U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R. Ala.. says mental health disorders and the over prescription of medications to treat them are to blame for the drastic increase in school shootings over the last thirty years.

But mental health researchers argue that other factors like gun access are more responsible for these crimes.

“I have seen kids’ attitudes change,” Tuberville said in a recent interview with Nicole Shanahan.

“I dealt with 120 a year for 35 years, and it was just devastating to watch it creep and then just run into our system in terms of kids that were having problems.”

Tuberville said that during his time as a football coach, he began to notice more students coming in each year that were being treated for ADD or ADHD.

“We are so chemically dependent, and it’s now starting with our younger kids,” he said.

“All the attention deficit drugs. Anything that our parents used to handle without drugs, we’ve gotten away from that.”

“Everything is drug dependency, and we can’t stay down this path. Because who knows what these drugs are going to do to you.”

Shanahan said this drug dependency was the cause of school shootings in America, which have increased by more than twelve times in the last 50 years, according to the American College of Surgeons.

“The school shooters … if you just take a random sampling, almost all of them are on prescription medications,” she said.

“These individuals are being led to do such an egregious act against humanity, the most innocent amongst us, children in a school setting.”

“These school shootings, they are not because of issues around the Second Amendment at all. They’re issues around how we medicate young people in our country.”

Tuberville agreed.

“It’s not a Second Amendment problem whatsoever. It is a mental health problem … that nobody wants to address.” “They want more and more drugs put in these kids instead of finding out what in the world is going on.”

Viral posts claiming that “psych meds are linked to 90% of school shootings” were debunked by multiple researchers in 2023.

“Available studies suggest a minority of school shooters were prescribed medication prior to committing their crimes,” reads a previous article from USA TODAY.

A 2022 study conducted by Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry found that there’s no evidence of a link between medication and shootings.

“SSRIs, and psych meds in general, are not responsible for mass shootings or violence in any way,” Dr. Ragy Girgis, who led the study, wrote in a 2023 email to USA TODAY.

“Not only are a small minority of mass shooters … taking therapeutic doses of these medications at the time of the mass shootings, but these psych meds have specific anti-violence properties.”

Girgis continued, “what that means is that, if a mass murderer happens to be taking a psychiatric medication, the medication was probably incidental, as is nearly all mental illness when present among mass murderers.”

James Densley, the co-founder of the Violence Project, which tracks mass shootings in the U.S., said in the same article “All because someone was prescribed an SSRI doesn’t mean (a) they were taking it and (b) the SSRIs caused them to perpetrate their crime.”

“This is a case of correlation, not causation, and one factor of many in the life histories of mass shooters,” he said.

Columbia’s study also adds that mental illness in general, medicated or not, accounts for “a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S.”

“First, understand that mental illness as the primary cause of any mass murder, especially mass shooting, is uncommon,” reads a 2022 interview with Girgis on the Columbia website.

“Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing.”

“They’re generally committed by middle-aged men who are responding to a severe and acute stressor, so they’re not planned, which makes them very difficult to prevent,” Girgis continued. “So, we must look much further upstream.”

“This is why it is important to consider ways to manage gun availability, for example.”

And while the Child Mind Institute and the National Institutes of Health have stated that it becomes more difficult to gather data on the long-term effects of ADHD medications after two years, several researchers have published studies investigating the question.

Rachel Klein, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, and a group of colleagues did a two-year controlled study of more than 100 school-aged kids back in the late 1970s and then followed up with them repeatedly over 33 years, according to an article published by the Child Mind Institute.

Most are now 41 years old, and those who took ADHD medication showed no negative effects, in terms of medical health or other functioning, compared to those who didn’t.

“Dr. Klein notes that we don’t know for sure what the long-term effects of this medication on the brain might be, because of the great difficulty of treating patients a scientifically systematic way for a long time, and of measuring the results,” the article reads.

“But she adds that parents have to weigh the unknowns of long-term use against the known risks of not treating ADHD in children: a higher rate of school failure, conflict with parents and authorities, and dangerous behaviors.”