Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that it is time to start asking difficult questions about what is in the heart of mass shootings and seemed to connect violence with what he called a “mental health crisis.”
“We really have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America. We take much more psychiatric medications than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to eat some very difficult questions about the fundamental causes of this violence,” Vance said in an event in Wisconsin in his first public comments about the shooting of Wednesday’s church in Minnesota neighboring, in which two children were killed.
In an interview on Thursday in Fox News, Vance called the shooter as a “human being with mental disorder.”
Early in the day, in a separate interview with Fox News, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he has the National Health Institutes to find links between violence and antidepressants that are prescribed regularly millions of people in the United States.
“We are launching studies on the potential contribution of some of SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that could be contributing to violence,” Kennedy said.
He did not offer details about the investigation, when and how it would be carried out or if the results would be reviewed by pairs. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comments on Thursday night.
The SSRI is abbreviation for a drug class called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Antidepressants increase serotonin levels, a chemical messenger in the brain that can improve mood. Common versions include Lexapro, Prozac and Zoloft, which treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said Thursday in MSNBC that he has no information about any previous mental illness of the shooter, identified as Robin Westman, who died of a self -inflicted gunshot wound. O’Hara added that Westman, 23, was never confined by mental illness.
Nor are there indications of the authorities that the shooter took SSRI or any other related medication.
To blame antidepressants for mass shootings has become a common tactic for some conservatives. In 2022, after the shooting at school in Uvalde, Texas, and the shooting at the Julio room parade in Highland Park, Illinois, some quickly speculated without evidence about the use of antidepressants by the shooters.
A 2019 study found that most school shooters had not taken psychotropic medications and that when they did, “a direct or causal association was not found” with the shootings.
Senator Tina Smith, D-minn., He subtracted Kennedy for her comments one day after the shooting in the Church of the Annunciation Catholic School.
“I challenge you to go to the Annunciation School and tell our community afflicted, in effect, weapons do not kill children, antidepressants do it. Just shut up. Stop selling bulls —“, he wrote in X. “You should be fired.”
Kennedy is a critic for a long time of the SSRIs, and has talked about what he sees as excessive and excessive use of drugs. He has also previously blamed drugs by school shootings, despite the evidence otherwise.
Mental health defense groups have also spoken against Kennedy’s criticisms to SSRS, saying that drugs can be saved by mitigating suicide thoughts and that can help people with severe depression or anxiety daily and maintain social relationships.
“I know that the Secretary of Health and Human Services said that HHS is investigating, perhaps, the links between some of these medications and these prescription medications that some of these minors can be taking and an increase in violence,” said White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt in Thursday’s informative session.
“And obviously we have mental health problems in this country of which this administration and Secretary Kennedy will continue to speak and the work we are doing to solve it,” he added.
President Donald Trump has not made any public comments on the Minneapolis shooting. He published about this on social networks on Wednesday, calling him a “terrible situation”, and asked that people “join me to pray for all those involved!”
He also called the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, to offer his condolences and ordered that the flags be flown in the middle of the staff.
Democrats have long argued that easy access to weapons and lax weapons laws in some states has fed the massive shooting epidemic. Trump over the years has focused on mental health problems and school safety when talking about armed violence.
