U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Thursday that the National Institutes of Health is launching a series of studies to determine whether selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other psychiatric medications contribute to violent behavior. Kennedy’s decision comes one day after a mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in which Robin Westman, a 23-year-old transgender former student, opened fire during a morning Mass, killing two children aged eight and ten and wounding 17 others before dying at the scene. Calling mass shootings a “health crisis,” Kennedy noted that several widely prescribed psychiatric drugs carry FDA black-box warnings for suicidal or homicidal ideation. “We can’t exclude those as a culprit,” he said, adding that the new research will examine prescription records, adverse-event data and medical histories that were previously difficult to access because of privacy rules. The initiative is the first federal inquiry of its kind and could reshape prescribing guidelines for the roughly one in ten American adults who use antidepressants. HHS did not give a timeline for the studies but said findings will be released publicly and inform future mental-health policy.