Why So Many Women Take Antidepressants

     “Most new moms get the baby blues. But it could be something more serious: postpartum depression.”

     So reads the title of a piece by Laura Ungar for the Associated Press last week. It is just one “unbiased” news report that leads women down a rabbit hole of uncertainty about their mental health and offers them the panacea of antidepressants for any woe.

     Ungar’s article starts off noting that the rate of postpartum depression in women doubled from 2010 to 2021 “partly due to improved screening and diagnosis.” She doesn’t mention that it has also doubled because of a tsunami of “factual” articles like the one Laura is herself writing. After all, the Associated Press touts itself as publishing “factual nonpartisan news for the last 180 years.” It’s news, they say, “without an agenda.”

     They’ve run Ungar’s article daily for a week, apparently just to make sure it gets the “nonpartisan” coverage they feel it deserves.

     Ungar first suggests to readers – women, of course, given the topic — that the DSM mood disorder can be hard to differentiate from the common “baby blues” women experience because of a radical shift in hormone levels. She then says how common it is – 8 out of 10 new mothers experience it – and then quotes Dr. Jennifer Payne, an expert in reproductive psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

     “Moms will feel kind of more emotional than normal,” the good doctor says in an utterly imprecise diagnosis that could easily apply to any new mom.

     By the way, just what is a “reproductive psychiatrist” anyway?

     Ungar then suggests the help of the screening tool a woman can use and which is often given at a postpartum checkup. The short questionnaire asks how often a recent mom has experienced feelings of sadness, panic, or worry. A “high” score, of course, means further evaluation is needed. From an expert reproductive psychiatrist like Dr. Jennifer Payne, we suppose.

     Next Payne is quoted again, but this time with far more specific and scary postpartum symptoms such as “feel negatively and badly about themselves. They’ll feel that they’re a bad mother. They might not feel attached to the baby very much.”

     The female audience for the article has now descended a few more levels down into the rabbit hole.

     Next Ungar tells the story of Jenna Carberg, a new mother who had thoughts of self-harm after giving birth and went to a psychiatric facility for a few days and then “did better for a while.” However, she did need to be prescribed Vyvanse in order for her to feel “like myself again,” she said.

     Ungar does not mention that some of the Black Box warnings for Vyvanse are “may cause or worsen new or pre-existing psychosis, bipolar symptoms, or aggression” and that such stimulants “can cause sudden death, stroke, and heart attacks in adults with pre-existing serious heart conditions.” It is a Schedule II controlled substance and has a “moderate potential for abuse and dependence.”
 
     Instead of giving that appropriate warning, she says that the antidepressants Zoloft and Prozac, among others, are also available from your local Jennifer Payne. Finally, she quotes Dr. Kerry Hudson, an OB-GYN at Newport Women’s Health Services in Rhode Island.

     “When we get people help, I think they can have a good future ahead of them,” Dr. Hudson says. “You don’t have to suffer in silence.”

     Dr. Hudson may not be talking about antidepressant help, but that is not clarified. Instead, help is now implicitly equated to dangerous Big Pharma medications.

     Not a very long slide all the way down the rabbit hole at all, is it, to the “help equals drugs” equation? To make the descent convincing Ungar has put her readers into the good company of other medically educated women who must know more than you do, mom, about your own mind and body.

     This is the kind of continuous public brainwashing that has led to 15 percent of all women taking antidepressants today and 25 percent of all women from 40-60 years old on antidepressants.

     Yes. That’s more than twice as many as men taking antidepressants.