A new study suggests drug companies have made billions of dollars by selling a false paradigm. Pfizer and other multi-national drug sellers have long promoted the notion that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Now, however, a group of University College London (UCL) scientists have upended that long-held but always fuzzy and unproven notion.The UCL study shows there’s no evidence behind the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. Therefore, pills that (allegedly) alter or “fix” brain chemistry can’t even potentially “treat” depression, except, perhaps, by some placebo effect having nothing to do with the actual contents of the drugs.
The Placebo Effect includes Major Surgery sans Anesthesia
Drug makers have long understood there is almost no overestimating the power of the placebo effect. It has been well known for years that someone believing in the “benefits” of some sugar pill will likely experience positive effects from taking it.
World War II medics who ran out of morphine on the battlefield, though they needed to perform emergency amputations on wounded soldiers, learned that they could substitute morphine with simple saline solution. Leading horribly wounded patients to believe that they were receiving a full dose of morphine allowed the military surgeons to perform entire amputations with no anesthetic.
While one might attempt to dismiss that battlefield evidence as “anecdotal,” or the result of horribly wounded soldiers slipping into shock, hundreds of studies have since proven the placebo effect to be very real.
Television Programming Hypnosis
Ever since Marshall McLuhan wrote 50 years ago about the powers of subliminal seduction flashed through movie and television screens, psychiatrists, social engineers, and advertisers have been well aware of the powers of the Orwellian telescreens prominently displayed in virtually every residence in the country. Television images programmed into millions of people every day through drug and vaccine promotions, along with positive press from television and news programs (paid for by the U.S. government) have recently resulted in record profits for Pfizer and other drug companies.
Pill-Popping Pez Dolls
The idea that “depression” is a result of chemical imbalances in the brain has turned nearly one in five Americans into pill-popping Pez dolls, because pill takers shed what they ingest into the water through urination. SSRIs like Prozac and other top-selling drugs have long been found in municipal water; so that anyone drinking, bathing, or cooking in it has been exposed to some level of SSRIs, which are also laced with toxic chemicals that include IQ-lowering fluoride.
Direct-to-Consumer Advertising
Considering that drug companies have spent millions of dollars advertising SSRIs on the basis of junk science, the level of false advertising that has been allowed by government “regulators” like the FDA is astonishing.The United States and New Zealand are the only countries in the world to allow drug makers to market prescription drugs directly to consumers. The U.S. consumer drug advertising boom on television began in 1997. That was the year FDA relaxed its advertising guidelines relating to broadcast media, and drug makers have been increasing their profits exponentially ever since.
Big Pharma argues that direct-to-consumer advertising helps consumers make informed decisions, but many experienced GP’s have long noticed that many of their patients self diagnose from television commercials and request the drugs they’ve seen promoted on their home screens. Concerned citizens groups argue that prescription drug advertising should be banned because it leads to higher costs and indiscriminate use of prescription drugs that can harm consumers.
What, or who, is there to protect the consumer, the taxpayer, the end user of these expensive and often arguably worthless, as well as often injurious, products? Virtually all SSRIs carry a black box warning, the FDA’s most serious type of warning. They are not, by any estimation, innocuous products that have been proven safe and effective by years of double-blind placebo-controlled studies, the gold standard for safety and efficacy.
In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian nightmare novel, Brave New World, most people take drugs every day to improve their moods, to adjust to the system which the drugs help them fit. Nobody questions the system, the beautiful system, in the “Brave (Read: not very) New World.” Then, as now, the problem is always assumed to be the people who fail to fit into the system. In Huxley’s fictional world, the system is the new deity, replacing God, Family and social interactions which allowed past societies to survive and thrive in a healthy manner.
Are SSRIs the Latest Soma?
The government in Brave New World strongly encourages individuals to take soma to increase happiness and complacency in the population. Soma can be taken in pill or powder form, or it can be released as an aerosol. It is free to everyone in the novel. Its inclusion in the text is central to the novel’s themes of complacency and resistance in society as well as the theme of escapism.
But that is all fiction, of course, nothing to do with us or our own brave new world.
Psychiatrist Peter Breggin, known by many as the Conscience of Psychiatry, expounded on this notion to The Epoch Times:
“Since the ancient Greeks, physicians have wanted to believe the mental and emotional distress must have biological origins. That allowed them to include ‘mental diseases’ within their specialty.
“With the development of massive drug company involvement in routine psychiatric practice during the advent of the antipsychotic drugs in 1954, drug companies also began pushing the biochemical and biological basis of human experiences such as anxiety, depression, manic-depression (now bipolar-disorder) and schizophrenia.
“Then in the late 1980s, in anticipation of the approval of Prozac for depression by the FDA, Eli Lilly and Company conducted an international advertising campaign claiming that depression is caused by a biochemical imbalance in serotonin. It was apparent from the start that this was pure fantasy.
“In my books and scientific articles as far back as 1983, I pointed out the continuing truth that there are no known biochemical imbalances in the brains of mental patients until they are put there by the neurotoxic effects of all psychiatric drugs.
“Now, a review article by British psychiatrist Johanna Moncrieff has reconfirmed that research fails to show any connection between depression and abnormalities in serotonin metabolism in the brain. No so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are known to be genetic or biochemical in origin – it’s all medical and pharmaceutical company hype.”
Dr. Breggin has pointed out since 1983 that science has shown no known biochemical imbalances in the brains of mental patients
If our brave new world of prison lockdowns (which even the CDC has finally admitted were more harmful than helpful for most of the country) has taught us anything, it is the importance of Faith, Family, Friends and healthy social interaction. We need to see people’s faces in person, hear their voices, feel their presence, commiserate and share our experiences. That culture of humanity is what makes us who we are, and no number of dubious pills or government edicts can replace those things humankind has known since time immemorial.
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