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General Problems with SSRIs
Note:
most of the issues described through this article apply to SSRIs and
SNRIs. For ease of reading, I will just refer to SSRIs. Likewise, in
some cases, “antidepressants” sometimes also includes other classes of
antidepressant drugs (e.g., tricyclics).
One of the
lesser known facts about the pharmaceutical industry is that more money
is spent marketing drugs than developing them (this was even the case during COVID when the industry had been given a virtual monopoly because the government suppressed every off-patent medication).
In
turn, you will frequently observe the industry concoct elaborate ways
to make a useless (or worse) drug appear to be worth selling to all of
America (in my opinion best encapsulated by the idiom “Putting Lipstick on a Pig”).
This I believe occurs because clinical trials cost so much to do and
the company needs to guarantee a return on that investment (resulting in
the same bag of tricks being used to inflate a drug’s benefits and
downplay its harms) and because the drug regulators (who often are taking money from the industry) never hold them accountable for that behavior.
Note: numerous whistleblowers testified
that the COVID-19 vaccine trials were not blinded and conducted in a
fraudulent manner which deliberately overestimated the efficacy of the
vaccines and concealed those who were severely injured by them. Despite
this (even after receiving a formal complaint from a researcher at one
Pfizer trial site), the FDA refused to do anything.
Since
“depression” is so subjective, it is even easier to game its research,
and as a result, when the “successful” studies of antidepressants are
carefully examined, we find over and over that they actually provided
minimal benefit to the recipients but severely harmed many of the test
subjects (in essence exactly what happened with the COVID-19 vaccines and their predecessors, the disastrous HPV vaccines).
Note:
the first SSRI, Prozac, was originally developed as a weight loss drug,
but Eli Lilly pivoted to marketing it for depression as that metric was
far more subjective and easy to falsify. John Virapen, Lilly’s
executive assigned to secure its initial approval testified that
Prozac’s data was so bad, regulators and psychiatrists dismissed his
attempts with laughter…until Virapen bribed Sweden’s “impartial expert” to push it through.
Following this, in 1987, FDA under Vice President George HW Bush
(whose father was an Eli Lilly board member) overcame its initial doubts
about Prozac, pushed it through and has defended it ever since, such as
by gagging the FDA scientist who found SSRIs caused children to commit
suicide (which may have been due to both George HW Bush and his son
George W Bush stocking their administrations with Eli Lilly
personnel)—all of which is discussed further here.
Fortunately, there are a few metrics you cannot cover up. One of the most well-known ones is overall mortality (how many people in total on vs. off the drug died) since you can’t reclassify death. Another is how many patients voluntarily chose to continue taking a medication:
•A review of 29 published and 11 unpublished clinical trials containing 3704 patients who received Paxil and 2687 who received a placebo, an equal proportion of patients in both groups left their study early (suggesting Paxil’s benefits did not outweigh its side effect), and that compared to placebo, 77% more stopped the drug because of side effects and 155% more stopped because they experienced suicidal tendencies.
•A study of 7525 patients, found that 56% of them chose to stop taking an SSRI within 4 months of being prescribed it.
•An international survey of 3,516 people from 14 patient advocacy groups found that 44% had permanently stopped taking a psychiatric drug due to its side effects.
•A survey of 500 patients found 81.5% were unsure if their anti-depressants were necessary.
Put differently, if patients feel worse on a medication they are taking to “feel good” than they do without it, that means the trials proclaiming the medications made patients feel better were a fraud.
Unfortunately, since there is so much money in the psych meds (as you can sell those pills indefinitely to as much of the population as you can give a “diagnosis” to), there is a vested interest to not reveal those side effects or provide resources for those who suffer from them (as doing so would effectively be an admission to those side effects existed). This in turn becomes particularly problematic when the patient develops a severe acute reaction (e.g., the psychosis that can turn violent), a permanently debilitating chronic reaction, or severe withdrawals when they try to stop using these highly addictive drugs.
When people read other people’s stories, they realize that they’re not the only person that’s experiencing that problem. There are 6,000 relatively complete case histories [on SurvivingAntidepressants.org]. You realize it’s all the same story. It’s one story. And each person who experiences it is so surprised that it happened to them—people go through a period of absolute disbelief. They realize that they’ve been trusting their doctors to have a certain amount of knowledge, and their doctors don’t actually have that knowledge.
And you know, this is heartbreaking. I went through this, and I felt that the world had fallen out from underneath me. There wasn’t any medical safety net. So the sociological phenomenon exists, and has not yet filtered into medicine [this is also exactly what has happened with the COVID-19 vaccines]. Medicine has its own ways of gathering information, and in psychiatry, for some reason, they keep asking each other what the truth is instead of asking their patients. The patient voice is not very well recognized in psychiatry at all.
Note: Surviving Antidepressants is a popular website (with 500,000 views a month and 14,000 users from every imaginable demographic) that the founder was forced to make because no resources existed for those with SSRI complications. In the above interview, she highlights another common issue SSRI victims face. Because there is so much stigma towards mental illness, when a “psych patient” shares their reaction to a medication, it is often discounted and attributed to their existing mental illness rather than the drug and is “treated” by giving more of the drug—which often has disastrous consequences (e.g., this is a common story with the mass shooters).
Violent Behavior
When Prozac was first brought to market in the mid-1980s, the pharmaceutical industry had not yet convinced the world everyone was depressed and needed an antidepressant. So, instead (given that SSRIs work in a similar manner to a stimulant like Cocaine) Prozac was initially marketed as a “mood-lifter.”
Likewise,
in 1985 when the FDA’s safety reviewer scrutinized Eli Lilly’s Prozac
application, they realized Lilly had “failed” to report psychotic
episodes of people on the drug and that Prozac’s adverse effects
resembled that of a stimulant drug. In turn, the warnings on the labels
for SSRIs, such as anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia,
irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia,
hypomania, and mania match the effects commonly observed with stimulant
street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Note: in the previously mentioned survey of 3,516 people which found 44% stopped a psych med due to side effects, a quarter reported this was due to the agitation they suffered.
In the previous article, I published a variety of studies showing that the manufacturers knew this violent behavior (e.g., suicide) was a common side effect of the SSRIs that was deliberately kept from the public. Since a common argument used to debunk that assertion is claiming that this behavior was actually due to a pre-existing mental disorder, I would like to cite three studies which disprove this notion:
•A Cochrane review
assessed 150 studies where healthy volunteers were given SSRIs, and
found approximately one third of them deliberately omitted discussing
SSRI side effects and about half of the studies were never made publicly
available (presumably to hide their concerning data). Ultimately, 14
of the 150 studies were eligible for meta-analysis (since enough
information existed in them for the researchers to know what actually
happened), and in these 14 studies, SSRIs were found to double the risk
of suicide.
•In 2000, David Healy published a study
he had carried out with 20 healthy volunteers – all with no history of
depression or other mental illness – and to his big surprise two (10%)
of them became suicidal when they received Zoloft. One of them was on
her way out the door to kill herself in front of a train or a car when a
phone call saved her. Both volunteers remained disturbed several months
later and seriously questioned the stability of their personalities.
•Eli Lilly showed in 1978 that cats who had been friendly for years began to growl and hiss on Prozac and became distinctly unfriendly. Once Prozac was stopped, the cats returned to their usual friendly behavior in a week or two.
Note: the FDA hypothesized that SSRIs can reduce violence in some but cause an increase in violence in others (which I suspect is linked to pre-existing genetic polymorphisms—as undermethylators respond quite well to SSRIs whereas hypermethylators can turn violent on them). Likewise a review of 84 animal studies showed that reduced aggression upon treatment with SSRI was most commonly observed, but sometimes the animals instead became more aggressive.
To illustrate what this can look like, I will share what four different patients experienced prior to killing themselves or others:
A month later, Toran experienced a severe cluster of adverse reactions including suicidal behavior, self-harm, aggression, hostility, hallucinations, lack of concentration and impaired functioning. The symptoms were so severe that he dropped out of school. His psychiatrist’s response was to increase his dose, which worsened the adverse reactions.
Six days later, Jake had his first reaction. He walked out of an exam half-way through it and cried for about 2-3 hours that night, saying, “You don’t know what it’s like in my head.” His parents thought this was from the stress of the exams. They never imagined that a drug could do this to a person.
The last two days she was just a complete zombie I have to say. She was just agitated, jumping at every noise and not making sense. I was very concerned. We were very close to Cecily. I just loved her deeply.
Shortly before his death, Woody came home crying after driving around all day. He sat in a fetal position on the kitchen floor profusely sweating with his hands pressing around his head saying, “Help me. Help me. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I am losing my mind. It’s like my head is outside my body looking in.”
While these cases are extreme, I know numerous people who had less extreme versions of the above (e.g., they never committed a violent act). Each of them shared with me just how terrifying it was for them to gradually lose their mind or that their brain just never worked right after SSRIs, and I hope this article can provide an inkling of what it’s like to go through that.
Lastly, competing theories exist to explain SSRI violence. These include:
•SSRIs
emotionally anesthetizing the individual so they lose their
psychological inhibition to wanting to hurt or harm human beings.
•SSRIs
causing akathisia, an extremely unpleasant agitation throughout their
body which makes it difficult to sit still and frequently causing them
to want to commit suicide.
•The individual becoming
psychotic or “possessed,” demonstrated by cases such as people
reporting seeing their body from above and it acting on its own, a boy
seeing “demons” then showing up at a school with a gun, taking everyone
hostage, then waking up midway through and having no recollection of
what happened, or a mass shooter setting up for an amusement park
massacre then shooting themselves and writing “I am not killer.”
•The stimulating nature of SSRIs being “activating” and provoking violent behavior.