Imagine we’re back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. You’re feeling depressed and no one wants to talk to you, so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems. But even after talking things out with your shrink, you’re still not feeling great. All hope seems lost. Then the shrink tells you not to despair, because you have the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms, called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs.

If you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you could get a placebo that does nothing. You’re told it’s a win-win: If you participate in the clinical trial, Big Pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drugs actually works. And you have a chance of being cured. If you’re not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario isn’t a big deal. Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects — like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on. And in exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away. So what do you have to lose?

This was the process drug companies used to convince the world that SSRIs worked. After running a bunch of “double-blind” clinical trials, they found that people who took the SSRIs ultimately reported that they felt better than people who received the placebo. Therefore, we were told that the whole “serotonin theory of depression” must be true. After all, when people took SSRIs and had more serotonin in their brains, their depression went away. The people who took the sugar pill didn’t do as well. So there you have it. Science wins again.

There’s a major problem with this whole methodology, however. It’s a problem that somehow didn’t occur to any of the media outlets or physicians who pushed SSRIs for decades. You might have to think about it for a few minutes, but eventually it becomes obvious. Here’s the issue: In practice, these clinical trials weren’t actually double-blind. The vast majority of patients were able to “break blind,” as they say in the industry. And that means they were able to figure out whether they got the real SSRI or the placebo. That’s because, in most cases, the patients who got the real drug very quickly noticed they were experiencing some of the side effects. After all, if you take a pill and you start experiencing dry mouth or nausea or something like that, then you’ll probably conclude that you’re taking an active medication. And that’s exactly what happened in many of these trials. In fact, in one study, conducted by researchers at Columbia, 89% of participants correctly guessed that they were on the SSRI. That’s an extremely high number for a clinical trial.

Now you can probably see the issue. If the studies aren’t really double-blind, then we have no way of knowing if the SSRIs actually improved people’s moods. It’s quite possible that these patients were actually feeling better because they thought they were taking a wonder drug. And then they convinced themselves that it was working, so they told the therapist they were improving. This is commonly referred to as the “placebo effect,” and the only way to defeat it — particularly when you’re trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs — is with double-blind studies. And that didn’t happen with SSRIs.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

This is not some crackpot theory, by the way. A few years ago, a researcher at Harvard named Irving Kirsch found:

Analysis of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect … The relatively small differences between drug and placebo in antidepressant trials are at least in part due to ‘breaking blind’ and discerning that one is in the drug group, because of the side effects produced by the drug.

Kirsch goes on to suggest that, instead of SSRIs, maybe all patients should be given a placebo. After all, based on the FDA’s data, less than 45% of SSRI trials showed a statistically significant benefit of the SSRI over a placebo. And the placebo, of course, has no side effects.

But as we all know, there’s no money in prescribing sugar pills. So instead, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry pushed SSRIs. Based on these garbage clinical trials — which fall apart under the slimmest possible scrutiny — the use of SSRIs among teenagers and adults in this country increased by almost 400% from the early 1990’s to 2006. And it kept going up. By 2014, one in ten adults was filling an SSRI prescription. From 2015 to 2021, SSRI use increased by another 35%. We’re talking about tens of millions of prescriptions here.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans suffering from depression has kept increasing. According to Gallup, in 2023, “The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime reached 29.0%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.” In other words, we’re more depressed than ever, and at the same time, we’re taking more antidepressants than ever.

These prescriptions have continued even after one of the most prominent medical journals on the planet admitted that actually, doctors no longer think low serotonin levels are linked to depression. In other words, if these drugs actually work, then no one can actually explain why. Quoting from the journal Molecular Psychiatry: “Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without. … This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.”

I’ll say that again. “This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.” This was a paper published in the summer of 2022, by one of the top journals in the entire field of medicine. No serious person disputes it.

And yet, to this day, if you suggest that depression isn’t related to a chemical imbalance, as I did this week, you will be dogpiled for doing so. It’s been impossible to have anything approaching an honest conversation about depression and SSRIs because many of the people on these drugs will lash out with blind rage if you even suggest that depression might have causes that go deeper than “chemical imbalances.” If you try to talk about the problem of despair with any depth or nuance at all, you are screamed out of the room by drug addicts who don’t know they’re drug addicts. The truth is, though, that none of the support for SSRIs is based in reality. This whole class of drugs has been peddled to tens of millions of people based on complete fabrications. It’s not an overstatement to say that this is one of the great medical scandals of our time.

What’s changing now is that, finally, someone in a position of authority is finally willing to investigate these drugs — and many other drugs like them. A few days ago, via executive order, the Trump administration established something called the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” or “MAHA,” and it’ll be headed by RFK Jr. The purpose of the commission, according to the White House, is to determine why Americans have shorter life expectancies than people living in other nations — as well as higher rates of chronic diseases like cancer and asthma. Part of this effort means assessing the, “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” Watch:

 

As of right now, as you heard, RFK’s commission is going to be focused on gathering data. They’re not banning anything outright. They’re not punishing doctors for prescribing anything. Instead, they’re doing what the government should’ve done several decades ago. They’re looking at the existing evidence and determining whether it’s valid or not. They’re not going to simply accept “clinical trials” without looking closely at them. They’re going to see whether it makes sense to keep prescribing these drugs to so many Americans, particularly young people.

You have to wonder what kind of person would object to a fact-finding effort like this. After all, if SSRIs (and the other drugs he mentioned) actually work as advertised, then the extra scrutiny wouldn’t be a problem at all. But RFK Jr. has received a lot of push back already. Newsweek, for example, recently took aim at RFK’s claim that antidepressants can be more addictive than heroin. They cited a Stanford professor as saying: “Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk. In my 35 years in the addiction field, I’ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.”

So we’re meant to conclude that RFK is a conspiracy theorist for even suggesting that SSRIs can cause dependency. Just a few years ago, however, that was not a conspiracy theory at all. It was settled science. In 2018, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.” Here’s some of the relevant findings: “In New Zealand, where prescriptions are at historic highs, a survey of long-term users found that withdrawal was the most common complaint, cited by three-quarters of long-term users. … In a recent survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs — most commonly antidepressants — about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so because of these symptoms. In another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users, withdrawal symptoms were reported by more than 130. Almost half said they felt addicted to antidepressants.”

Now, if you compare those numbers to the percentage of heroin users who become addicted within a month of using the drug, you’ll find that RFK actually has a point. By one estimate, up to 38% of new heroin users become dependent within a year. That’s a lot, obviously, but it’s less than the number of antidepressant users who reported feeling severe withdrawal symptoms.

This is why RFK’s commission is an important step. It’s clear we have a lot of evidence that antidepressants are causing far more harm than most people realize. But they’re not seeing the evidence because it’s being suppressed. A transparent commission can solve that problem. It can also address this objection, which was just published by the Left-wing outlet Mother Jones.: “In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, [RFK] claimed that ‘tremendous circumstantial evidence’ suggested people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.).”

This is another common refrain you hear from defenders of SSRIs. They say “most school shooters” were not taking SSRIs. As we’ve previously discussed, there are two major problems with this line. First of all, we don’t know what drugs a school shooter was taking unless the family discloses it. The police and hospitals won’t tell anyone, citing privacy laws. And in pretty much no case does the family definitely state that the shooter wasn’t taking any kind of medication. Secondly, a lot of “mass shootings” are really gang violence, and those incidents get lumped in with school shootings. So they flood the data set, and make it hard to determine whether SSRIs are influencing a certain kind of shooting.

Anecdotally, of course, you’ll find plenty of evidence that SSRIs might be linked to school shootings. From Columbine to Northern Illinois University to the Navy Yard to the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to the black church in Charleston to the Old National Bank in Kentucky, the shooters were all confirmed to be on antidepressants. In response to these shootings, you might say that correlation doesn’t prove causation. After all, these shooters were taking SSRIs because they were unstable. That doesn’t necessarily prove SSRIs made their condition worse.

And that’s true. But there is additional, affirmative evidence to believe that SSRIs are in fact making these shooters’ condition worse. For one thing, there’s the FDA black box label on these drugs, which indicates that they can “increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior.” And then there’s this. A few years ago, researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that antidepressants doubled the risk of suicidality and violence, when they’re given to healthy people with no mental health disorders. From the journal: “Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.”

How is that possible? The truth is we have no idea. We have no clue why these drugs supposedly work in the first place. And we have no idea why they might turn normal people into violent maniacs. It’s obviously a very concerning finding, especially given how much doctors are over-prescribing these drugs to any patient who claims to be depressed.

Doctors would rather prescribe those drugs than tell patients the truth about their depression, and how to deal with it. I can say that, in my personal life, I have known many people who take antidepressants. And in almost every case, there are glaringly obvious things in their lives that would cause any normal person to be depressed. Depression is a totally rational response to their circumstance. Instead of making lifestyle changes or dealing with the underlying trauma, however, they are given drugs that effectively numb their brain. It’s like giving someone a painkiller to make it hurt less when they put their hand on a hot stove. The stove is still burning them. The pain from the stove is not the problem. Their hands and nervous system work just fine. It’s where they’re putting their hand, that’s the problem.

The reason the medical establishment and Democrats are panicking over RFK’s commission is simple. The moment people realize they have agency — when they realize they can take their hand off the stove — they become a lot harder to control. They also become a lot harder to monetize. For Big Pharma and corporate media outlets that sell advertising space to Big Pharma, the implications are obviously dire. Nevertheless, for Americans hoping to reverse this country’s long-standing public health decline, after a generation of junk science and fake clinical trials, it’s a change that’s long overdue.

​[#item_full_content]  

​[[{“value”:”

Imagine we’re back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. You’re feeling depressed and no one wants to talk to you, so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems. But even after talking things out with your shrink, you’re still not feeling great. All hope seems lost. Then the shrink tells you not to despair, because you have the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms, called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs.

If you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you could get a placebo that does nothing. You’re told it’s a win-win: If you participate in the clinical trial, Big Pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drugs actually works. And you have a chance of being cured. If you’re not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario isn’t a big deal. Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects — like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on. And in exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away. So what do you have to lose?

This was the process drug companies used to convince the world that SSRIs worked. After running a bunch of “double-blind” clinical trials, they found that people who took the SSRIs ultimately reported that they felt better than people who received the placebo. Therefore, we were told that the whole “serotonin theory of depression” must be true. After all, when people took SSRIs and had more serotonin in their brains, their depression went away. The people who took the sugar pill didn’t do as well. So there you have it. Science wins again.

There’s a major problem with this whole methodology, however. It’s a problem that somehow didn’t occur to any of the media outlets or physicians who pushed SSRIs for decades. You might have to think about it for a few minutes, but eventually it becomes obvious. Here’s the issue: In practice, these clinical trials weren’t actually double-blind. The vast majority of patients were able to “break blind,” as they say in the industry. And that means they were able to figure out whether they got the real SSRI or the placebo. That’s because, in most cases, the patients who got the real drug very quickly noticed they were experiencing some of the side effects. After all, if you take a pill and you start experiencing dry mouth or nausea or something like that, then you’ll probably conclude that you’re taking an active medication. And that’s exactly what happened in many of these trials. In fact, in one study, conducted by researchers at Columbia, 89% of participants correctly guessed that they were on the SSRI. That’s an extremely high number for a clinical trial.

Now you can probably see the issue. If the studies aren’t really double-blind, then we have no way of knowing if the SSRIs actually improved people’s moods. It’s quite possible that these patients were actually feeling better because they thought they were taking a wonder drug. And then they convinced themselves that it was working, so they told the therapist they were improving. This is commonly referred to as the “placebo effect,” and the only way to defeat it — particularly when you’re trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs — is with double-blind studies. And that didn’t happen with SSRIs.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

This is not some crackpot theory, by the way. A few years ago, a researcher at Harvard named Irving Kirsch found:

Analysis of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect … The relatively small differences between drug and placebo in antidepressant trials are at least in part due to ‘breaking blind’ and discerning that one is in the drug group, because of the side effects produced by the drug.

Kirsch goes on to suggest that, instead of SSRIs, maybe all patients should be given a placebo. After all, based on the FDA’s data, less than 45% of SSRI trials showed a statistically significant benefit of the SSRI over a placebo. And the placebo, of course, has no side effects.

But as we all know, there’s no money in prescribing sugar pills. So instead, doctors and the pharmaceutical industry pushed SSRIs. Based on these garbage clinical trials — which fall apart under the slimmest possible scrutiny — the use of SSRIs among teenagers and adults in this country increased by almost 400% from the early 1990’s to 2006. And it kept going up. By 2014, one in ten adults was filling an SSRI prescription. From 2015 to 2021, SSRI use increased by another 35%. We’re talking about tens of millions of prescriptions here.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans suffering from depression has kept increasing. According to Gallup, in 2023, “The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime reached 29.0%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.” In other words, we’re more depressed than ever, and at the same time, we’re taking more antidepressants than ever.

These prescriptions have continued even after one of the most prominent medical journals on the planet admitted that actually, doctors no longer think low serotonin levels are linked to depression. In other words, if these drugs actually work, then no one can actually explain why. Quoting from the journal Molecular Psychiatry: “Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without. … This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.”

I’ll say that again. “This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.” This was a paper published in the summer of 2022, by one of the top journals in the entire field of medicine. No serious person disputes it.

And yet, to this day, if you suggest that depression isn’t related to a chemical imbalance, as I did this week, you will be dogpiled for doing so. It’s been impossible to have anything approaching an honest conversation about depression and SSRIs because many of the people on these drugs will lash out with blind rage if you even suggest that depression might have causes that go deeper than “chemical imbalances.” If you try to talk about the problem of despair with any depth or nuance at all, you are screamed out of the room by drug addicts who don’t know they’re drug addicts. The truth is, though, that none of the support for SSRIs is based in reality. This whole class of drugs has been peddled to tens of millions of people based on complete fabrications. It’s not an overstatement to say that this is one of the great medical scandals of our time.

What’s changing now is that, finally, someone in a position of authority is finally willing to investigate these drugs — and many other drugs like them. A few days ago, via executive order, the Trump administration established something called the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” or “MAHA,” and it’ll be headed by RFK Jr. The purpose of the commission, according to the White House, is to determine why Americans have shorter life expectancies than people living in other nations — as well as higher rates of chronic diseases like cancer and asthma. Part of this effort means assessing the, “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” Watch:

 

As of right now, as you heard, RFK’s commission is going to be focused on gathering data. They’re not banning anything outright. They’re not punishing doctors for prescribing anything. Instead, they’re doing what the government should’ve done several decades ago. They’re looking at the existing evidence and determining whether it’s valid or not. They’re not going to simply accept “clinical trials” without looking closely at them. They’re going to see whether it makes sense to keep prescribing these drugs to so many Americans, particularly young people.

You have to wonder what kind of person would object to a fact-finding effort like this. After all, if SSRIs (and the other drugs he mentioned) actually work as advertised, then the extra scrutiny wouldn’t be a problem at all. But RFK Jr. has received a lot of push back already. Newsweek, for example, recently took aim at RFK’s claim that antidepressants can be more addictive than heroin. They cited a Stanford professor as saying: “Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk. In my 35 years in the addiction field, I’ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.”

So we’re meant to conclude that RFK is a conspiracy theorist for even suggesting that SSRIs can cause dependency. Just a few years ago, however, that was not a conspiracy theory at all. It was settled science. In 2018, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit.” Here’s some of the relevant findings: “In New Zealand, where prescriptions are at historic highs, a survey of long-term users found that withdrawal was the most common complaint, cited by three-quarters of long-term users. … In a recent survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs — most commonly antidepressants — about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so because of these symptoms. In another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users, withdrawal symptoms were reported by more than 130. Almost half said they felt addicted to antidepressants.”

Now, if you compare those numbers to the percentage of heroin users who become addicted within a month of using the drug, you’ll find that RFK actually has a point. By one estimate, up to 38% of new heroin users become dependent within a year. That’s a lot, obviously, but it’s less than the number of antidepressant users who reported feeling severe withdrawal symptoms.

This is why RFK’s commission is an important step. It’s clear we have a lot of evidence that antidepressants are causing far more harm than most people realize. But they’re not seeing the evidence because it’s being suppressed. A transparent commission can solve that problem. It can also address this objection, which was just published by the Left-wing outlet Mother Jones.: “In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, [RFK] claimed that ‘tremendous circumstantial evidence’ suggested people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.).”

This is another common refrain you hear from defenders of SSRIs. They say “most school shooters” were not taking SSRIs. As we’ve previously discussed, there are two major problems with this line. First of all, we don’t know what drugs a school shooter was taking unless the family discloses it. The police and hospitals won’t tell anyone, citing privacy laws. And in pretty much no case does the family definitely state that the shooter wasn’t taking any kind of medication. Secondly, a lot of “mass shootings” are really gang violence, and those incidents get lumped in with school shootings. So they flood the data set, and make it hard to determine whether SSRIs are influencing a certain kind of shooting.

Anecdotally, of course, you’ll find plenty of evidence that SSRIs might be linked to school shootings. From Columbine to Northern Illinois University to the Navy Yard to the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to the black church in Charleston to the Old National Bank in Kentucky, the shooters were all confirmed to be on antidepressants. In response to these shootings, you might say that correlation doesn’t prove causation. After all, these shooters were taking SSRIs because they were unstable. That doesn’t necessarily prove SSRIs made their condition worse.

And that’s true. But there is additional, affirmative evidence to believe that SSRIs are in fact making these shooters’ condition worse. For one thing, there’s the FDA black box label on these drugs, which indicates that they can “increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior.” And then there’s this. A few years ago, researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that antidepressants doubled the risk of suicidality and violence, when they’re given to healthy people with no mental health disorders. From the journal: “Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.”

How is that possible? The truth is we have no idea. We have no clue why these drugs supposedly work in the first place. And we have no idea why they might turn normal people into violent maniacs. It’s obviously a very concerning finding, especially given how much doctors are over-prescribing these drugs to any patient who claims to be depressed.

Doctors would rather prescribe those drugs than tell patients the truth about their depression, and how to deal with it. I can say that, in my personal life, I have known many people who take antidepressants. And in almost every case, there are glaringly obvious things in their lives that would cause any normal person to be depressed. Depression is a totally rational response to their circumstance. Instead of making lifestyle changes or dealing with the underlying trauma, however, they are given drugs that effectively numb their brain. It’s like giving someone a painkiller to make it hurt less when they put their hand on a hot stove. The stove is still burning them. The pain from the stove is not the problem. Their hands and nervous system work just fine. It’s where they’re putting their hand, that’s the problem.

The reason the medical establishment and Democrats are panicking over RFK’s commission is simple. The moment people realize they have agency — when they realize they can take their hand off the stove — they become a lot harder to control. They also become a lot harder to monetize. For Big Pharma and corporate media outlets that sell advertising space to Big Pharma, the implications are obviously dire. Nevertheless, for Americans hoping to reverse this country’s long-standing public health decline, after a generation of junk science and fake clinical trials, it’s a change that’s long overdue.

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