrational motive. The police needn’t look for one. Jesse Van Rootselaar is the latest in the long list of antidepressant, antipsychotic taking mass shooters who have caused such carnage over the last two decades…the same time period, coincidentally, that prescriptions for antidepressants have increased by fifty percent.

     Actually, the police should be looking for one motive: the motive behind those psychiatrists who continue to prescribe such dangerous drugs to our youth.