The Hidden Dangers of Antidepressants and Why It's So Hard to Stop Taking Them

SSRI antidepressants are some of the most harmful and overused medications on the market

by A Midwestern Doctor

Story at-a-glance

• SSRI antidepressants are some of the most harmful and overused medications on the market

• Common side effects of SSRIs (and SNRIs) include emotional numbness, severe agitation, bipolar disorder, cognitive decline, sexual dysfunction, and birth defects

• Psychiatry's denial of SSRI-related issues often leads to misinterpretation of side effects as signs of pre-existing mental illness, resulting in more medication and catastrophic consequences

• SSRIs, like stimulant drugs (e.g., cocaine), are highly addictive, leading to severe illness during withdrawal, which affects approximately half of users

• Withdrawal from SSRIs is often extremely difficult, with very few resources available for those trying to stop

Whenever I ask a holistic physician which commonly used medication classes they believe cause the most harm to society, SSRIs always are one of the top five.

Note: Statins (discussed here), NSAIDS like ibuprofen (discussed here), and PPI acid reflux medications (discussed here) frequently make the top five as well.

This is because SSRIs rarely benefit patients (only a minority of depressed patients have a metabolic type that responds to SSRIs) and the drugs have a large number of severe and often life-changing side effects. For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients¹ on antidepressants in New Zealand:

Many of these can be immensely impactful for individuals (e.g., SSRI sexual dysfunction is often permanent and frequently causes severe depression, while emotional anesthesia takes away the joy of life and can cause people to spend years, if not decades, in emotionally toxic situations).

Worse still, the SSRIs are somewhat unique in that they can also harm those not taking the drugs as they can trigger psychotic violence, which results in either suicide, homicide, and tragically, in numerous cases, mass shootings (discussed further here). Furthermore, the pharmaceutical industry was aware of this from the start, but chose to conceal all that evidence to sell the drugs (and only revealed it after lawsuits forced them to).

Note: Another example of a pharmaceutical that harms others is the COVID vaccine as it causes certain recipients to shed the vaccine and then significantly harm those around them who are sensitive to shedding — to the point numerous sensitive readers have shared COVID vaccine shedding has greatly impacted their lives (discussed further here).

Maximizing Sales

Much of the medical industry’s appalling conduct makes sense once its actions are viewed through a business lens that seeks to maximize sales. This for instance, is why the SSRIs, rather than being outlawed, were able to become some of the most successful drugs in history (e.g., in 2027, they are projected to be an 18.27 billion dollar global market²) and why almost all of their appalling side effects have been hidden from the public. Let’s review some of those unconscionable tactics.

Sales Funnels

A classic principle in marketing is to cast as wide a net as possible for your customers and then gradually pull some of those customers into costlier and costlier products. Since funnels gradually shrink as you go further down them, similar to how fewer customers will buy a product as it becomes more expensive, this method is often referred to as a “sales funnel.” With the SSRIs, a robust sales funnel exists as:

• Through years of almost unbelievable marketing (discussed further here), depression was redefined to include the normal negative emotions of life. As such, depression became so subjective it became possible to market it to most of the population and patients frequently will ask their doctors to prescribe SSRIs after they encounter an emotional obstacle.

• Numerous mass screening programs exist for doctors to diagnose if someone is depressed (e.g., this is routinely done for pregnant women and the elderly).

• Once a patient is “depressed,” rather than using natural approaches that effectively treat depression, the medical system will aggressively push them to start SSRIs.

• The SSRIs frequently cause a variety of psychiatric issues which require taking even stronger psychiatric medications.

This skit for example illustrates many of the sad absurdities behind a common SSRI sales funnel used on pregnant women:

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