In particular, I’d put my money on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of psychotropics that includes such brand names as Luvox®, Paxil®, and Zoloft®.

SSRIs, when misused or misprescribed (e.g. prescribed for a mental disorder other than the indicated disorder, perhaps because of misdiagnosis of the disorder), are far and away the #1 cause in this day and age of a mental condition known as “hypermania.” Other, rarer causes include a brain tumor (e.g. the Texas University sniper of the 1960s) or a blow to the head (e.g. Andrew Kehoe, perpetrator of the worst-ever school massacre, whose body count equals the COMBINED TOTAL of BOTH Columbine AND Virginia Tech! This one tends to be forgotten and ignored these days because it doesn’t fit the pet theories of either right nor left-wingers — it was the Bath School Disaster of May, 1927; the fourth worst mass murder on U.S. soil in U.S. history [behind 9/11, Oklahoma City, and the NYC Night Club Arson]).

Hypermania causes its victims to lose emotional attachments to others, nullifying or even reversing feelings of love. They also lose their conscience (SSRIs inhibit the conscience even when working PROPERLY! The pharmaceutical companies actually ADVERTISE this effect [“Do you suffer from feelings of … guilt?” What IS guilt, but the CONSCIENCE!?]!), and have a vastly over-inflated sense of self.

The perpetrators of many (far and away too many to be chance) of the modern rash of premeditated school shooting sprees were on SSRIs (Luvox in the case of Eric Harris of Columbine, Paxil in the case of Dylan Klebold, and we all know about Cho of Virginia Tech., etc., but there are far more than just them).

SSRI-induced hypermania is also implicated in the decade-earlier rash of “unexplained” lethal violence among a particular group of adults that was so shocking at the time that it added a whole new two-word idiom to the English language: “Going Postal.”