On April 14, 2026, in the southeastern Turkish district of Siverek in Şanlıurfa province, a former 19-year-old student walked into his old high school, Ahmet Koyuncu Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, and opened fire on students and staff, wounding at least 16 people before killing himself. At the same time, Turkey is drowning in antidepressants, with use nearly doubling in a decade and millions pulled into a crisis created by behavioral health and drug companies that sell a pill for every human problem instead of fixing the systems that cause the harm. This is not an isolated tragedy; it is the predictable product of a psychiatric drug industry that has spun out of control, with governments acting as partners instead of watchdogs, expanding uses, loosening safeguards, and shielding the system from scrutiny while classrooms and families absorb the consequences.

In Turkey, antidepressant consumption has surged year after year, turning these drugs into a quiet backbone of social policy rather than a last‑resort medical tool. Pharmacies now move well over 60 million boxes annually, up from roughly 30–35 million a decade ago, and reports indicate more than 70 million boxes were sold in 2025. Prof. Dr. Nesrin Dilbaz of NPİstanbul Brain Hospital warns that “1 in 10 people in Turkey use antidepressants,” a stark signal of how deeply these drugs have penetrated everyday life. Other experts say regular antidepressant use has roughly doubled in ten years, from about three in every 100 people to about six. Turkey is not in the very top tier of users, but it is firmly in the high‑use group, with around 40 to 50 daily doses per 1,000 people per day—far above many nations and just below places like Iceland and Portugal.

Around the world, psychiatric drug use has exploded. In rich countries, people now take the equivalent of more than 120 psychiatric doses per 1,000 people every single day, as if more than one in ten citizens were on a full‑strength psychiatric drug all year long. In some nations, antidepressant use is so high that well over 10 percent of the population is effectively on a daily dose. Turkey now sits in the middle of this high‑use club: not at the very top, but far above countries where these drugs are still used sparingly.

Meanwhile, the money keeps pouring in. The global antidepressant drugs market is projected to rise from about 19–20 billion dollars in the mid‑2020s to more than 26 billion dollars by 2034, with long‑term prescribing and market expansion built into the business model. Across most wealthy nations, antidepressant consumption has climbed with almost no serious reversal; everywhere you look, the curve bends the same way: more pills, more years on them, more markets to capture.

Psychiatry today rests on judgments that are subjective, yet it claims the power to turn human suffering into permanent labels and life‑long drug regimens with no real accountability. The “chemical imbalance” story that sold these drugs to the public has been abandoned in the scientific literature, but the marketing and clinical culture built on it roll on unchanged. So we are left with brutal questions no regulator or professional body wants to face in plain language: Are we supposed to accept that, out of the hundreds of millions of people on psychiatric drugs worldwide, some will descend into extreme violence or kill themselves, and that this is simply the cost of having 10 percent or more of whole populations medicated? Is it acceptable that once people are put on these drugs, they are turned into life‑long “patients,” never truly recovering, only rotated from one pill to another while their original distress is buried under side effects, withdrawal, and stigma?

Psychiatry has claimed the right to define who is “ill,” to pathologize normal reactions to trauma and hardship, and to saturate societies with drugs on the promise of treatment that never ends. A world that tolerates this without demanding independent science, honest risk disclosure, and real, non‑drug options is a world that has agreed, by silence, that some level of mass murder, suicide, and lifelong chemical dependency is an acceptable trade‑off. The real question is whether we will keep paying that price, or finally say that human beings are worth more than a diagnosis code and a prescription refill.

By 2026, worldwide spending on psychiatric drugs alone is estimated at roughly 80–85 billion dollars a year, including about 83 billion in psychotherapeutic and psychotropic medications such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti‑anxiety drugs, and mood stabilizers. At the same time, global behavioral‑health services now account for well over 100 billion dollars annually. It is time we start asking the most basic question about these mass killings: were the killers on psychiatric drugs, and why are authorities so reluctant to give the public a clear answer?