
WARNING: Don't bother trying to get off antidepressants unless you are truly committed to the idea in the name of healthcare liberty. You have to be committed to such a goal heart and soul, merely to have a chance at success. For long-term users, it can be a real challenge. It is interesting how psychiatrists flip the script on this subject, by the way: they claim that the hideous withdrawal symptoms somehow prove that the user needed the drug all along. But this is obvious nonsense. This can be seen in the fact that these same psychiatrists would never say such a thing about heroin users: that their angst upon quitting the drug is a sign that the drug was actually working for them.
Note that I am not saying that antidepressants are drugs from hell -- but rather that they BECOME drugs from hell thanks to drug prohibition. Drug prohibition outlaws all drugs that could help you get off of antidepressants and so live a fulfilled life without becoming a ward of the healthcare state. We need merely to re-legalize Mother Nature's medicines. Why do we fail to do so? Because we judge drugs based on the following silly and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anybody at any dose in any circumstances...
Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?
Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.
The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.
So do antidepressants make sense?
This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that Drug War prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.
Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.
Addicted to AddictionAddicted to IgnoranceAddictionAmerica's Great Anti-Depressant ScamAmerica's Invisible Addiction CrisisFour reasons why Addiction is a political termHow Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug WarHow Drug Prohibition Causes RelapsesHow Prohibition Causes AddictionHow the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality TaleIn the Realm of Hungry Drug WarriorsLibertarians as Closet Christian ScientistsModern Addiction Treatment as Puritan IndoctrinationNight of the Addicted AmericansNotes about the Madness of Drug ProhibitionOpen Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor MateOpen Letter to Richard HammersleyProhibition Spectrum DisorderPublic Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War EraSherlock Holmes versus Gabor MatéTapering for JesusThe aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependencyThe Myth of the Addictive PersonalityWhy Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and AlcoholismAmerica's Great Anti-Depressant ScamAnd don't get me started on antidepressants!Brahms is NOT the best antidepressantDepressed? Here's why you can't get the medicines that you needDepressed? Here's why.Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug WarHow the Drug War Screws the DepressedHow the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the DepressedHow to end the war in Mexico, stop inner-city killings and cure depression in one easy stepI'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma CactusPsychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize AntidepressantsReplacing antidepressants with entheogensSurviving the Surviving Antidepressants websiteThe common sense way to get off of antidepressantsThe Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on DrugsThe Depressing Truth About SSRIsThe Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug ProhibitionThe real reason for depression in AmericaUsing Opium to Fight DepressionUsing plants and fungi to get off of antidepressantsWhat Malcolm X got right about drugsWhy doctors should prescribe opium for depressionWhy SSRIs are Crap
"The irreducible core of the disease theory of addiction is still as strong as ever -- the significant distinction between good and bad opiate use is whether it's medically supervised." --Emperors of Dreams by Mike Jay
Addiction is a hugely fraught subject in the age of the drug war. This is because the Drug War does everything it can to make drug use dangerous. It encourages addiction by limiting our access to all but the handful of drugs that dealers find it practical and lucrative to supply. It fails to regulate product so that drug users cannot know the dose or even the quality of what they are ingesting. Meanwhile, the Drug War censors honest talk about drug use.
In short, until we end the Drug War, we will not know how much addiction is a true problem and how much it is an artifact of drug-war policy. And yet materialist researchers tell us that addiction is a "disease"? Why is it a disease to want to improve one's life with drugs? One could just as easily say that people are diseased, or at least masochistic, if they accept their limitations in life without doing everything they can to transcend them.
Indeed, the very idea that materialists are experts on psychoactive drug use is wrong. It is a category error. The proof is extant. Materialist researchers today are in total denial about the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs. They maintain the lie that psychoactive drugs can only be proven effective by looking under a microscope, whereas the proof of such efficacy is right in front of them: in endless anecdotes, in human history, and even in psychological common sense, the kind of common sense that scientists ignore in the name of both Drug War ideology and the inhumane philosophy of behaviorism.
Addicted to AddictionAddicted to IgnoranceAddictionAmerica's Great Anti-Depressant ScamAmerica's Invisible Addiction CrisisFour reasons why Addiction is a political termHow Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug WarHow Drug Prohibition Causes RelapsesHow Prohibition Causes AddictionHow the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality TaleIn the Realm of Hungry Drug WarriorsLibertarians as Closet Christian ScientistsModern Addiction Treatment as Puritan IndoctrinationNight of the Addicted AmericansNotes about the Madness of Drug ProhibitionOpen Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor MateOpen Letter to Richard HammersleyProhibition Spectrum DisorderPublic Service Announcements for the Post-Drug War EraSherlock Holmes versus Gabor MatéTapering for JesusThe aesthetic difference between addiction and chemical dependencyThe Myth of the Addictive PersonalityWhy Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism