See, dignified people are inconvenient. They refuse to stay on their knees. Even if they are pushed to their knees by force, they don’t stay on their knees for long. They bounce back, and they just keep bouncing back again and again as long as they are alive. They insist on being up-straight.

To the life-hating tyrants, that is totally unacceptable. The tyrants don’t like it when people expect a free and independent existence, and so they work hard to disallow that. The amount of energy they spent on enslavement is no small feat. Their anti-dignity warfare is a full-time job for the tyrants! They probably worry about free people even in their sleep!

Lies About Being “Heartbroken” for the Vaccine Injured

For example, check out this tyrant lying about this previous position in vaccine side effects. This tyrant is the German Federal Minister of Health — shifty eyes and all — and he is shamelessly lying the camera and saying that he cares deeply about the vaccine injured (sounds plausible), and that he had never said that COVID injections were injury-free.

The video is in German but it has English subtitles, and worth a watch. Incidentally, the Minister also says — out of his own mouth — that the rate of serious adverse effects is 1 in 10,000. Many data points show that the rate is much higher (and the long-term effects are a scary thought) but even if he is correct, the population of Germany is 84,270,625 — and so it leaves the country with more than 8,000 people who are seriously injured — and for what?!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653x0SpYd48

Google’s New AI

And here is a notorious tyrant and tyrant collaborator, Google, pretending (again) that is it doing something good. Here is Google’s own presentation of how it plans to replace human beings a little more.

And here is a mainstream media article with an appropriate title: “The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived.”

“In Gmail, there are tools that will attempt to compose entire emails or edit them for tone as well as tools for ingesting and summarizing long threads. In Docs, there are tools for generating text from simple prompts or other content.

A lengthy email discussion is turned into a “brief” and then a slide deck, which is then illustrated with generated imagery … Google makes the decks now and writes all those client emails. I’m sure it’ll be able to write a solid layoff notice, too.”

There are so many things that are wrong with this direction.

• One philosophical problem, described in detail in the pre-COVID book by Nicholas Carr, “The Glass Cage,” is that the people relying on AI services will inevitably forget how to use their natural skills. In this case, we are talking the ability to form complete sentences and think long thoughts.

People will forget how to think long thoughts even more than they already have! And, once a lot of people start relying on tools like this (dear God!), Google will use the new dependency for social control.

• Another, rather obvious, philosophical problem is that we will never know if that “heartfelt” note was an awkward but sincere attempt at affection by a human being or plain bot spit. We are in a bad collective place with sincerity already, and this AI business (I think I am going to use the term “bot spit,” or BS for short) takes small talk to a new abyss.
• And of course, all this means that we will feeding the devils more of our personal data — which is what the devils want.

And there is also something else that bothers me here. The rates of chronic disease, cognitive and neurological troubles, and — yes — vaccine injuries — are going up at an alarming speed. And so, is this tool intended to mask and hide the existence of the victims whose heads hurt so much that they can’t put two coherent thoughts together — and yet they still need to “keep a job” in order to eat? This is a terrifying thought.

Sneaky Tyrants

Ignoring philosophical problems is not a winning strategy for good people because ignoring them leads to pain on a massive scale. So let’s talk about the tyrants and their warfare toolkit — so that we can start pushing back more effectively, more confidently, and without fear. (They don’t deserve our fear.)

The tyrants are at war with everyone, and with each other, too. But because they cannot win on their own, they make alliances and blow smoke. They capitalize on “divide and conquer,” they always do.

They select a target whom they want to straight out decimate right away, and a target whom they want to decimate maybe later on — but in the meanwhile, the tyrants charm ‘em, befriend ‘em, and throw some bones their way for their loyalty and support. They have done this for wars, for color revolutions, for colonial genocides, and they are doing this again today for the biosecurity state.

All of this works according to the classic logic of bait and betrayal. And for some reason, we read about history, shake our heads, say wow, then turn on the television — and forget the wisdom we’ve just learned.

Initially, in every new campaign, the tyrants often start with brutal force. They use brutal force against the “first generation” or “first wave” of straight-walking people — those they target for straight out destruction due to their experiential knowledge of freedom — and then they use tricks and metaphorical bad magic against their descendants whom they want to subjugate and keep as their half-asleep, obedient slaves.

And to accomplish their trickery, the tyrants come up with all sorts of tricks to confuse the minds so that their victims forget that we are actually born with dignity and that we are not supposed to lose it in the course of our lives.

The Role of Challenges and Encounters With Bullies

Now, it’s true that our life’s journey is not all honey and sweets. Life has ups and downs, and in the course of our lives, we do have to deal with some tough challenges and some hard times. We usually have to deal with some bullying and abuse.

But the point of having to deal with abuse is not shirking ourselves in response to the abuse, it’s actually the opposite — it’s growing our power as a result of standing up to abuse. And raising from our knees. And bouncing back. And raising from our knees again. (The tyrants hate it when we figure that one out — and so they come up with yet another “divide and conquer” campaign to keep us weak.)

The point of having to deal with abuse is remembering why we need to walk straight up, and how. The point is a renewal of our dignity, a renewal of our spiritual clarity, a renewal of our sincere self-love. And by the way, loving thy neighbor, too, come to us naturally when we remember self-love. Yes, we are born with dignity but it’s our job to protect it from any forces that try to sway us away from our dignity. It is our dignity. It is our sacred soul. If we don’t protect it, who will?

By the way, dignity is not ego. Ego is, roughly, about defining ourselves in relation to the external world. Dignity comes from an internal memory of who we are, it is the sweet, sincere respect and love for our own soul.

Psychological Warfare

The tyrants have a special characteristic, and it’s that they don’t respect the soul. They are very interested in weaking the people’s connection to the spiritual power because disconnected people make good prey. And so, the tyrants come up with narratives that undermine self-worth and elevate desperation, anxiety, and guilt.

How does it work? See, when one is anxious, or desperate, or guilty, one voluntarily passes on the support of the good forces of the universe. That feeling of being little and forsaken? Know that feeling? It is not yours. It’s a sure sign that you are under psychological attack, and it is in your best interests to shake it off and work on shaking it off until it’s gone — no matter the circumstance.

No one is little. And no one is forsaken. This is not how the world works. We are warriors in the middle of the journey, not victims. But the tyrants keep “poisoning the well” and creating narratives that make us feel unsure of ourselves, alone, isolated, unconfident, and perpetually hurt.

By the way, I am saying this from experience. Sometimes, in the middle of blinding pain, it is hard to see the light. And sometimes, people get attached to their pain, and even argue that all this talk about love is too and idealistic — and then I remind them (and myself) that in the course of my life I have been through such ridiculous abuse that I’ve earned my right to see the light in the middle of crap. I am speaking strictly from experience. This is not theory. This is my hard-earned truth.

Tyrant’s Vocabulary and Anti-Dignity Tricks

• “You are being abused because there’s something wrong with you” — That’s straight out nonsense. Only a broken person or an enemy would say that to a fellow traveler in this world.

No, we are not perfect. And perhaps not everything went right. Some of us may have had a tough life. We may have been told lies and gobbled them up. We may have done dumb things (I have). But, if we have done dumb things, we can still pray for guidance to straighten out our ways, and there is beauty in finding our courage and righting the wrongs.

• “You are being abused because you are dirty, and so you get what you deserve” — This, now, is more ridiculous nonsense. Making people feel dirty is perhaps one of the biggest psyops in human history, a psyop that has been lubricating the way for many tyrants of this world!

Sadly, this is a psyop that has been thoroughly internalized in many cultures, and many of us have been fed this psyop by our own loving parents, out of misguided love. The way I look at it, it is our job to heal ourselves and to forgive our parents from our hearts.

The dynamic of “human dirt” is playing out today again with COVID, and masks, and vaccines. And it’s tragic. And now is a perfect time to end this dynamic at its root and accept ourselves as beautiful spiritual beings with important jobs.

• “You are being abused because, unlike those other people who are real, you don’t belong in this world. The abuse is the punishment for the fact that you don’t fit in” — Another outrageous lie! That feeling of not belonging, of being different from others in a humiliating way, is what most people feel on occasion (or often) in a world that does not respect our true selves.

It is simply a natural reaction to spiritual starvation, a reaction that, by the way, comes with the task of figuring out the source of that feeling and rejecting the tyrant poison of the mind.

It is spiritual warfare. It is the goal of the tyrants is to disorient us and to make us feel like the world is theirs — that they dictate the rules because it’s their job to dictate the rules, and that we are just some disposable renters of their property, under a perpetual sword of an eviction from their property. They are liars. And courage is the antidote.

• “You are not abused. This is normal. This is what life is” — This flavor of tyrant propaganda is very close to home for me. I grew up in a culture where it was a big talking point, something that was passed from generation to generation, with a hammer of pain. In my adulthood, I spent many years unwrapping the ball of lies. And today, it seems like the history wants to repeat, and I object.

I would like to end the story with a beautiful interview I did with Brownstone Institute fellow Thomas Harrington. We talked about history, dignity, and hope.

Time for crying is over,
It’s courage time.
Time for crawling is over,
It’s courage time.
Time for self-loathing is over,
It’s courage time.
Time for self-betrayal is over,
It’s courage time.
What time is it?
It’s courage o’clock.
It’s a time to stand up for dignity full force.
We are worth it.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

If you’ve ever wondered why, you’ve come to the right place. Any casual reader of the alternate media landscape will eventually come up with a reference to Stanley Milgram, or Philip Zimbardo, the “Asch Experiment” or maybe all three.

“Cognitive Dissonance”, “Diffusion of Responsibility”, and “learned helplessness” are phrases that regularly do the rounds, but where do they come from and what they mean?

Well, here are the important psycho-social experiments that teach us about the way people think, but more than that they actually explain how our modern world works, and just how we got into this mess.

1. THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT

The Experiment: Let’s start with the most famous. Beginning in 1963, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments now referred to as the Milgram Obedience Experiments.

The setting is simple, Subject A is told to conduct a memory test on Subject B, and administer electric shocks when he makes mistakes. Of course, Subject B does not exist, and the electric shocks are not real. Instead, actors would cry, ask for help or pretend to be unconscious, all the while Subject A would be encouraged to carry on administering the shocks.

The vast majority of subjects carried on with the test and gave the shocks, despite the distress of “Subject B”.

The Conclusion: In his paper on this experiment Stanley Milgram coined the term “diffusion of responsibility”, describing the psychological process by which a person can excuse or justify doing harm to someone if they believe it’s not really their fault, they won’t be held accountable, or they do not have a choice.

The Application: Almost literally endless. All institutions can use this phenomenon to pressure people into acting against their own moral code. The army, the police, hospital staff – wherever there is a hierarchy or perceived authority, people will fall victim to the diffusion of their own responsibility.

NOTE: They made a decent film about Milgram, and the backlash his experiments caused called Experimenter. In recent years there has been a major pushback on this experiment, with articles in the MSM attacking the findings and methodology and new “researchers” claiming “it does not prove what you think it does.”

2. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

The Experiment: Only slightly less famous than Milgram’s work is Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment, carried out at Stanford University in 1971. The experiment set up a mock-prison for a week, with one group of subjects designated “guards” and the other “prisoners”.

Both sides were provided uniforms, and prisoners were given a number. The guards were ordered to only ever address prisoners by their number, not their name. There were a number of other rules and procedures, detailed here.

In brief, over the course of the week, guards became increasingly sadistic, dealing out punishments to disobedient prisoners and rewarding “good prisoners” in order to try and divide them. Many of the prisoners simply took the abuse, and in-fighting began between “trouble makers” and “good prisoners”.

Though technically not an “experiment” in the purest sense (there was no hypothesis to test, and no control group), and perhaps impacted by “demand characteristics”, the study does reveal interesting patterns of behaviour in its subjects.

The Conclusion: Prison guards became sadistic. Prisoners became obedient. All this despite no real laws being broken, no real legal authority, and no real requirement to stay. If you give people power and dehumanise those below them, they will become sadistic. If you put people in prison they will act like they are in prison. In short, people will act the way they are treated.

The Application: Again, endless. We’ve seen it all through Covid, if you start treating people a certain way, the majority will go along with it and blame the minority who refuse to cooperate. Meanwhile, police forces around the world were suddenly granted new powers, and promptly abused them because the maskless and unvaxxed had been dehumanised in their eyes. Those reactions were engineered, not accidental.

3. THE ASCH EXPERIMENT

The Experiment: Another experiment in conformity, not as brutal as Milgram or Zimbardo, but perhaps more unsettling in its findings. First conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s, the setup is a simple one. You put together a panel of subjects, one real subject and a handful of fake subjects.

One by one the subjects are asked a series of multiple-choice questions to which the answer is always obvious, and all the fake subjects will get every answer wrong. The question is whether or not the real subject will maintain his own correct answer, or begin to conform with the group.

The Conclusion: While most people maintained their right answers, the “error rate” in the experiment group was 37% versus less than 1% in the control group. Meaning 36% of subjects eventually began to change their answers to align with the consensus, even though they knew they were wrong.

Around one-third of people will either pretend to change their minds for the sake of conformity or, more alarmingly, will actually alter their beliefs if they find themselves in the minority.

The Application: Staged or invented polls, falsified vote counts in elections, bot accounts on social media, astroturfing campaigns. Media headlines proclaiming “everyone knows X” or “only 1% of people think Y”. There are a great many tools you can use in order to create the impression of a fake “consensus”, a manufactured “majority”.

NOTE: The experiment has been done a million times in dozens of variations, but perhaps the most interesting finding is that putting just one other person in the panel who agrees with the test subject seemed to reduce conformity by 87%. Essentially, people hate being a lone voice but will tolerate being in the minority if they have some support. Good to know.

4. FESTINGER’S COGNITIVE DISSONANCE EXPERIMENT

The Experiment: The least well-known experiment on the list, but in some ways the most fascinating. In 1954 Leon Festinger created an experiment to evaluate the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, his setup was again quite simple.

A subject is given a repetitive and dull physical task to do (originally turning wooden pegs, but other variations use other tasks).

After the task is complete, the subject is instruced to go and prepare the next subject (actually a lab assistant) for the task, by lying and telling him/her how interesting the task was.

It’s at this point the subjects are divided into two groups, one group is offered $20 to lie, the other only $1. This is the real experiment.

The Conclusion: After lying to the fake subjects, and being paid their money, the real subjects take part in a post-experiment interview and record their genuine thoughts on the task.

Interestingly, the 20-dollar generally told the truth, that they found the task dull and repetitive. While the one-dollar group, more often than not, claimed to have genuinely enjoyed the task. This is cognitive dissonance in action.

Essentially, for the $20 group, the money was a good reason to lie to their fellow test subject, and they could justify their own behaviour in their head. But, for the $1 group, the meagreness of the reward made their dishonesty internally unjustifiable, so they had to unconsciously create their own justification by convincing themselves they weren’t lying at all.

In summary, if you offer people a small reward for doing something, they will pretend to enjoy it, or be otherwise invested, to justify only making a small profit.

The Application: Casinos, computer games and other interactive media use this principle all the time, offering players very little pay off knowing they will convince themselves they are enjoying playing. Big corporations and employers can likewise rely on this phenomenon to keep wages down, knowing that low paid workers have a psychological mechanism that may convince them they enjoy their jobs.

NOTE: A variation on this experiment introduces a third group, who are paid nothing to lie. This group is not affected by cognitive dissonance, and will honestly appraise the task just as the well-paid group do.

5. THE MONKEY LADDER

The Experiment: Now this is a somewhat controversial addition to the list, but we’ll get to that later. It’s a very famous experiment you’ve probably heard cited dozens of times.

In the 1960s scientists at Harvard put five monkeys in a cage with a stepladder in the middle. Atop the stepladder is a bunch of bananas, however each time a monkey tries to climb the ladder they are all sprayed with ice-cold water. Eventually, the monkeys learn to avoid the ladder.

Then one monkey is removed and a new monkey is introduced. He naturally goes straight for the ladder and is set upon by the other four monkeys. Then a second monkey is removed, and another new monkey is introduced. He naturally goes straight for the ladder and is set upon by the other four monkeys…including the one who was never sprayed.

They continue to replace each monkey in turn, until no monkeys are present who were ever sprayed with water, and yet they all refuse to go near the stairs and prevent all the new monkeys from doing so. Now, the obvious conclusion here is that people can be conditioned to mindlessly follow rules they do not understand. The only problem with that is that none of this ever happened.

Yes, that’s the controversy I mentioned earlier. Despite being easily found on every corner of the internet, despite magazine articles explaining it and animations recounting it…it never happened. The experiment appears to be entirely apocryphal. No ladder, no monkeys, no cold water.

So while this supposed experiment doesn’t actually teach us about herd mentality, it does explain the modern world, because it shows us how easily a myth can be worked into a reality through sheer dint of repetition.

BONUS: MONKEY LADDER REDUX

That’s right, it doesn’t stop there, there’s another twist. National Geographic did actually recreate the fictional monkey ladder experiment using people:

One subject walks into a doctor’s waiting room filled with fake patients. When a bell sounds, all the fake patients stand up for a second and then retake their seats.

After this process repeats a few times, the fake patients are slowly removed one-by-one until only the subject of the experiment remains. Then secondary real subjects are introduced one at a time.

The experiment seeks to answer the following questions:

1. Will the original subject stand up at the bell without knowing why?
2. Will they will continue to stand up when they are alone in the room?
3. Will they then teach this behaviour to the new subjects?

The answer to all three appears to be “yes”.

Now, while far less scientific than the other four experiments, I include this here for a very specific reason. The above video of the experiment doesn’t just record the conforming behaviour but describes it as possibly beneficial. Adding that herd behaviour saves lives in the wild and is “how we learn to socialise”.

A very interesting take, don’t you think?

So, while the fake monkey experiment that never happened was used to teach us about the perils of herd mentality, its nonexistence actually teaches us about the perils of non-primary sources and the group consciousness’s ability to confabulate.

Meanwhile, the real monkey experiment is used to sell us the idea that herd mentality does exist but is potentially a good thing. Raising the possibility the whole thing could have been staged, simply to promote conformity.

…Isn’t the world a strange and confusing place?

So, there they are. Five of the most critical pieces of psychological research ever done, hopefully going forward nobody will be left in the dark when these concepts or experiments are referenced.

But the point of this article is not to just make you, the reader, understand these experiments…it is also meant to remind you that they do.

The people in charge, the elite, the 1%, “The Party”. The powers that be – or shouldn’t be – whatever you want to call them.

They know these experiments. They have studied them. They’ve probably replicated them countless times on grand scales and in unethical ways we can barely imagine. Who knows exactly what takes place in the dank dark dungeons of the deep state?

Just remember, they know how the human mind works.

• They know they can make people do anything if they reassure them they won’t be held responsible.
• They know that they can rely on people to abuse any power they’re given, OR believe they are powerless if they’re treated that way.
• They know that peer pressure will change a lot of people’s minds even in the face of undeniable reality, especially if you make them feel completely alone.
• They know that if you offer people only a small reward for completing a task, they will make up their own psychological justification for taking it.
• They know that people will mindlessly do whatever everyone else is doing without ever asking for a reason.
• And they know that people will happily believe something that never happened if it is repeated often enough.

They know all of this. And they use that knowledge all the time – All. The. Time.

Every commercial you see, every article you read, every movie they release, every item on the news, every “viral” social media post, every trending hashtag.

Every war. Every pandemic. Every headline.

All of them are constructed with these principles in mind to elicit specific emotional reactions that steer your behaviour and beliefs. That’s how the media works, not to inform you, not to entertain you…but to control you.

And they have it down to a science. Always remember that.

Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.

• While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
• Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
• 97.8% of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
• Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
• Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence

While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.

An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date¹ and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,² and psychreg.org in late January 2021,³ noted:

“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …

Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.

Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.

Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,⁴ 97.8% of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …

This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.

Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.

As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”

The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants

Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.

The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.

Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.

In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.

In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400%,⁵ and by 2010, 11% of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.⁶

In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.⁷ In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.

Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.⁸

How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.

For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.

Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.⁹

The Risks Are Clear

The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:¹⁰

“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”

SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.

In one review^11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8% of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.

The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:¹³

• Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
• Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
• Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
• Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
• Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times

Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed

In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:¹⁴

• Sadness
• Anxiety
• Feeling hopeless
• Feeling worthless
• Feeling helpless
• Feeling ’empty’
• Feeling guilty
• Irritable
• Fatigue
• Lack of energy
• Loss of interest in hobbies
• Slow talking and moving
• Restlessness
• Trouble concentrating
• Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
• Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
• Thoughts of death or suicide

The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,¹⁵ only 38.4% actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3% of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:¹⁶

“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.

Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”

What Role Might War Games Play?

Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?

As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.¹⁷ While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:¹⁸

1. Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
2. Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
3. Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning

In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.

Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.

On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.¹⁹ When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.

Even now, the U.S. insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”²⁰

Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?

As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.

There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.

• ^1, 9, 14 Ammo.com, Prescription for Violence
• ² Libertarian Institute May 20, 2019
• ³ Psychreg.org January 26, 2021, updated February 21, 2022
• ⁴ Crime Prevention Research Center, Mass Public Shootings Stats
• ⁵ Harvard Health October 20, 2011
• ⁶ Washington Post October 19, 2011
• ^7, 8 Time April 16, 2021
• ¹⁰ Psychiatric News November 5, 2004
• ¹¹ PLOS ONE December 15, 2010, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015337
• ¹² Psychology Today January 5, 2011
• ¹³ Live Science January 12, 2011
• ^15, 16 Psychotherapy Psychosom 2013;82(3):161-9
• ¹⁷ World Bank Blogs August 14, 2018
• ¹⁸ Centrical Benefits of Simulations Training
• ¹⁹ War and Violent Crime Research
• ²⁰ VOA Nws March 4, 2022