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Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant

A critique of The Emperor’s New Drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

August 1, 2022



The title sounded promising: 'The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the antidepressant myth' by Irving Kirsch1. Here was someone who was going to uncover the insidious link between the Drug War and the great American addiction of our time: namely, the fact that 1 in 4 women are hooked on Big Pharma drugs for life because the Drug War outlaws all better medications!

But I was wrong. I could tell just by reading the book's very first sentence:
'Brahms is the best antidepressant.'


What? That is the kind of vapid bromide that only an indoctrinated Drug Warrior could come out with. It's absolute nonsense. If such feeble advice really worked ('listen to Brahms, exercise, eat right, focus on the positive'...) I would be the happiest man on earth, because that's about all the help I've gotten from 'psychotherapy' over the years - before, that is, they decided to drug me instead and thereby make me a patient for life on a big pharma antidepressant that's been found to be harder to kick than heroin 2.

Like almost every nonfiction writer today, Dr. Kirsch reckons without the Drug War. In other words, he writes as if he's living in a free country, where psychoactive medicines are legal and he can therefore generalize about them meaningfully. But the inconvenient truth is that almost all psychoactive medicines have been criminalized. Instead of acknowledging this fact, Kirsch keeps opining about the value of 'meds,' apparently thereby referring to the handful of substances that can be legally prescribed for mood and/or mental improvement. He completely ignores the fact that there is a vast pharmacopoeia of drugs that are completely off-limits, both to therapist and patient. His silence on this topic suggests that he's in full agreement with the Drug War lie that such substances have no beneficial uses whatsoever, no matter how, when, why or where they are used.

So when he concludes that psychotherapy is better than 'meds,' it's unclear what he means. I could gladly endorse the idea that psychotherapy is better than the currently available drugs for depression, but that is not what Kirsch seems to be saying: He seems to be saying that psychotherapy is better than any kind of drugs, while simultaneously implying that no 'drugs' are worth even mentioning unless they have not been criminalized by the government. And yet the kinds of psychoactive drugs that we're talking about here have inspired entire religions in the past, a fact that Kirsch does not seem to know, as he is likewise ignorant of the fact that MDMA and psilocybin have been showing great promise for treating depression, even in 2012 when this book was published.

Kirsch does understand the simple psychological fact that hope leads to happiness -- the ability to have something to look forward to -- and yet he fails to draw the obvious conclusion from this fact, namely that drug use -- the intermittent use of coca, opium 3 , psychedelics, MDMA 4 and all manner of psychoactive plants -- necessarily fights depression in that it provides hope. If I am struggling today emotionally, but know that I can look forward, say, to a weekend in which I deeply enjoy nature with the non-addictive use of morphine 5 or coca, etc., then I will not be depressed -- I will have hope. Moreover,, just because a substance is potentially addictive does not mean that it has to be used addictively -- unless we're talking about Big Pharma meds, of course, in which addiction seems to be a feature, rather than a bug (as is implicit in the advice: 'You gotta keep taking your meds!')

But Kirsch can't see this because, in line with Drug War ideology, he accepts that demonized substances can have no beneficial use for anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances whatsoever. It is thanks to that lie that I have spent my whole life as an eternal patient of Big Pharma , shunted off onto highly addictive meds. And why? Because the government wanted to protect me from addiction?

Please.

Kirsch does not realize that the condition that we call 'depression' today is a creation of the Drug War. No one had to see a doctor for sadness in the past because the world of psychoactive medicine was free. Now anyone who wants to medically improve their mind or battle their depression is forced to go to the monopoly holders on mind medicine - a monopoly- which exists because of the very 'illness' metaphor which Kirsch otherwise denounces as invalid. When will writers on this topic start asking themselves the million-dollar question when it comes to drug laws: Cui bono? (I'll tell you who benefits: the healthcare industry! Why? Because substance prohibition gives them a fabulously remunerative monopoly on mind medicine.)

Speaking of the 'mental illness 6 ' metaphor, Kirsch denounces it on scientific grounds, but the fact is that depression as an illness does not make philosophical sense, for if Big Pharma has really cured depression, then they ought to be able to tell us what that cure consists of. Am I cured when I become a good consumer and stop thinking about killing myself, or am I cured when I start to 'live large' in the world, enjoy Mother Nature, and feel sympathy for other people, etc. ? Judging by the tranquilizing effects of the Big Pharma antidepressants 7 that I've taken for decades now, Big Pharma 's definition of 'cure' is quite different from my own. Therefore their pills may cure something, but they do not cure my depression as I define that word: namely, a condition that keeps me from 'living large' in the world.

Kirsch says he enjoys being controversial, but frankly he has not yet begun to be controversial. If he wanted to truly be controversial, he'd connect the dots of his own argument and admit that the Drug War itself causes depression by denying human beings the right to access Mother Nature and the kinds of medicines that have inspired entire religions.

Instead, he condescends to the chronic depressed like myself, telling us that we need to listen to Brahms -- or exercise -- or meditate and then, hey presto, we'll be happy. But this advice rests on the following causal fallacy: 'Because successful happy people do X (listen to Brahms, exercise, and/or meditate), then doing X will make a person successful and happy.' This is the fallacy behind all self-help books, of which American bookstores are full these days thanks to the Drug War, which outlaws all REAL mind cures.

Author's Follow-up: August 5, 2022





I think 'talk therapy,' as Kirsch seems to recommend, can be very valuable indeed. Who could not benefit from discussing their life concerns with an empathic human being? The problem is that Kirsch thinks that talk therapy and drug therapy are two completely different protocols and that never the twain shall meet. This, of course, is probably true if by 'drugs' we mean Big Pharma medicine. But the fact is that there are plenty of demonized psychoactive medicines out there that have the potential to help 'talk therapy' actually succeed like it was always intended to succeed, by rendering the 'patient' honest and self-aware in a way that is completely impossible for them without such pharmacological prompting. Sure, not everybody requires such assistance, but for some it is a godsend. Indeed, many 'patients' who have engaged in talk therapy while 'on Ecstasy,' for instance, claim to have made more progress in one pharmacologically aided session than they had previously made in several years' worth of drug-free counseling.

When I look back on the counseling that I myself received as a young man, I can say for certain that I was not honest with my highly paid interlocutors -- but not because I wanted to lie to them. In fact, I did not even know that I was being dishonest with them, that's how ridiculously NON-self-aware I was at the time. It's so plain to me now that I needed a medication back then (a 'drug,' if you must) that would help me get outside my very narrow thought processes and see myself objectively, not as my 'self' but as a kind of third person whose thoughts and behaviors could be analyzed dispassionately. Only then would I have been able to do much more than mutter and say commonplaces during my psychotherapy sessions.

What I'm advocating here is what I call 'pharmacologically savvy shamanism,' in which we stop ideologically scorning psychoactive medicines and begin using them advisedly for the benefit of human beings. But this can only happen when otherwise smart people like Kirsch disabuse themselves of the big Drug War lie: namely, the idea that most psychoactive substances can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason whatsoever, and that such substances can simply never be used safely, no matter how hard we might try.

These are all lies, of course. There are no such things as substances like that, except in the minds of Joe Biden 8 9 and his Office on National Drug Control Policy, which actually forbids its members from even considering beneficial uses for the substances that America has criminalized10.

These considerations lead us to the mother of all ironies: the fact that the only way for a nuclear-armed world to survive and for its people to be truly happy (at very least to the point that they will refrain from shooting up grade schools) is for people to START USING DRUGS -- start using them advisedly, that is: especially empathogens, which teach us, experientially as it were, to love our fellow human beings and to see ourselves objectively, without the blinders of 'self' that nurture and nature have securely fastened to our mind's eye by the time we are adults.

One of the many benefits of this 'pharmacologically savvy shamanism' is that it would get rid of the whole concept of 'patient' when it comes to mental and mood issues, because the drug-aided talk therapy that I'm advocating here could benefit anyone who wishes to see their world more clearly and define their life goals with the help of a friendly empath. Of course, those who have Christian Science scruples against drug use are free to abstain, yet there are so many potential mood and mind medicines out there that researchers have been dutifully ignoring in deference to the Drug War that it seems silly to me for someone to prejudge the utility of this class of medicines based on drug-war ideology -- especially as that ideology has been promoted through censorship and lies, like the blatantly false idea that psychoactive substances fry the brain11 the moment that they are criminalized by pharmacologically clueless politicians.

The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the Drug Warrior says, for the only drugs that are known to fry the brain (by conducing to anhedonia in long-term users) are Big Pharma 12 13 meds like SSRIs.





Notes:

1: The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the antidepressant myth (up)
2: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School (up)
6: How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
8: America’s War on Drugs Has Always Been Bipartisan—and Unwinnable (up)
9: Joe Biden’s Drug War Record Is So Much Worse Than You Think (up)
10: Recognizing, of course, that Trump has managed the seemingly impossible by being far worse than Clinton (or even Biden, for that matter) when it comes to drug policy. (up)
11: Meds fry the brain, not drugs (up)
12: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
13: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)


Antidepressants




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.



  • 'Synthetic Panics' by Philip Jenkins
  • Blaming Drugs for Nazi Germany
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Clodhoppers on Drugs
  • Disease Mongering in the age of the drug war
  • Even Howard Zinn Reckons without the Drug War
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Intoxiphobia
  • Michael Pollan on Drugs
  • Noam Chomsky on Drugs
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire
  • Psilocybin Mushrooms by Edward Lewis
  • Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches: LSD, Cannabis, and Spiritual Sacraments in Underground America
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Richard Rudgley condemns 'drugs' with faint praise
  • The Drug War Imperialism of Richard Evans Schultes
  • The End Times by Bryan Walsh
  • What Andrew Weil Got Wrong
  • What Carl Hart Missed
  • What Rick Strassman Got Wrong
  • Whiteout
  • Why Drug Warriors are Nazis
  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • And don't get me started on antidepressants!
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Depressed? 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 war
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
  • How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What Malcolm X got right about drugs
  • Why SSRIs are Crap





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

    There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.

    In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.

    We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.

    Here is a sample drug-use report from the book "Pihkal": "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." Prohibition is a crime against humanity for withholding such drug experiences from the depressed (and from everybody else).

    The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.

    "My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."

    "Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

    Attention People's magazine editorial staff: Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.

    The DEA is a Schedule I agency. It has no known positive uses and is known to cause death and destruction.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    American City Homicide Awards 2021
    The Unpeople of Southeast Washington, D.C.


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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