How Psychiatric Authority Overrides Common Sense

     Today half the people who start taking an antidepressant experience at least one negative “side effect” for the first several weeks. Nausea, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, constipation, anxiety, and restlessness are the most common symptoms, and sometimes they can last longer than that. In some cases they are permanent.

     That’s hardly surprising. They’re putting a highly toxic chemical into their bodies. If one ingested any other food, drink, or medicinal item that produced those effects, common sense would say not to take it any longer. However, people push themselves through those initial warning signs of dangerous toxicity from antidepressants because they have come to believe they will be “helped” to deal with the problems of life by taking an antidepressant.

     That belief is so strong that they even disregard the Black Box warning on antidepressants for the increased risk of suicide, self harm, and heightened agitation. They also choose to ignore the FDA’s warning for the severe withdrawal symptoms when one stops taking an antidepressant.

     Again, common sense would suggest it’s not worth those dangers to taking and antidepressant given the risk/reward ratio involved.

     The authority of the idea that antidepressants “help” and that they are “good” has become more dominant for these people than their own common sense. Psychiatric opinion has come to trump personal integrity.

     How’d that happen?

     Back in the nineteen-fifties “shrinks” in America were for the most part ridiculed for their Freudian gobbledygook. The first DSM was compiled in 1962, but it was a 32 page volume that merely unified the current diagnostic approaches to mental illness.

     By 1955 the “tranquilizer” Miltown became popular as the first “happy pill” after being promoted in the press and by Hollywood celebrities. Regular doctors prescribed it, not just psychiatrists, and at the height of its cultural popularity about eight million Americans took Miltown.

     Today, of course, more than eighty million Americans take antidepressants. In the last seventy-five years psychiatrists have from being the butt of cultural jokes to being the authorities on mental health.

     By the time regular doctors began to think that Miltown might not be any more tranquilizing than a dummy sugar pill or that it was really just an expensive sedative, pharmaceutical companies had seen its success and they soon began producing the first antidepressants of the early nineteen-sixties.

     The DSM was the expanded slightly in 1968, about the same time that scientists noticed that chemicals changed brain chemistry (no kidding). From that observation psychiatrists came up with their chemical imbalance theory of mental illness.

     In 1980 a completely revised third edition of the DSM was published and it became the psychiatric bible of diagnoses which it remains today, listing every little human foible as a mental disorder. Combined with psychiatry’s bogus chemical imbalance theory, that made psychiatrists “true” medical doctors, but expert in mental illness.

     In 1997 the FDA allowed pharmaceutical companies to broadly advertize psychotropic drugs on television and in magazines and newspapers. Big Pharma began brainwashing the public about antidepressants’ ability to correct the chemical imbalance that was making everyone unhappy or anxious…to the tune of spending billions of marketing dollars from the now lavish profits from their antidepressant sales.

     We have 80,000,000 Americans now who have abandoned their common sense to psychiatric authority. They’ve been brainwashed to believe that someone else’s idea is more important than their own tangible experience and that someone else’s idea is more important than their own mental health.

     And psychiatry is no longer ridiculed…as it still should be.