Back when I was an investigative reporter at the ABC, I researched and filmed a documentary about antidepressants.
The premise was hardly radical.
I was investigating whether the drugs were being prescribed too widely, especially among children, and there was evidence that in a small number of people the drugs could trigger akathisia, severe agitation, suicidal thoughts and aggression.
One of the women I interviewed had a story I have never forgotten.
She was a 33-year-old mother of two from Western Australia who had tried to kill herself and her daughters, aged nine and two — not once, but twice.
On the first attempt she drove them to a car park and attached a hose to the exhaust of the family car. The hose twisted and the attempt failed.
Later that day she tried again, in another parking bay, and left the engine running for 15 minutes before her nine-year-old daughter managed to open the car door.
That is how they survived.
There is no sanitising what happened. Two little girls came terrifyingly close to being killed by their own mother, who had been taking antidepressants.
Her case later appeared in a paper in PLoS Medicine by psychiatrist David Healy and colleagues, examining a possible relationship between antidepressants and violence.
She had first been prescribed the SSRI paroxetine. The dose was increased from 20mg to 30mg. She became more anxious and agitated and was switched to venlafaxine, which was raised to 300mg a day.
Healy and colleagues reported that her records documented increasing anxiety and agitation during those increases—but her clinical notes did not link the deterioration to the medication.
Then came the attempts to kill herself and her children.
When the case reached sentencing in the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 2004, the authors reported that the judge found there were “substantial grounds for implicating venlafaxine” in her behaviour. She received a suspended sentence.
Healy and colleagues concluded that the case appeared to involve treatment-induced akathisia.
“Restlessness” does not come close to describing akathisia.
People who have experienced it describe an unbearable inner agitation, a feeling of wanting to crawl out of their own skin, an inability to escape their own mind.
Some describe it almost as an out-of-body experience—a terrifying sense that they are no longer themselves. Severe cases have been associated with self-harm and suicidality.
I thought the public deserved to know that. But the ABC disagreed.
For two years the TV network actively suppressed the documentary, then decided it would never air. I was told the subject was too controversial and the risk of people stopping their medications was too great.
Kennedy tried to raise the issue
In 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr raised the possibility of a relationship between antidepressants and school shootings, calling for more research. He did not claim the drugs caused all school shootings. He said the relationship should be studied.
But that was enough to provoke outrage.
A group of US legislators accused him of promoting “disproven and outright false theories” about psychiatric medications and warned that it would stigmatise people with mental-health issues and discourage them from seeking help.
But there is already evidence that some antidepressants can cause precisely the kinds of behavioural disturbances that make the question worth investigating.