When Depression Was Unknown in America

     Dr. Roger McFillin has gained an expanding audience through his Radically Genuine podcast and Substack blogs as his mission to bring sanity to the field of mental health has been recognized and applauded. This week he published an article with some astounding statistics on the absence of “depression” in the American public one hundred years ago.

     Community surveys done in the 1930s and 1940s showed that fewer than one in a thousand Americans experienced any depression, per Charlotte Silverman’s 1968 book, The Epidemiology of Depression. Today, of course, the mental health community reports that more than one out of every five people has been diagnosed with depression. An estimated 43,000,000 American are prescribed antidepressants every year.

     How is it, McFillin asks, that there were so few people suffering from depression in a world fraught with the aftermath of two world wars and the Great Depression? He says, correctly, the cause has been the marketing tsunami by the pharmaceutical industry over the last thirty years about what they claim is the omnipresent depression in America and about the chemical cure they offer for it.

     In 1987 the FDA first approved the sale of Prozac to the public. Pharmaceutical manufacturers then launched aggressive marketing campaigns, sought extensive funding for favorable antidepressant research, and influenced various diagnostic criteria to “effectively manufacture a depression epidemic,” McFillin writes.

     There was one other event that took place in 1987 that was necessary for that epidemic to occur. In 1987 work began on the next edition of the DSM with the intention by psychiatrists to provide what they hoped sounded like actual empirical evidence for the 297 mental disorders the DSM-IV would contain.

     It is true that Big Pharma was given permission by the FDA to manufacture the Prozac bullets that they would machine gun the American public with, but first it was the psychiatrists who needed to name the targets of those bullets through their new bible of “mental disorders. Then they could give their psychiatric cohorts the authority to fire those Prozac guns by writing prescriptions for these dangerous drugs.

     It was no coincidence that the FDA approved Prozac through their research and approval committees populated mostly by psychiatrists with financial ties to Big Pharma. These psychiatrists had already begun to meet in closed rooms to scribble out their new criteria for the mental health disorders that would justify so many Prozac prescriptions to be written.

     Conspiracy theory? No. Just accurate observation of the forces in play to profitably and unnecessarily enslave 43,000,000 Americans with antidepressants, the same Americans who had been perfectly capable of surviving world wars and economic hardships without having to take even one of “mother’s little helpers.”