Dr. Keith Humphreys

I mean, you know, even at a lower rate, there would be, the disparity is so huge in where mass shootings occur that that's just not going to be the, you know, the likely explanatory variable.

What about suicides?

There is some worry about adolescents on SSRIs.

This has been a really hard-fought, debated issue for years, and it's tough because depression, of course, raises suicide risk, right?

So by definition, if someone's getting an SSRI, they already have some risk present.

I think there's some legitimate worry with teenagers.

I would say it's non-zero, but to be honest, it's not...

completely in my wheelhouse, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

There are people who've worked on this much more deeply than I can.

Still, though, I would say there are many teenagers on these medications who benefit from them, also there's no doubt about that.

Yeah, I honestly don't know what the evidence is in that particular case.

I will say just something very general about medications, how we approve them.

They're approved on short-term trials.

I mean, if you look at like the typical trial for opioids and pain, you know, it's like 9 weeks or 12 weeks.

And there's lots of medications and opioids are a good example, that doesn't necessarily mean that taking them for a year gives you the same effects because for example you become tolerant to them or you might become addicted to them and all that.

And that is a general challenge of how we regulate these medications.

There are post-marketing studies that are done, but particularly if something is a complicated and rare,

from a widely used medication, it's hard to figure that out.

I mean doctors will make reports that get aggregated up, but that's hard to figure out.

Yeah, so Nolan and I were office neighbors and I really liked him, he was a huge loss.