Depression is NOT a Chemical Imbalance in Your Brain – Here’s Proof Posted By Dr. Mercola | April 06 2011 | Total Video Length: 2:56:35
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This powerful video contains interviews with experts, parents and victims. It is the story of the high-income partnership between drug companies and psychiatry which has created an $80 billion profit from the peddling of psychotropic drugs to an unsuspecting public. How did these drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress?
Dr. Mercola’s Comments:
This is an excellent documentary detailing how the psychiatric drug industry was born and its powerful and profitable partnership with the drug industry, which has turned psychiatry into an $80 billion drug profit center.
But is any of it based on real medical science?
How valid are the psychiatric diagnoses being handed out?
And are the drugs safe?
Unfortunately, the evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against psychiatric drugs. It’s becoming ever clearer that most of today’s psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent drug treatment is a sham, successfully promoted to make you believe it’s based on some scientific truth.
But it’s not…
What Causes Psychological Distress?
Answering this question is the holy grail of psychiatry. Even before there were psychiatrists, such troubles were blamed on things like evil spirits, or an imbalance of “humors.”
The latter was treated by bloodletting, which is perhaps the longest running tradition in medicine, originating in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Greece, persisting for some 2,500 years through the Industrial Revolution. It was the “aspirin” of the day, used for just about every conceivable condition from pneumonia to depression. Yet, there was never any evidence that it did any good, and many times the patients died. Of course, it was always assumed it was the disease that killed them, rather than the treatment.
Interestingly, we now know that there was good reason why this may have helped men or postmenopausal women. If they had high iron levels this would have been able to reduce their load and thus improve their overall health.
Finally, 19th century scientists began to question its value and medical statisticians who tracked case histories discovered that it wasn’t helping much of anything.
The blanket prescription of drugs for every conceivable psychological hiccup has become the bloodletting theory of the 21st century… Of course, in the case of psychiatric drugs, there’s tremendous profits to be made by maintaining the status quo and not admitting the error of their ways.
The fact is, psychiatry STILL doesn’t understand what causes psychological distress, and the primary theory proposed; the idea that unwanted behavior and depression are due to an imbalance of serotonin and dopamine in your brain, has NEVER been proven.
On the contrary, research has proven the theory is WRONG, yet this evidence has been swept under the proverbial rug.
Despite what the slick advertisements say, psychotropic drugs have no measurable biological imbalances to correct—unlike other drugs that can measurably alter levels of blood sugar, cholesterol and so on.
“How can you medicate something that is not physically there?” they ask in this documentary.
The answer is, of course, you can’t!
Doing so anyway is a dangerous game.
The Physical Dangers of Medicalizing a Non-Physical Condition
One significant danger of psychotropic drugs is that they can upset the delicate processes within your brain needed to maintain your biological functions. This risk simply cannot be overstated… The documentary cites some staggering statistics attributed to psychiatric drugs:
700,000 adverse reactions per year
42,000 deaths per year
How in the world can drugs that cause over 40,000 deaths a year be permitted, let alone handed out like candy?
Even if you DO have a serious psychiatric issue, such as PTSD for example, drugging it away is risky—especially if you’re taking multiple drugs. Since the average American takes 13 drugs per year, this is a serious issue.. A number of military personnel have died in their sleep, for example, after taking a prescribed combination of Paxil, Seroquel, and Klonopin. These deaths were NOT due to overdosing, but rather “each case involved a sudden cardiac incident and resulting death,” Jed Shlackman wrote in an article for the Examiner last year, adding:
“This adds to growing concern about serious adverse effects of psychiatric medications commonly prescribed to emotionally disturbed or traumatized soldiers.”
Several studies have demonstrated the potential for lethal cardiac side effects. For example:
A literature review of studies from 2000-2007, published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety in 2008, found that “Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses, whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations.”
A study published in January 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antipsychotic drugs doubled the risk of sudden cardiac death. Mortality was also found to be dose-dependent, so those taking higher doses were at increased risk of a lethal cardiac event.
Another study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that same year also found that antidepressants increase the rate of sudden cardiac death.
Are Emotional Symptoms Really Signs of Mental Illness?
Clearly, there are “real” mental illnesses that can destroy any semblance of normalcy in a person’s life. But are you mentally ill when you’re sad for more than a couple of weeks?
Is losing zest for life a sign of mental illness?
Where does the normal grieving process fit into our modern lives—is it something that should be drugged, or is it a normal phase of life that everyone on the planet has to move through? And when does an emotional phase go from being a natural part of the changing emotional landscape that is life to a problem that needs to be “fixed”?
Many are quick to defend their choice to take drugs. No one wants to “feel bad.” But are these drugs destroying lives rather than saving them?
I believe the answer is a resounding YES at this point.
Rather than helping people address the root cause of their suffering, psychiatry has now simply resorted to a chemical form of lobotomy to “make the problem go away.”
Drug therapy has been the conventional therapy of choice in the psychiatric field since its beginnings. Insane asylums during the early 19th century employed drugs like morphine and opium to quiet patients’ outbursts. By the turn of the 20th century, heroin was peddled as a cure for psychiatric problems, and Sigmund Freud wrote articles promoting the use of cocaine for spiritual distress and behavioral difficulties.
Today, these drugs have become “illicit” and anyone resorting to cocaine to ease their troubled mind is called a junkie… But in essence, all the industry has done is replacing a few dangerous drugs with other dangerous drugs.
The Truth about the “Chemical Imbalance” Theory
As a family physician I have treated many thousands of depressed patients. Depression was actually one of my primary concerns in the mid 80s when I first started practicing, however at that time my primary tool was using antidepressants. I put thousands of people on these drugs and acquired a fair level of experience in this area.
Thankfully I learned more and was able to stop using all these drugs. It was my experience that the chemical imbalance was merely a massive marketing gimmick to support the use of expensive and toxic antidepressants.
Most of you have probably heard that depression is due to a “chemical imbalance
