https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/overprescribed-suicides-haunt-the-dubious-approval-of-antidepressants-5498641?utm_source=HT_article_paid&src_src=HT_article_paid&utm_campaign=health-2024-02-07-ca&src_cmp=health-2024-02-07-ca&utm_medium=email&est=iGnNdQZfiR7YvWuhMGYnT8zCFvDJw79rlQS49PO4nT5WGUWDwgfKXUbrDPjwJucYyhbxBe%2FMDg%3D%3D

Depression’s Controversial ‘Mechanism’
For the past 60 years, Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist with a psychotherapy practice in Ithaca, N.Y., has been sounding the alarm on the risks of psychiatric drugs. He has written more than 20 books, many co-authored with his wife, journalist Ginger Breggin—about half of which include warnings about the adverse effects of antidepressants. Books authored by Dr. Breggin, who has been called the “conscience of psychiatry,” include “Toxic Psychiatry,” “Medication Madness,” and “Talking Back To Prozac.”

Zoloft, Prozac, and Paxil are classified as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In an interview with The Epoch Times, Dr. Breggin said doctors have made unsubstantiated claims that the inhibition of reuptake of serotonin alleviates depression. As neurotransmitters carry messages between nerves, the reuptake mechanism returns some of them to the nerves where they were created.

“This inhibition of reuptake will allegedly help depression by increasing serotonin in the synapses,” Dr. Breggin said.

This is the explanation psychiatrists give patients but many scientists have long doubted the overly simple explanation that serotonin could be responsible for depression, sadness, apathy, and other things linked to depression.
Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist. (Courtesy of Dr. Peter Breggin)
“Serotonin is the most widespread neurotransmitter throughout the brain, so it affects all kinds of things. It is in the gut, it is in the bloodstream, so this idea is ridiculous.”
When this class of antidepressants was originally marketed, psychiatrists claimed they now had a gold standard to treat people because they were going to affect a particular chemical imbalance in their brains in an effective way, Dr. Breggin said.

“And everybody bought it, even though the idea that depression would be linked to one function of the brain was flawed,” Dr. Breggin said. “What anyone would have known, if they hadn’t been influenced by the drug companies, is that you can’t affect one neurotransmitter in the brain by itself because they all are connected. That is why we humans are so complicated.”

In light of the black box warnings associating antidepressants with suicide, several other researchers undertook studies to discover for themselves if there was a causal relationship. In a study published in 2006 in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, researchers asked “How have the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants Affected Suicide Mortality?”
Australian researchers, Dr. Wayne D. Hall, then professor of public health policy at University of Queensland, and Dr. Jayne Lucke, senior research fellow at the university, found that recent randomized controlled studies of SSRI antidepressants “increased suicidal ideation early in treatment compared to placebo. Observational studies have found an increased risk of self-harm within 9 days of an antidepressant drug being prescribed.”

They concluded, “If SSRIs increase suicide risk in some patients, the number of additional deaths is very small because ecological studies have generally found that suicide mortality has declined (or at least not increased) as SSRI use has increased.”

Ecological studies involve looking at a mass group of people to make inferences about population-level effects of a treatment and pattern. In the case of antidepressants, researchers did not find an increase in suicides after SSRIs were introduced. However, ecological studies can make it difficult to parse out specific causes and effects because of the number of confounding variables. For example, if there is a population-wide decrease in smoking or an increase in wealth, this could skew any potential insights.
Pain in Plain Sight
Army Sgt. Angela Peacock, then 24, was serving in Iraq when a fellow soldier was almost killed by an improvised explosive device. Sgt. Peacock was physically ill at that time, and not with her unit when the convoy was hit. Thoughts of death led her to see an Army psychiatrist, who prescribed a sedative and anti-anxiety drug. The drugs made her feel worse, and she was medically discharged from the service.
A few years later, Ms. Peacock was on 18 medications at the same time, including antidepressants. She was having suicidal thoughts, as well as thoughts about possibly killing students in her niece’s school.

“My original problem was compounded by the drugs,” Ms. Peacock told The Epoch Times. “I was put on more than 40 drugs during 13 years to treat the mental health symptoms and side effects. I didn’t realize it was the meds that were keeping me in these bad states until way later.”

Producers of a feature-length documentary film on people damaged by psychiatric drugs, “Medicating Normal“ contacted Ms. Peacock and chronicled her healing process, as well as her return to college, where she earned a master’s degree in social work. She now works as a healing coach, helping people who have been harmed by psychiatric medications.
Mary Neal Vieten, a board-certified clinical psychologist, is the director of Warfighter Advance, a group that assists warfighters in reintegration after their war experiences. Since 2010, she has treated many people suffering from severe adverse effects of antidepressant drugs. A 22-year Navy veteran, Dr. Vieten was featured alongside Ms. Peacock in the documentary.

She went along with the biochemical model of mental health treatment for the first years of her military career. “It took so many suicides before I asked myself, ‘What are we doing wrong?’” Dr. Vieten said in an interview with The Epoch Times. “I realized that a lot of what I was fed in graduate school was provided by parties that were not impartial, like pharmaceutical companies. Hiding in plain sight was the fact that people getting on antidepressants and killing themselves was a very common outcome.