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.
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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 DepressedI'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma CactusPsychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize AntidepressantsReplacing antidepressants with entheogensThe 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 ProhibitionUsing Opium to Fight DepressionUsing plants and fungi to get off of antidepressantsWhat Malcolm X got right about drugsWhy SSRIs are Crap
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.