The FDA has two criteria for testing and approving a medication: its efficiency and its safety.

     “Efficiency” means does it handle the condition it is supposed to handle. “Safety” means does it handle it without undue risk to the consumer.

     If a new antibiotic, for instance, is created to eliminate a particular virus from the body, extensive trials are conducted to see if it actually does so and does so without too many negative “side effects.” If so, that medication is approved for use by the public, but the FDA then further monitors its widespread use for any negative side effects.
That is not the way it works with antidepressants, though.

     For antidepressants on the market before 2004, the standard FDA “side effect” alerts were part of the user information given out with these prescribed drugs. By 2004, however, so many reports of severe suicidal “side effects” had been reported by the public on nine commonly prescribed drugs that the Black Box warnings were mandated by the FDA on all of them them. Celexa, Luvox, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, Serzone, and
Wellbutrin were determined to result in a high risk for suicide when prescribed to adolescents.

     The FDA did not remove them from the market, however.

     Antidepressants (SSRIs) are one type of psychotropic drug, and it is estimated that there are 42,000 deaths a year from psychotropic drugs. 

     So much for the FDA’s safety factor for antidepressants.
  
     How about the efficiency factor?

     With many medicines, effectiveness can be measured by conducting sufficient trials to see if the unwanted condition the medicine addresses is diminished or eliminated by the medicine. With an antibiotic designed to address an unwanted “XYZ” virus, for instance, laboratory tests can be done to see if the “XYZ” virus has been eliminated from the body after the antibiotic is given.

     There is no test, however, that can be done to measure a “chemical imbalance” in the brain associated with depression, anxiety or any other emotional condition. “Chemical imbalance” is a myth promoted by Big Pharma to legitimize psychiatrists as medical doctors and unwanted emotional conditions as diseases.

     There is no such thing, and there is no laboratory test for it.

     Therefore, the efficiency of an antidepressant has no objective, scientific way of being measured in the same way that other medications like antibiotics can be.

     So much for the FDA’s efficiency factor for antidepressants.

     That doesn’t leave any other factors, does it? So why does the FDA continue to approve them?