Psychiatrist Stuart Shipko, M.D.: Stuart Shipko again uses same old 'Paxil made him do it' defense on wife-killer when every other psychiatrist who evaluated the murderer determined he suffered from psychosis

What can you say about Dr. Stuart Lee Shipko's lack of knowledge in psychiatry, or as a doctor for that matter?


Dr. Stuart Shipko loses another case based on his belief Paxil withdrawal syndrome caused someone to die

In virtually every case we have reviewed involving Dr. Shipko as a paid expert witness in the courts, he has used the same one-note criminal defense that all the violent deaths he evaluated were due, in some manner, to some kind of adverse reaction to the anti-depressant drug Paxil.

To be fair though, in the case of kidnapper Dennis Shellhouse, Dr. Shipko claimed that two different kinds of SSRI (Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor) anti-depressant medications, Paxil and Prosac, and possibly a low-dose of prednisone were responsible for his medication-induced psychotic state of "unconsciousness," wherein the kidnapper methodically planned out and research a kidnap-for-ransom plot over a 6-month period in his home in Alabama.

Somehow, Shellhouse was "unconscious" during this entire time when he researched and put the plan together, according to Dr. Shipko, which is just laughable.

Paxil, like all other SSRI anti-depressant drugs (e.g., Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, Zoloft, etc.), have some adverse side effects with a small minority of patients when they are are initially started on the drug, suddenly are taken off of the drug, or when the dosage is dramatically changed, (e.g., nausea, vomiting, sensations of shocks, changes in mood, agitation, increased tendency to feel depressed or energetic, etc.), but no one has proven to have suffered from psychiatric blackouts or psychotic episodes from this mood-altering class of drug, especially at the low doses that Dr. Shipko has claimed his criminal clientele have allegedly been using the drug in the criminal cases he testified on.

But apparently for the one-note wonder Dr. Shipko, Paxil-induced psychosis—if such a thing actually exists—is his only go-to area of expertise, as he appears to know no other reasonable psychiatric defense or diagnosis as a psychiatric forensic expert witness.

Shipko has already admitted in court that he has no training or knowledge in this specialized area of psychiatry—to properly assess any of the defendants who have paid him handsomely to come up with a reasonable psychiatric legal defense to avoid going to jail.


The anti-depressant drug Paxil

In Simon Faeed Ranteesi's case, it was no different, but in his case, Ranteesi suffered from an underlying psychotic thought disorder that Dr. Shipko badly misdiagnosed as only a severe drug-indued mood disorder, which had no relevance to Mr. Ranteesi being unable to remember the events of the murder.

More than a year before the murder, Ranteesi's estranged wife Milia, a corrections officer at Yolo County Jail, left him in June of 2001 for another man after becoming involved with an inmate at the jail she worked at.

The inmate, a former Iraqi soldier, soon became an object of obsession for Ranteesi, who imagined the man was a double agent working for Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the CIA, and the FBI who was also out to get him.

Ranteesi became irrationally fearful of the "other man" as being a "Muslim terrorist," who was terrorizing his family and wanted to take his wife. Ranteesi went so far as to report the other man to the FBI, but there was nothing that they found incriminating about the other man to do anything about the situation.

The fear that this man was going to kill his wife and children not only made Ranteesi delusional and terrified for his life, but it also made Ranteesi very emotional to the point of crying a lot uncontrollably, so a doctor prescribed Paxil to treat his depression and anxiety in July of 2002.

On August 6, 2002, Ranteesi and his estranged wife had an argument in the parking lot of the family home they once shared over whether their teen-aged daughter, Rachal, could visit her relatives for the weekend in Burlingame, CA.

Ranteesi didn't want his daughter to go because he wanted her to stay home and help take care of her younger brothers and because he was paranoid that his in-laws were putting thoughts in her head to turn her against him.

When Milia arrived to pick up her daughter to take her to see her relatives, Ranteesi began arguing with his estranged wife that Rachal could not go, and he blamed his estranged wife for his daughter being defiant against his orders. So he took out all his anger on Milia with extreme violence.

In a rage during the heat of the argument, Ranteesi picked up a metal welding jack from his work truck—since he was a welder by trade—and brutally bludgeoned his wife to death in front of his four children. Ranteesi claimed afterwards that he could not remember the act of killing his wife.

Unfortunately for Ranteesi, he had a long history of domestic abuse with his wife, and he had made many threats in the past that he was going to kill her for "disrespecting him," even long before he was ever put on Paxil, so a drug-induced manic state defense was not likely going to work because there was still a long history of violent physical threats and criminal malice behind his motives to kill his wife.

Even if you are determined to be insane, which this guy clearly was, if the intent behind an assailant with diminished capacity was consciously to act out with malice, then the person can still be held criminally responsible for his/her actions in the eyes of the law.

And so the same, old song and dance went on with Dr. Shipko as a psychiatric expert witness on June 9, 2006, claiming his paying client was under the influence of Paxil when he did the unthinkable. But in this case, Ranteesi was also evaluated by three other psychiatric experts, who all independently came to the same conclusion that the accused suffered from a delusional disorder, with a persecutory aspect to his delusions.

Unfortunately for Mr. Ranteesi, his delusional beliefs could not account for any of the motives on why he acted out to brutally beat his wife to death with a heavy metal welding jack in front of his children. The motives for acting out so violently against his estranged wife were all attributable to a well-established, and deeply in-grained contempt he had for her.

Dr. Shipko, after interviewing the defendant on June 9, 2006 for only half an hour, decided to terminate his only face-to-face interview with Mr. Ranteesi, because Shipko did not feel he was not getting "reliable and credible answers from Mr. Ranteesi."

In other words, Mr. Ranteesi was ranting and raving like a real crazy person with a legitimate mental illness during his interview with Dr. Shipko, but he didn't want to assess any part of Mr. Ranteesi's inherent psychosis because he got flustered and didn't know what to make of Mr. Ranteesi's irrational behavior as a bona fide and professional psychiatrist would have and would have been professionally obliged to investigate in depth.

After all, only a real psychiatrist would know how to assess and handle a real crazy person, and Dr. Shipko didn't think this underlying and inherent psychotic state of mind of the defendant, that was very apparent to everyone else, was relevant to his personal agenda to crow-bar in his preconceived notion that the defendant was suffering from a temporary "Paxil-induced manic state."

Forget the fact that Dr. Shipko totally missed the boat on identifying an easily identifiable psychotic thought disorder in his subject, that even a layman could figure out, Shipko had a preconceived notion of tagging him instead with a drug-induced mood disorder that there really was no evidence to support.

The real shocker from Dr. Shipko was that he thought he could better get to the bottom of Mr. Ranteesi's underlying problem by just reviewing the police interview, the police and coroners' reports on Milia's death, and the other psychiatric examiners' evaluations rather than evaluating the subject in the flesh as any other expert witness would be expected to do. Thus, this was again another psychiatric evaluation he would do strictly on paper, in retrospect, trying to determine the state of mind of a murderer in the past tense, much like a psychic would do.

There has been a very negligent pattern with Dr. Shipko where he basically is so lazy that he merely comments on the paper evidence of other forensic experts' work, much like a judge, jury, or trier-of-facts would do in a trial, and then come up with an unsubstantiated theory based on his product liability claims of the hypothetical side effects of a drug with no basis in reality to explain away the behavior; however, he does not appear to really understand the role a psychiatric expert plays in a court case, which is to evaluate and assess a human subject in the flesh at the time of an examination.

Unfortunately for Dr. Shipko's clients, he thinks his role in a case as an expert witness is to be the judge and jury over everyone. Something he is woefully lacking in knowledge and expertise to ever be, and that fact becomes very apparent when he has to explain his conclusions and back them up with evidence based solely on what he observed as an evaluating forensic psychiatrist.

On cross-examination, Dr. Shipko's outlandish theories fell apart in a big way because even the prosecutors began asking basic questions about Mr. Ranteesi that Dr. Shipko should have asked during his evaluation of the subject. He acknowledged that he had never "interviewed a killer who was on an antidepressant like Paxil at the time of the crime and said they couldn't remember."

He also acknowledged that, while he has prescribed Paxil to hundreds of his own patients through the years, none of his patients killed anyone while on Paxil or any other antidepressants; therefore, he had no experience to a violent reaction from one of his patients who was on the drug. He also agreed with the prosecutor that Mr. Ranteesi "had a lot of reasons in his own mind to kill his wife other than Paxil," commenting further, "He had a history of being abusive."

Dr. Shipko also opined under oath during cross-examination that the amount of Paxil prescribed to Mr. Ranteesi could not have put him into an unconscious state and that a person on Paxil was still very capable of forming the intent to murder, contradicting his own prior testimony. Contradictions to his own prior testimony ultimately unraveled Dr. Shipko's credibility on the witness stand.

He agreed with the prosecutor in no uncertain terms that a person on Paxil could form the necessary intent to kill.

Q: Now, would you agree with me, Doctor, that a person who's on Paxil, let's say, a 20 milligram dose, one time a day, that was the recommendation, right the prescription?

A: Yes.

Q: Who is on that, they can plan to kill, couldn't they?

A: Absent any other factors, a general person taking Paxil has the ability to make a plan to kill.

Q: And to carry out the plan to kill?

A: All other factors being equal, the Paxil would be irrelevant.

Q: That's it. It would be irrelevant, right? Because a person who is on Paxil can decide to kill or not kill just like anybody who is not on Paxil, true?

A: Yes.

"[W]hen individuals commit particularly violent acts," Shipko went on to declare, "they generally do not have a recall of doing that." Such misleading blanket generalizations as this statement had no basis in any of the current forensic psychiatric thinking about violent acts committed by all criminals.

Thus, Dr. Shipko choked under cross examination yet again and put the nail in the coffin in another criminal trial for his paying clients.

So even by just what Dr. Shipko testified to, one can see why a man with a bona fide mental illness would be found guilty of murder. It's really sad because, had Mr. Ranteesi's counsel gotten a more credible psychiatric expert on the stand, he may have actually been found not guilty by reason of insanity, which was probably his only shot at not going to jail.

One thing that one of the other psychiatric expert said in the trial we found to be very interesting. Psychiatrist Dr. Carlton Purviance said there was controversy concerning the practice of some psychiatrists rendering a retrospective diagnosis, or diagnosing what someone's mental state was on a date in the past.

"You can reliably diagnose what you see at the moment," said Dr. Purviance. "It's difficult to diagnose a person for some distant date."

Well, that's all that Stuart Shipko ever does because he can't be bother to examine a patient in the flesh on his own, so he only comments on other witnesses' testimonies and draws his own uninformed conclusions from hearsay. Unfortunately for anyone who hires him or has the great misfortune to listen to what he says, those conclusions have nothing to do with the field of psychiatry.