In the flurry of coverage following the shootings, the media sought all possible explanations for the seeming outbreak of teenage violence, yet ignored the possibility that a prescription drug might be at fault.  While devoting pages to possible explanations ranging from lax gun control laws to the type of clothing the gunmen wore, only a few articles even mentioned that the lead gunman was on Luvox, an SSRI prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Even though many suggested causal factors were weak and later discarded, the time and energy given to debating them created issues that would remain in the national consciousness after the media had moved on. 

In contrast to some of these weak and unverifiable potential causes, the possibility that Harris’ actions were influenced in part by an adverse reaction to Luvox bears considerable substantiation in current medical research.  SSRIs are known to have an assortment of fairly well researched side effects, among them mania, aggression and suicidal ideation (which includes desires for both suicide and violent outbursts). Studies in the Journal of  the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have found manic behaviors associated with Prozac use in 12 to 18 year-olds with obsessive compulsive disorder.  The Biological Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has found a similar incidence of mania in patients taking antidepressants.  The Clinical Handbook of Psychotropic Drugs reports that hypomania or mania have been found to occur in as many as 3.7 to 20% of patients taking SSRIs, with an increase in susceptibility to side effects whe taken by children.  Other side effects reported—psychosis, aggression, and suicidal urges—all could have played a major role in the Littleton killings. 

These particular side effects bear some concordance to the details of the Columbine shooting.  The grandiose plans Harris made for the massacre suggest mania, and the suicide that followed could be linked to a pharmacologically induced increase in suicidal thoughts. The Handbook also warns that severe effects can result from abrupt discontinuation of medication, or concurrent nicotine or alcohol use.  While it unknown whether Eric Harris smoked or drank alcohol, the media could have uncovered additional risk factors with minimal effort had this been pursued.  Although these studies cannot provide definitive evidence for whether manic or aggressive side effects were responsible for or influential in inspiring the killings, they suggest an important line of inquiry.  Because antidepressants are so widely used, any information that illuminates dangerous aspects of these drugs must be conveyed to the public. 

Although Harris’ psychotropic drug use would provide a rich and important avenue of investigation, Luvox was largely ignored in the newspaper and magazine coverage of Littleton, eschewed in favor of a discussion of gun control, popular culture, and parenting.  Within the deluge of articles that appeared in the six months following the shootings (17,548 articles), only 0.4% of all coverage even mentions that Harris took Luvox (71 articles).  Still fewer attempted to discuss whether his antidepressant use could have been a factor in the killings.  Out of eight articles sampled containing either Luvox or antidepressant, only two explored side effects or implied a possible connection between the drug and Harris’s actions.  The remaining articles either mentioned Luvox in reference to toxicology reports, which revealed that he had Luvox in his blood at the time of the killings, or pointed out that Harris was rejected from the Marine Corps because he concealed his prescription drug use when applying.  In contrast, most articles exhaustively explored other potential causes, including gun control, violence in television and the movies, video games, Goth dress and culture, and parenting.  In a search for each of these issues in articles that contained Columbine or Littleton in the headline or lead paragraph, each issue claimed a large percentage of articles.  Gun control appeared in 20.5% of those articles, video games in 19.3%, violence on TV and in the movies in 6.9%, Goth in 3.1%, and the word parenting in 3.0%.  Each of these percentages is significantly higher than the scant 0.7% of articles that mentioned Luvox or antidepressants, suggesting the print media seriously overlooked Harris’ prescription drug use. [Chart]

While immediate and voluble in its condemnation of popular culture and lax gun control as responsible for the horrors that occurred in Littleton, the media mentioned Luvox infrequently and with weaker language. Although countless articles decried our cultural obsession with violence and demanded that the second amendment be repealed, only a scant few mentioned antidepressants at all, often adding caveats suggesting that “[their] relation to [the] April attack at Columbine High School is unclear.”   Issues such as violence in video games and the availability of guns generally served as the main focus of articles, and were far more likely to appear in the headline or lead paragraphs than were mentions of Luvox. 

Articles about issues other than Luvox also used the full force of language in reinforcing their claim, stating that video games must “wreak havoc”  on the psyche of young gamers or observing that the gunmen “dressed in black and spoke in the icy dialect of madness”.  Such forceful wording created a vivid image of causation where actual connections were tenuous at best—while drowning out less potent mention of other factors.  The few articles that mentioned Harris’ use of Luvox generally relegated this remark to the last sentence of an article, or addressed it in a very limited scope.  The powerful language used to address gun control or popular culture effectively distracted from the few weaker reports of Luvox use, drawing the public’s attention away from an issue that may be damaging to advertisers. 

Although subsequent coverage sometimes softened or refuted the initial attacks on other factors, the primacy and intensity of these first articles framed the debate and crystallized these issues in the national consciousness.  Later articles could agree or disagree with the initial stance on issues such as gun control or violence in the movies, but could not afford to ignore these topics altogether.  The country’s reaction to the Columbine shootings reveals the influence the media has over public opinion.  Because the media chose to focus on the Goth dress of the two Littleton killers, this became an identifier for kids at risk nation-wide.  In the aftermath of the Littleton massacre, teenagers that dressed in black and that participated in the Goth scene were (perhaps unfairly) singled out as potential murderers.  Had the media addressed pharmaceutical issues with the same degree of scrutiny, some of this destructive attention could have been redirected towards understanding the possible dangers of prescribing antidepressants to children. Although antidepressant use is no less tenable an explanation than clothing choice, the media failed in giving this issue comparable attention.   By flooding newspaper and magazine pages with powerfully worded articles blaming popular culture and lax gun control, the media averted meaningful debate over whether antidepressants present a serious risk to our youth. 

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