Big Pharma Creates Victims, Not Patients

     43 million Americans take antidepressants today as a result of a massive, long term marketing campaign by psychiatry and Big Pharma. That’s bad enough. As we have learned, those drugs’ “help’ is questionable, at best, and the physical and emotional ordeal of trying to withdraw from them can be horrific.

     Worse, Big Pharma has convinced the American government that there are still millions of people out there suffering from mental health issues and the government needs to increase its funding of programs to “help” them. In other words, 43 million Americans taking antidepressants is still nowhere near enough to satisfy Big Pharma’s multi-billion dollar greed.

     Bogus mental health questionnaires are now handed out at every doctor visit to see if that upset you had last week at work is not actually a sign of an anxiety that requires a daily 10 milligrams of Zoloft just so you can get through the day.

     Big Pharma offers all of these chemical wares under the guise of “help.” The government and do-gooder groups follow innocently along under that same banner, and when their funding programs are challenged, they protest how cruel it is not to expand mental health services for all those poor, suffering souls.

     Big Pharma’s marketing thrust for the last forty years has not only created a vastly expanding market for antidepressants, it has also created a widespread victim mentality within the American culture by enabling the acceptance of the mental health label to every little “overreaction” to life’s upsets and foibles. Big Pharma marketing story tells each of us that we are the effect of daily life and that by taking antidepressants, we can diminish our uncomfortable feelings from being that effect. We are victims, in essence, they say. Individuals have bought into that narrative, as evidenced by those 43 million antidepressant users. The government and other well meaning social groups have also bought into it, and their “help” programs now ride along everywhere on the top of that “everybody is a victim of life” marketing concept. These programs now enable victimhood, not help bring people out of it.

     Government welfare programs originally sought to help those in financial need during the Depression, but today they have created fifth generation Black welfare mothers unable to see any way of supporting themselves other than remaining on the dole. Government welfare has enslaved far more people than racist Southern plantation ever did.

     Big Pharma has convinced too many federal and state governments and non-profits that an expanded mental health system is necessary to help those in need, but like our welfare system, the outcome will ultimately be more slaves, more victims, more antidepressant users in our society.

     Help has degraded into a cruel victimization. 

     Of course, if antidepressants worked, that would not be the case.

     But they don’t.

     What works is Big Pharma marketing.