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The Depressing Truth About SSRIs

why psychedelic therapy must REPLACE modern psychiatry rather than simply complement it

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





April 17, 2020



Open letter to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies:

2025 Update
Author's follow-up for September 11, 2025

I keep hearing MAPS1 researchers use the phrase "those who don't respond to regular anti-depressants" when talking about clinical trials. This gives the impression that anti-depressants usually work just fine, but that is just plain wrong - although psychiatrists have been paid millions by Big Pharma to go on shows like "Oprah" and say otherwise.

If such pills are really the silver bullets they are purported to be, why is America more depressed than ever, statistically speaking, decades after these silver bullets hit the market?

Many of these medications are highly addictive and harder to kick than heroin! Heroin can be beat in one grueling week. Anti-depressants can take months as the brain chemistry attempts to return to normal. Some of these meds can NEVER be stopped. I wanted to get off of Effexor 2 , but my doctor told me not to bother because recidivism rates are over 95% after three years.

{^About one in eight 3 men and one in four women are addicted to Big Pharma antidepressants 4, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland. And now the pharmaceutical companies are going after the toddler market. This is a huge but silent scandal, especially when you consider Robert Whitaker's finding that antidepressants actually CAUSE the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix.}{

And yet MAPS researchers are silent on these issues. I can only guess that Big Pharma 's influence is keeping them from recognizing the obvious. MAPS researchers should be pushing for psychedelic therapy to REPLACE modern antidepressants, not simply to eke out therapy for those supposedly rare cases that can't be "helped" by these deliberately addictive drugs (these annuities for Big Pharma executives).

And what do we even mean when we say that an antidepressant "works"? In the book "Psychedelic Medicine," Dr. Richard Louis Miller tells the story of a reporter who wrote a first-person story about Prozac. The reporter was bullish on the drug at first, saying that the medicine was definitely making him happier. But then he went to a family funeral and found to his horror that he felt nothing at all. Was Prozac working? You might say yes, it was working all too well. (This is not a surprise, since American psychiatry has a long history of defining "cures" as "treatments that render the patient more docile," as opposed to "treatments that help the patient achieve self-fulfillment in life.")

Anti-depressants are working great for Big Pharma , of course, bringing in $40 billion a year. They are swimming in dough from monthly purchases by addicts. But those who take the drugs are turned into eternal patients and are guinea pigs for substances that were never properly trialed for lifetime use. Worse yet, such patients are ineligible for participation in most new psychedelic therapies for fear of Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome.

MAPS researchers should start speaking truth to power and tell Big Pharma that its whole pill-mill approach to psychiatry is wrong. As a victim of the status quo, I for one would appreciate to hear someone in the field actually recognizing that "eternal patients" like myself exist. I don't expect I'll ever get an apology from the psychiatry business for addicting me for a lifetime to a mind-numbing drug (one that offers no self-insight whatsoever), but it would be nice if someone in the field would at least acknowledge that there is a problem here.

That's why I won't be fully happy with MAPS until they start promoting psychedelic therapy as a REPLACEMENT for the status quo, rather than as a mere helpful adjunct for the Big Pharma pill mill.



July 12, 2022



Where are the conspiracy theorists when we need them? They could at least open our minds to some disturbing possibilities. Like, for instance, I sometimes wonder if Prozac wasn't designed to turn folks into neo-liberals. I know my own politics veered right after a few years of Prozac use. This was the same time that my musical skills decreased, at least when it came to playing in natural sync with my fellow musicians. There suddenly seemed to arise a new brief but destructive mental step of conscious reflection between the impulse and the act, rendering me nervous and uncertain in circumstances in which the thought of nervousness had never occurred before.

Of course, unlike the Drug Warrior, I know that one swallow does not make a summer, so perhaps the mental changes described above can be explained without reference to Prozac. My only point here is that no one seems to be considering the possibility that antidepressants are changing personalities in ways that are not necessarily consistent with the interests of the antidepressant user. Of course the silence is to be expected, since the moneyed interests support a media narrative that turns SSRIs into whole milk. And as with whole milk, all reported downsides are blamed on the user, not on the substance. Can't handle milk? Why, you freak! You must be lactose-intolerant! Can't handle a given SSRI? No problem, we just have to keep weaning you off and on different KINDS of SSRIs until we find the one that's "right" for you.

Speaking of which, it's the new feminine small talk: what meds are you on? How many? How long have you been taking it? Do you think you'll switch to another SSRI any time soon?

And this in a country that is trying desperately to get Americans to say no to drugs? 1 in 4 American women are on multiple drugs every day of their life and the Drug Warrior pretends to not notice as they advocate 20-year jail terms for folks who reach down and use the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet.


Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




It is amazing how easily one can be propagandized to believe that almost anything is normal. If super-intelligent aliens came to Earth and we told them that depression was "a tough nut to crack," they would be astonished. "What?" they would cry. "Haven't you people ever heard of laughing gas ? Haven't you heard of opium ? Haven't you heard of the thousands of phenethylamines that inspire and elate and which you could synthesize at will?"





Here is where the modern Drug Warrior would have to take the little green men aside and bring them up-to-speed on the warped mindset of our times.

"You see, Voltana, we Earthlings feel that it is highly inappropriate to use psychoactive medicine for the emotional and mental well-being of our species -- with the exception of commercial medicines that "work" according to the behaviorist's definition of that term. We feel that the government's role is to scare our people away from any common-sense uses for drugs."

To which Voltana would respond:

"Come, Krakor and Vestron: I told you earthlings were a crude people. Let us go back to our planet, where improving mind and mood is actually considered to be a GOOD thing!"



Author's Follow-up:

September 11, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up






I seem to be the only philosopher in the world who sees the connection between the Drug War and the psychiatric pill mill. The few other authors who attack the Drug War seem to be materialists who are under the impression that science has "sorted" depression. In fact, it has always been a category error to place science in charge of mind and mood medicine. This is what Native American activist Albert Hensley was getting at when he complained as follows about the western world's attempts to study peyote, a substance that his people consider to be of divine origin:

"It is utter folly for scientists to attempt to analyze this medicine. Can science analyze God's body?" 5


This is why it is an uphill climb to correct America's attitude toward drugs, because all of the best thinkers are either ON Big Pharma antidepressants or else they believe in the power of materialist science to handle matters of mind and mood, which is precisely like placing the passion-scorning Dr. Spock of Star Trek in charge of the field. This is exactly why our scientists ignore the glaringly obvious benefits of laughing gas 6 and MDMA 7 and coca and opium 8 . They claim they have no benefits, when they could so obviously prevent suicides and render brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary! Instead, they expect to establish drug efficacy by looking under a microscope, while dogmatically ignoring all anecdote, history and common sense psychology about drug benefits.

Of course, I myself am on antidepressants -- but only because they are literally impossible to "kick" -- at least that is definitely the case with Effexor. And when one attempts to do that, the depression returns in a form that is incomparably worse than ever! If Drug Warriors were consistent, they would demonize these drugs from the rooftops -- and yet these downsides are completely ignored. In fact, we are told that we are good patients for "taking our meds."

It amazes me. For all the handwringing about addiction, Americans have no problem with the fact that 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma 9 10 drug every day of their life -- and that these drugs are harder to kick than heroin. Wouldn't it break a heart of stone! The hypocrisy is just enormous. Our drug policy is incoherent -- especially in a world wherein we refuse to even discuss gun control or liquor control.

I am literally the only person I know who has ever mentioned the demoralization that results from turning a depressed person into a patient for life.

But as much as I attack Effexor, it is not the drug that is evil. I could easily get off the drug if I were to use the plants and fungi of Mother Nature. This is psychological common sense. And yet racist politicians have made it a crime for me to take care of my health! This is nothing less than a crime against humanity11. And yet here I am, in a remote corner of the Internet, more or less ignored by everybody.

They say that quality will rise to the top. Maybe so. But controversial opinions not so much: not when the entire world has been brainwashed for over a century now in the drug-hating ideology of the West.

Incidentally, some Drug Warriors -- and even my own psychiatrist -- cite the pedantic difference between addiction and dependency, as if dependency is fine, only addiction is bad. Why? They say that addiction is problematic drug use -- but what could be more problematic than being stuck on a drug one dislikes and in place of which one wants to use time-honored godsend medicines instead? Besides, the problems caused for the addict are created by drug prohibition itself, which refuses to teach safe use, refuses to regulate drug supply and refuses to offer drug choice.

"But addicts have cravings," says the prohibitionist.

Why is it bad for a person withdrawing from a drug to have cravings while it is okay for them to feel like hell and wish to die???

If the failure of Effexor to cause cravings is a good thing, then it is good only for the psychiatrist, because they will not get a call late at night demanding a refill. Instead, the depressed will simply suffer in silence, wishing that he or she had never been born.

What blindness on the part of Americans. This is the result of our scientific triumphalism and a century's worth of censorship about the positive effects of the vast psychoactive pharmacopoeia that racist politicians have outlawed with the help of purblind materialist scientists!

AFTERWORD: Thirty-four percent of soldiers in Vietnam used heroin -- at least 20% were dependent on the drug. And yet when these hundreds of thousands returned home, only 5% of them had issues with getting off the drug. Only 5%. Compare this with the Effexor that I am on. According to my own psychiatrist, it has a 95% recidivism rate. 95%!!! It is almost impossible to quit. Why? Because our hubristic scientist wanted to "cure" sadness -- and so they mucked about with brain chemistry to make a one-size-fits-all "miracle drug"12. And psychiatrists stand by this pill to this day. They actually praise it! This is how far we have come from being able to take care of our own health. We are now given drugs that turn us into patients for life and we are concerned Luddites if we complain about the status quo.

Effexor is hell for those who attempt to get off it. No wonder psychiatrists tell us to "keep taking our meds." They want to flip the script so that no one even bothers trying to get off of their cash cow medicines that turn the users into wards of the healthcare state.












Notes:

1: Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS (up)
2: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs (up)
3: Common antidepressants could help the immune system fight cancer, UCLA study finds (up)
4: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
5: Artificial paradises : a drugs reader (up)
6: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
7: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
9: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
10: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)
11: Drug Prohibition is a crime against humantiy (up)
12: Lee Robins' studies of heroin use among US Vietnam veterans (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.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a drug war opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the drug war
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
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  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
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  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the drug war is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting drug war lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • 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 Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap
  • 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




    I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.

    The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

    After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.

    If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.

    Here's one problem that supporters of the psychiatric pill mill never address: the fact that Big Pharma antidepressants demoralize users by turning them into patients for life.

    Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

    If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.

    If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"

    Musk vies with his fellow materialists in his attempt to diss humans as insignificant. But we are not insignificant. The very term "insignificant" is a human creation. Consciousness rules. Indeed, consciousness makes the rules. Without us, there would only be inchoate particles.

    Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.


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






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    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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