Dyeing Your Brain: the Origin of Psych Drugs

     Most of us are familiar with the recent forty years of Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging of Americans since the FDA approved Prozac back in 1987. Today almost 80,000,000 Americans are taking antidepressants thanks to the lies of Big Pharma’s mass marketing campaign about its miracle handling of a “chemical imbalance” behind any mental “disorder.”

     What’s even more interesting is the forty years or psychiatry history before that and the origins of psychiatric medication before the FDA decided the side effects of SSRIs like Prozac no longer made them too dangerous to be prescribed to the American public. Those previous, generations of more dangerous psychotropic drugs had begun with Thorazine back in the 1950s, when the FDA approved it as the first psychiatric medication.

     Its use to calm the mentally ill meant that thousands of patients could be released out into the world from psychiatric hospitals because they could now be sedated to the point of not being a danger to their fellow man. John F. Kennedy’s Community Mental Act of 1963 discharged mental patients from America’s psychiatric institutions, but the local community clinic aspects of the bill were never put into effect for those released and many of them eventually became homeless.

     Where did this idea for this mass sedation of the mentally ill come from back then? French surgeon Henri Laborit was searching for a more effective anesthetic so his patients might suffer less during their surgery, and he noticed that the calming effects of a drug used in antihistamines might be worth exploring. He found that one French company had, in fact, begun putting a drug used as a dye the textile industry into their antihistamines because of its calming effect.

     Administering this drug to his patients, Laborit saw that it not only aided the anesthesia that was needed to prevent “surgical shock,” but it also calmed his patients when he administered it to them before the surgical procedure. Patients who had previously been anxious about the surgery itself became calm and, as he noted, oddly “disinterested.” They were no longer fearful and agitated.

     He then thought there might be an application of the drug dye to psychiatric patients to calm them, and with French chemist Paul Charpentier he concocted an even stronger, textile dye based compound. By 1952 French psychiatrists Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker had begun experimenting with it and they discovered it could significantly reduce hallucinations, delusions, and agitation in their patients with schizophrenia.

     The drug was then released in France under the trade name Largactil. In 1954 the FDA approved the version made by Smith Kline & French, Thorazine. Big Pharma was off and running toward becoming a multi billion dollar industry with new drugs sanctioned by the FDA and designed to produce “calm and disinterest.”

     Did any one know why putting textile dye into your brain did that? Probably not.

     Today psychiatric drugs make you disinterested in your problems, yes, but they make you disinterested in your life, as well. You’ve become exactly what Henri Laborit wanted his surgical patients to become.  Anesthetized.

     Or, as Pink Floyd would say, “comfortably numb.”