So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety?
Home Caffeine Blog Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? By Robert Carter/October 28, 2024 The National Institute of Mental Health and Mental Health America bemoan the “fact” that 20 percent of all Americans experience mental health problems, and that 56 percent of those people do not receive any help for their condition. How do they know about that 56 percent? By those nine short survey questions that begin “…in the last two weeks have you felt unexpectedly sad or unexpectedly anxious…?” Depression and anxiety – known through the psychiatric labels of Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, both taken from the DSM – are the most common “mental disorders,” per them. Not surprisingly, of course, two of Big Pharma’s most profitable mental health drugs these days are the antidepressant Xanax and the anti-anxiety medication Lexipro. How do those drugs “work”? By making you feel nothing…not any sadness, not any anxiety…and, in fact, not anything at all. Is that really preferable to feeling a bit of sadness or a bit of anxiety? Aren’t sadness and anxiety part of living life? Don’t most people usually recover all by themselves from the loss of a relative or dear pet or from the rigors of corporate stress…without having to resort to some self-numbing medication? Interestingly enough, many clinical trials have actually shown that those taking the placebo rather than the antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication being tested do just about as well handling their sadness or anxiety. In other words, taking nothing – a placebo — is pretty close to as effective as taking one of Big Pharma’s dangerous drugs. Those trial results are hardly well promoted by Big Pharma, but they are there. Life itself may be like the placebo. Time may or may not heal all wounds, but most people get over the trials and tribulations that life hands them all on their own. And, if you thought you felt bad because of the sadness or anxiety you felt before you started taking Xanax or Lexipro, wait until you see how bad you feel trying to get off thosemedications. The withdrawal symptoms are brutal. It can take years to taper off from those medications at a rate slow enough that you don’t want to commit suicide just to avoid the unpublicized “side effects” of withdrawal. As The New York Times reported in 2018, patients who “try to stop taking the drugs often say they cannot.” It cited a survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, where “about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so because of these symptoms.” Another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users found that more than 130 reported withdrawal symptoms that could be “severe and long lasting.” Psychiatrists originally told the patients who were suffering these harrowing physical and mental effects of withdrawal that they were just experiencing their original disorder symptoms resurfacing after they discontinued their medication. That was not so. Many studies now show that the semi-psychotic withdrawal symptoms one experiences after stopping medication are only because of the withdrawal itself from the medication. Those studies have also not been much promoted by Big Pharma or by psychiatry. They should be. Revealing to a patient the possibility of grueling withdrawal symptoms should be done by a psychiatrist – legally – as part of their standard Informed Consent protocol. Maybe none of us thought we were signing up for sadness or anxiety as part of life…but what did most of us know when we signed up for life itself? A temporary sadness or anxiety, appropriate for the rigors of living life, is a far easier fate to endure than the numbing of all feelings while on a drug, or the horrible intensity of even worse feelings while trying to come off it. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil