Are 1 in 10 Americans Depressed—Or Are Doctors Nuts?

by Heidi Stevenson

25 August 2009

Nearly 10 percent of American adults are taking antidepressants. About 27 million people. Are Americans really that sad, or is it a matter of crazy doctors—or is it simply money?

Close to half of these drugged people have no psychiatric diagnosis. The number of women drugged is more than double that of men. Most of the prescriptions are written by family doctors. The odds are high that the patient asked for the drug after seeing it advertised.

Though doctors dispense them like candy, modern antidepressants—SSRIs and SNRIs—are far from safe, with a side effect profile that's chilling, including tingling sensations (indicative of neural damage), difficulty breathing, heart problems, muscle pain, liver damage and hepatitis, amnesia, rashes, seizures, and a host of others, including permanent brain damage.

Let pointer hover here to see a more thorough list of negative SSRI and SNRI effects.

Antidepressants Damage the Brain

Even the list of side effects doesn't tell the whole story. SSRIs work by interfering with brain function on the claim that depression, along with zillions of other psychological issues, is the result of defective serotonin function. The popular image of serotonin is of a brain chemical that regulates depression. It's pure myth. Serotonin is responsible for a number of body functions, including transmission of neuron signals, vasoconstriction, stimulating smooth muscles, and endocrine functions. Large amounts are found in the hypothalamus, the brain gland that controls nearly all the body's endocrine functions. It's no wonder that drugs interfering with serotonin can cause flu-like symptoms, low sodium, fever, fatigue, and uncontrollable movements.

Normally, serotonin in a brain synapse is reabsorbed if not used. SSRIs interfere with that process, keeping the serotonin circulating in the synapse. The hypothesis suggests that depression is caused by a lack of circulating serotonin. It has never been proven, but drug manufacturers and doctors have stated and restated it so often that it's become the basis of the "depression is a brain malfunction" myth.

Our bodies respond to malfunction whenever possible, and artificially increased serotonin is no exception. Neurons that synthesize serotonin are shut down. It's a self-regulating system. Too much serotonin triggers a production stoppage. Too little results in reopening the serotonin factory.

Homeostasis and Smaller Brains

When shutting down the serotonin factory doesn't work, the brain also responds by destroying serotonin receptors. Homeostatis is the body's ability and tendency to maintain equilibrium. If a critical function is out of balance, then putting it back in balance is a priority. Without this tendency, we die. Serotonin function and balance is critical to health. Therefore, if the first attempts at restoring proper function don't work, the brain resorts to stronger measures. It starts to destroy serotonin receptors. As many as 40-60% of them may die off.⁽¹⁾

A study by Wayne State University School of Medicine researchers in 2000⁽²⁾ found that paroxetine shrinks the brain in the area of the thalamus. The authors of the study claimed that this decrease in brain mass benefits the children, based on the study's evidence that obsessive-compulsive behavior was reduced, though they had not shown any cause-and-effect between the shrinkage and symptom improvement.

Homeostatis and Bigger Brains

Another of the brain's responses to excess serotonin is to increase the density of the transporter system that removes serotonin. So, part of the brain becomes denser.

A Yale study⁽³⁾ published the same year as the Wayne University study found that paroxetene caused neurons in part of the brain to proliferate abnormally. Naturally, the authors of this study claimed that abnormal brain cell growth is beneficial, with the statement that antidepressant use "overcomes the stress-induced atrophy and loss of hippocampal neurons and may contribute to the therapeutic actions of antidepressant treatment." They justify this claim by referring to brain cell proliferation that occurs in electric shock treatment. Of course, they don't point out the memory loss and other harms caused by that practice.

So, it appears that brain damage of any sort, if it's found in the course of a study for a particular drug, will almost certainly be declared beneficial—even when the claims are conflicting.

SNRI Drugs

Thus far, the discussion has focused on SSRIs. If you're thinking that SNRIs might be better...well, 'fraid not. These drugs have all the same effects as SSRIs because they have the same effects, plus they do more. Not only do they prevent the reuptake of serotonin, they also prevent the reuptake of noradrenaline, which is another name for norepinephrine—which is the fight or flight hormone. So, SNRIs keep the high stress hormone circulating, the one that's responsible for so much chronic disease nowadays because of the constant stress modern society places on us. Need more be said about the risks of SNRIs?

What Are We Doing?

Our doctors take the easy way out over and over. Patients ask for and sometimes demand drugs that will not benefit them and may do enormous harm. Rather than attempt to educate—either their patients or themselves—they simply prescribe— and rake in money for the quick office visits required for prescription refills.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers have the system completely under control. They produce drugs for profits. They invent diseases for the drugs they're developing. They hire the employees of agencies that supposedly regulate them. They create fake grass-roots movements to manipulate the regulating agencies and the public. They buy doctors to do fake trials and hire ghostwriters to give the best possible spin on the weakest results, even on ones that document the opposite of their claims. Medical journals, whose boards are, as often as not, filled with people with links to Big Pharma and whose magazines are filled with pharmaceutical ads, print just about any sort of drug trial paper, giving them the spin of being peer-reviewed by a bunch of people who are either taking pharma money or hoping to. The news media, whose own profits are dependent on ads, and whose parent companies likely have financial ties to Big Pharma, blindly run the press releases Big Pharma produces without even bothering to check for accuracy.

We are so deluded that we watch an ad on television, one that is designed to appeal to our basest emotions to convince us that we have no rational control over our lives, but need to submit to someone in a white coat, hoping that the person inside that silly uniform will deign to give us a little pill and make our lives better, happier, and insulate us from our problems. So, we troop to the doctors' offices and ask for whatever pill has been pressed into our brains by the latest marketing technique.

And now, ten percent of the American public takes dangerous antidepressants, drugs that function by producing brain damage. That is beyond depressing.

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