What you don't know about antidepressants can kill you

I’ve been unable to post for several months because of a bad arm injury that required surgery. Now that I can finally type with two hands…

My younger son suffered from depression and anxiety and was treated with one drug after another. Nothing helped. When he died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, I was not only devastated, but also furious at the mental health system that had relied on drugs to help him. In order to move on with life, I decided to write a book about my son’s experiences ("Broken: How the Broken Mental Health System Leads to Broken Lives and Broken Hearts," Amazon 2019). The research I did for the book taught me that dependence on antidepressants is misguided if not downright dangerous.
Evidence continues to mount that antidepressants are not an effective treatment, may increase the severity of the condition, and may even prove fatal.

The ineffectiveness of antidepressants is well documented. “Over a third of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not have an adequate response to first-line antidepressant treatments,” as reported in the MDPI journal in June 2020. Similarly, the journal of the British Pharmacological Society reports, “…in the real‐world, antidepressants are only efficacious in 30%‐40% of depressed patients.” With this information in hand, it is not at all surprising that Joanna Moncrieff, MD, writes, “People should be informed that the story they have been told, implicitly or explicitly, about having an underlying chemical imbalance that drugs can correct is just that—a story—with very little evidence to back it up.” ("Mad in America," October 2020)

And when antidepressants do work, they are no more effective than a placebo. According to NIH, approximately 40 to 60 out of 100 people taking antidepressants notice an improvement in six to eight weeks. However, in that same time period, 20 to 40 of every 100 people taking a placebo also notice an improvement in symptoms. Further evidence of this phenomenon was reported in the journal "Frontiers in Psychiatry" in June 2019 “… data are consistent in showing that most (if not all) of the benefits of antidepressants in the treatment of depression and anxiety are due to the placebo response.”

Studies also demonstrate that antidepressants can actually worsen the symptoms they are designed to eradicate. John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, considered this issue in “Are Psychiatric Medications Making Us Sicker.” “A multi-nation report by the World Health Organization in 1998 associated long-term antidepressant usage with a higher rather than a lower risk of long-term depression.” In September 2017, a study conducted by Jeffrey Vittengl at Truman University and published in "Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics" indicated that patients who had taken antidepressants for nine years displayed more severe depression symptoms. According to the 2020 book "Advances in Neuropharmacology Drugs and Therapeutics," “The use of antidepressant drugs for the period greater than 3 years increased the risk of suicidality in the prescribed patients.” No wonder the "Journal of Clinical Psychiatry" has published at least four studies that looked at worsening suicidal ideation during antidepressant treatment (https://www.psychiatrist.com/JCP/arti...).

The dangers of worsening symptoms may not be the worst outcome of antidepressant use. In 2017, researchers at a public research university in Canada reviewed studies involving hundreds of thousands of people and reported that antidepressant users have a 14 percent higher risk of cardiovascular events such as strokes and heart attacks and a 33 percent higher chance of death than non-users. A 2018 study published in "BMC Medicine" looked at 238,963 patients aged 20–64 being treated with a variety of antidepressant medications. It was reported that mortality rates were significantly increased with all classes of antidepressants compared with non-use.

This information is all readily available, and yet In 2019, antidepressant drug sales amounted to $14.3 billion. Have pharmaceutical companies purposely misleading the public? To be continued...