I have been on Zoloft for 5 years now. I do not know about the other anti-depressants but it was a God-send for me. I am a 42yr old female. I would prefer a natural substitute if there is one?

I really like your website.

Thanks Shane. I know that antidepressants are to be avoided. My daughter has suffered from depression since she was about 15 (she is now 21). She has taken Prozac on and off for that many years. She usually takes it for a month or two then goes off of it (until her depression is too bad again) because she knows it is not good for her. This last round of taking it and going off didn’t last, she said it didn’t work to be off of it. Her shrink had a month or two ago told her that was usually what happened, people could go on and off for a while then they needed to stay on it.
ANYWAYS I will of course send her your article, her response will be as always, well he is not telling me what else I can do, her depression is severe. I tell her that she has to improve her diet, as she eats terribly…too much sugar and refined products. What do you suggest I do to give her a plan to head towards. She says she doesn’t want to become a health nut like me. HELP. If you wrote, or have written, a simple article about how to combat depression that I could show here it would be great. I think there are a lot of people out there that are in need of a plan they can follow, or they won’t be able to give up the relief they get from the antidepressants either.
Thanks for any consideration you can give this.

You are spot-on with this attack on antidepressant, as well as with the fact that Big Pharma controls the medical profession, including psychiatrists. At the moment, the only effective countermeasure most of us can take is to avoid the medical community and take care of our health outside the mainstream. Certainly that’s what I’m doing. Keep up the good work.

I’m usually on your side, but not this time. I am and have always been far more vulnerable to depression than the vast majority of people and that trait definitely runs in my family: has been for several generations. Suicide attempts (a couple of them successful) have been commonplace in my family with or without chemical intervention because suicide sounds so good to people who have to put up with constant, crippling pain. On my better days, I feel as though everything I do is an outcome of someone shooting at my feet. On bad days, I can’t do anything but fend off pain in ways people consider crazy. (Other people act weird themselves when they’re in some form of intense pain, and would do well to remember that.)

There are familiar types of pain that I experience in connection with depression, and that’s important because it tells me what effect various drugs have had on my condition. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, there are antidepressants that eliminate certain types of pain – the one that forces me to lie down, clutch my stomach, and writhe, for instance. (What do some people do in response to food poisoning?) You eliminate that and I am, of course, a more pleasant, productive person. The drugs do, however, have so-called “side effects,” one being aggression. Aggression is going to feel delightful to someone who was previously in a defenseless position most of the time, consequently that person may become an addict. He or she will learn that he has to take more and more of the pills to achieve the same high. That would be a particularly dangerous outcome given a drug that removed sorrow and compassion as do antidepressants. On one hand, you can take more pills until you’ve poisoned yourself to death, and on the other, you can go back to where you were – excruciating helplessness. So maybe some people decide they need a permanent solution: multiple murders. Then they wouldn’t feel helpless anymore, they’d tell themselves.

I think the worst candidate for antidepressants would be someone whose hereditary capacity for aggression was normal or healthy (unlike mine), but whose background forced him – often brutally – into a defenseless position. That person would find himself feeling abnormally angry and would immediately focus on turning the tables. By comparison, a person like me would experience, for the first time, a healthy level of aggression and would respond productively…..at least until the drug had to be taken in higher and higher doses. It would take longer, but I too would tend to get addicted and in the process, might end up with an abnormal level of aggression. I might also decide to remedy this problem by withdrawing from the drug, having been told that nothing serious would happen if I did. Common sense should tell us otherwise. In the real world, you can’t radically alter your emotions and opinions – your entire sense of reality, in fact – without serious consequences. Of course people have ended up psychotic. Everything they learned to believe in crashed in a few days! Do people learn to take pride in independent self-assertion? Do they learn to despise beggars who constantly make excuses? All of that would collapse if they lost their basic ability to respond to adversity aggressively. Several school shooters openly embraced a Nazi belief system before condemning themselves to death (by their own values). They must have tried to withdraw from the drug.

I think most of this country’s psychiatrists had good intentions in the beginning. They genuinely helped a limited number of people – people like me. However, through the usual profit motive added to the usual universal ignorance, they ended up with a circus so lawless it could lead to mass murder in the near future (just like amphetamines led to the second world war). The public too readily believed that if a life like mine could be saved, the benefits outweighing the risks, everybody had something to gain from antidepressants, or from psychiatry generally. At that point, a crime syndicate moved in throughout the nation and worst cases abounded. The syndicate noticed that and must have been overjoyed: lots of company! They wanted people who were more likely to give them their way, so they mass produced antidepressants to make everyone compatibly aggressive and antipsychotics to stamp out emotions that unusually ambitious people tended to hate. Fifty years ago, only people with disturbingly intense emotions and riveting imaginations received antipsychotics. Now, because of the preferences of the people in charge, half the population could end up receiving them. Little Red Riding Hood will have been unfair to wolves, so she’ll be on Prozac and Risperdal. I’ve seen this before. The elite are searching for something that dictatorships systematically destroy: call it illumination. When everyone agrees with them, there won’t be any.

Shane’s article is saying what the news media, psychiatrists, and the drug industry refuses to admit; antidepressants are causing violence, not curing it!

Most mass murder/suicides are linked to antidepressant use. Only the high profile perpetrators get autopsies done to determine antidepressant levels in the blood. But there are probably far more homicide/suicides that are caused by antidepressant use that we do not read about in the news.

“I don’t know what happened to old Henry,” says a neighbor. “He always seemed so mild mannered. This just wasn’t like him to do something like this.” This is a typical comment we see on news stories about antidepressant related violence.

Americans are blowing brain fuses left and right due to SSRI’s inducing neural malfunction. And there’s no way to protect ourselves from the random violence that is springing up in schools, shopping malls, fitness clubs, and other public places as a result.

Thanks for having the testicular mass to put out an article like this.