hen I see doctors praising antidepressants online, it plucks my last and final nerve. I ask myself, why, in 2023, are doctors still praising a treatment protocol from the 1970s that has turned 1 in 4 American women into wards of the healthcare state?
Now, the doctors will tell you that a large percentage of pill takers say they've seen improvement. But so what? A depressed person is the worst possible judge of their own condition.
Take me, for instance. I would have told you that SSRIs were helping when they first started me on Prozac back in the late 1970s. But then I was slipped a psychedelic at a party in my early 20s and my eyes were open. I saw life and its possibilities so clearly during that experience that I began to cry. Why? Because I was suddenly conscious of all the time I had been wasting by moping around and procrastinating on my many short-, medium- and long-term goals in life. The psychedelic had woken me up to a vibrant new reality of which I had been hitherto unaware. I now saw that psychiatry was a lie: it was not helping me live large, it was merely helping me to become a predictable consumer. My psychiatrist's motto seemed to be: "Don't worry, be satisfied."
Antidepressants are not so much bad science as they are bad philosophy. Take, for instance, the idea that these medications scientifically cure depression. You cannot cure depression without first defining what depression is, and that is a definition that no two philosophers will ever entirely agree on. Is depression merely a difficulty in getting up in the morning, or is it the inability to live large? The psychiatrist will say that it's the former. They do not share the vision of Jack Kerouac that we should all burn brightly, "like fabulous yellow roman candles." Neither do they share the view of Avicenna that a life of width is preferable to a life of length. If they had gotten their hands on Robin Williams, he would have never been a great comedian. They want to turn their patient into a predictable citizen, not a truly self-fulfilled individual, living a joyously unpredictable life.
But I am getting carried away here. I am really speaking about psychiatry as a field and not about particular psychiatrists. Many psychiatrists are well-meaning human beings whose strong suit is empathy - but they are hobbled by the inability to prescribe the necessary medicines. I would love to see the best psychiatrists enabled to employ ANY drug or drugs in order to enlighten the moribund patient as to the possibilities in life and thus help them strive for self-actualization rather than for a sleepy satisfaction with a humdrum status quo. Moreover, this type of shamanic protocol would get rid of the very concept of "patient," since it would attract anyone interested in being all they can be in life, and not merely those whom the psychiatrists of yore might have considered to be pathologically depressed.
In short, antidepressants are tranquilizers - and I say that based on 40+ years' of personal experience with their daily use. And like most tranquilizers, they create chemical dependency. They have a long list of side effects and downsides that are never going to be fully fleshed out and publicized in a time when money and politics control science - as they always do in a capitalist society that is engaged in an anti-scientific war on certain politically unpopular medicines. Remember, Big Pharma pays for research trials, not the FDA.
And a tranquilizer is not a treatment for depression. It could be easily replaced by a sharp blow to the head with a hammer. When the patient "comes to," they would not experience self-actualization but if the blow were hard enough, they would no longer be complaining about their life. They might even naively claim that they felt "happy." Psychiatry has a long history of making patients "happy" in this way, with its previous miracle cures, such as enema therapy, ice baths, and lithium. Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomy, not because it helped the depressed achieve their goals in life, but because it rendered them less obstreperous and easier to care for. In short, it made nurses happy, not patients.
We should also remember that SSRIs and SNRIs are huge business. Before anyone praises them, they should tell us what their financial interests might be in so doing. Robert Whitaker tells us how many of the talking heads that have promoted this therapy on prime-time talk shows have been under the pay of Big Pharma, either directly or indirectly. And any psychiatrist's views on the topic have to be considered in light of the fact that he or she makes a living based on the foot traffic that the pill mill creates for them.
As far as I know, I am the only philosopher who has made the link between the Drug War and the psychiatric pill mill, and yet the pill mill is a product of that very Drug War. What depressed person would knowingly choose a treatment for which chemical dependency is a feature rather than a bug? What depressed person would knowingly choose a treatment that tranquilizes rather than inspiring them? No one would do so if all drugs were legal again. Americans take SSRIs today not by choice, but simply because the government has outlawed almost all the competition.
Today's attitude about drugs is bizarre: it tells us that the worst possible fate is to become dependent on a "drug," and yet at the same time, we are told that we have a medical duty to take antidepressants every day of our life.
But if there is nothing wrong with taking a drug every day of one's life, then there is nothing wrong with taking opium every day of one's life or chewing the coca leaf daily. And yet most of the doctors who promote the use of SSRIs will tell you that engaging in these activities is habit forming and therefore wrong - and this from doctors whose psychiatric pill mill has created the greatest mass chemical dependency of all time. In fact, if you insist on something other than the miniscule pharmacopoeia of modern psychiatry, doctors will class you as an "addictive personality" and insist with Gabriel Mate that you have some "inner pain" that needs to be addressed. (That's a great way to suppress complaints about the Drug War: pathologize and tranquilize those who object to the anti-patient status quo.)
The idea that I do not have a right to coca and the poppy is not based on science: it's based on a mix of politics, money and puritanism: the politics of the Drug War, which suppresses black voting and allows the US to lord it over South American countries; the money which allows the richest 3% of Americans to control Congress and the Senate; and the puritanism which tells us that it's better to hide one's candle than to burn too brightly and thus potentially upset one's neighbors.
The antidepressant protocol is like shock therapy or euthanasia. The only reason they make sense to us is because we ignore the existence of the Drug War. We say, for instance, that shock therapy is used only as a last resort, but that is just a conscience sop: shock therapy is used because of the Drug War, which outlaws all the drugs that might have cheered the patients up without potentially injuring their brains. If we do not acknowledge the role of the Drug War here, we are giving the Drug War a huge MULLIGAN for this great evil that it is causing. Likewise, euthanasia is despicable in the age of a Drug War: it lets us use drugs to kill a gloomy or distraught person, but once again, it does not let us use drugs to cheer them up. Surely even Mary Baker Eddy herself would not have been so dogmatically heartless.
The Drug War is based on so many lies, preconceptions and misconceptions that it cannot survive forever. Someday we philosophers are going to untangle the seemingly endless knots and prove to the world that the man behind the "Drug War curtain" is a racist bully, shouting "Drugs, drugs, drugs!" not in an effort to educate us, but rather in order to terrify us into pursuing anti-scientific policies that turn once law-abiding citizens into criminals. And when the Drug War ends - when we human beings finally regain the right to control our own moods and minds - SSRIs will disappear, not because the government will outlaw them but because no one in their right mind will opt for becoming a lifetime ward of the healthcare state for the purposes of receiving expensive tranquilizers from an expensive psychiatrist.
Until that time, I hope this essay has encouraged a few fence-straddling doctors out there to think twice before advocating pills whose use has turned America into the setting for a real-life Stepford Wives.
Here's where I add the usual disclaimer that you should see your doctor before trying to get off these drugs -- if only to find out if it's even possible. If you don't believe me, you can search "Effexor" and "withdrawal symptoms" online and see some of the problems that you could encounter. Which brings us to one final point about SSRIs: you simply are not going to hear the full story about them in a capitalist society. For I assure you, if naturally occurring drugs had a fraction of the downsides possessed by antidepressants, the Drug Warrior would have a field day pillorying those drugs.
Instead, we find today's doctors writing shameless apologetics for antidepressants. Just yesterday I saw a doctor responding to someone who pointed out the sexual dysfunction allegedly caused by antidepressants. And what did the doctor say? He said that penicillin will cause a few people to go into shock but that penicillin is still a good treatment.
What hypocrisy in the age of the Drug War! Of course penicillin is a good treatment. But if MDMA caused so much as one single solitary person to go into shock - just one, mind! -- prohibitionists would have a field day, saying that the drug must be illegal for everyone, everywhere, in any dose, ever - never mind the fact that the outlawing of such drugs will make brain-damaging shock therapy a necessity for depressed folk like myself. The idea that patients should risk their sexuality on SSRIs makes no sense - except with the unstated assumption that the Drug War is right in outlawing all the competition for such medicines - an assumption which makes zero scientific sense whatsoever.
SSRIs may "work" for those with modest goals in life -- though I'm sure that even these folk would demand more from their therapist had they experienced the kind of pharmacologically induced epiphany that I had in my youth. Probably the most we can say about SSRIs is that they may keep a tiny minority of patients from committing suicide, but again, so could a sharp blow to the head with a hammer. But speaking of suicide, does anyone really think that 1 in 4 American women would have "offed" themselves had they not been started on antidepressants? If this is so - that is, if 1 in 4 American women are really truly deeply depressed - then there is something wrong with American society, not American women - and we should not be tranquilizing women in order to ignore the evidence of that social dystopia - least of all in a world in which we have outlawed all the drugs that could open their minds rather than putting them to sleep.
Author's Follow-up: April 5, 2023
In "Anatomy of an Epidemic," Richard Whitaker explains how these drugs cause the very chemical imbalances that they purport to fix. This is no doubt why they are so hard to quit: they create a new baseline brain chemistry. So while opium withdrawal can be performed in one week, antidepressant withdrawal takes months or more. In fact, government studies have shown that some SNRIs, like Effexor, have a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users. That is, 95% of those who attempt to quit Effexor are back on it within two years of having commenced their withdrawal process.
Of course, these numbers would improve drastically if we re-legalized mood medicine. But Drug Warriors want to see "drug users" doing poorly so that they can keep their moral narrative about drugs operating as America's national religion.
Author's Follow-up: April 15, 2023
One of the justifications for "pill therapy" is that it keeps us from blaming ourselves or our parents for behavioral problems. But this is no way to justify a therapy. What if the parents really are the problem? Take the case of a young child who misbehaves all the time. In many cases, this may be caused or aggravated by a parent who is constantly correcting the child for no good reason -- or else ignoring the child. In fact, there are endless ways in which parents might unwittingly be driving their children crazy, literally speaking. If we ignore the family and social context and look for pills to solve this problem, then we are going to "dope up" the kid when by rights we should be teaching the parent how to raise children.
This should not be seen as blaming the parents -- but rather simply recognizing the obvious truth that parenting can be tough business -- and if one has hang-ups of their own, then try as they might, they're likely to pass those hang-ups on to their children by giving them unintentional examples of "how not to behave." The answer to this is to teach the parent, not to tranquilize the kids so that they can sleep through all the madness to which they are being subjected. There is no stigma to taking dog obedience classes in which owners are taught how to behave: why should we deem it insulting to teach our parents how to raise children -- without unwittingly turning them into maniacs. If you're like me, you've seen a kid in public who was being subjected to nonsensical demands by a parent or totally unwarranted reprimands. You think to yourself, "God help us when that kid grows up."
Parents should check their egos at the door and attend classes in parenting as a kind of duty -- unless they're the lucky minority for whom their kids behavior is not problematic.
Likewise, the "pill" approach completely rules out the possibility that society could be the problem. If 1 in 4 American women think that they need antidepressants in order to function in modern America's capitalist society, then there is something wrong with modern America's capitalist society, not with women. The "pill mill" approach lets us completely ignore this gorilla in the room and carry on as if nothing's wrong with America. And if we don't recognize a problem, we are never going to solve it -- least of all when we tranquilize those who should be rising up to overthrow that system or at least to modify it until such time as it becomes healthy again for a large percentage of the population.
Related tweet: June 22, 2023
Based on 40+ years of use, I find that SSRIs tranquilize me and decrease my spontaneity, while making me a ward of the healthcare state. They only seem reasonable to us because we've outlawed all competition, and users who like them literally do not know what they're missing.
Imagine a psych. who said: "Okay, we can give you Williams James' laughing gas weekly and HG Wells' coca wine as needed and bi-monthly tokes on Ben Franklin's opium pipe -- or we can tranquilize you and lower your creativity. Which will it be?"
Getting Off Drugs
NOVEMBER 2024
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
The formula is easy: pick a substance that folks are predisposed to hate anyway, then keep hounding the public with stories about tragedies somehow related to that substance. Show it ruining lives in movies and on TV. Don't lie. Just keep showing all the negatives.
The drug war bans human progress by deciding that hundreds of drugs are trash without even trying to find positive uses for them. Yet scientists continue to research and write as if prohibition does not exist, that's how cowed they are by drug laws.
I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
If fearmongering drug warriors were right about the weakness of humankind, there would be no social drinkers, only drunkards.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Why SSRIs are Crap: testimony from an expert, published on April 2, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
hen I see doctors praising antidepressants online, it plucks my last and final nerve. I ask myself, why, in 2023, are doctors still praising a treatment protocol from the 1970s that has turned 1 in 4 American women into wards of the healthcare state?
You have been reading an article entitled, Why SSRIs are Crap: testimony from an expert, published on April 2, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)