Antidepressants have been linked to 28 reports of murder and 32 cases of murderous thoughts, in cases referred to the UK medicines regulator over the past 30 years, a BBC investigation has discovered.

The pills, known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) which includes common drugs like Prozac and Seroxat, are prescribed 40 million times each year in Britain.

But an Freedom of Information request for BBC Panorama discovered that the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency had received 60 reports of murders or murderous thoughts linked to the drugs in the past three decades.

Professor Peter Tyrer, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London, has been assessing the performance of SSRIs since they were first introduced in the 1980s.

Although the link between murders and antidepressants in cases referred to the MHRA do not mean the drugs caused the events, Prof Tyrer told programme-makers that the extreme side effects of the drugs should be investigated further.

“You can never be quite certain with a rare side-effect whether it’s linked to a drug or not because it could be related to other things,” he said.

“But it’s happened just too frequently with this class of drug to make it random. It’s obviously related to the drug but we don’t know exactly why.”