Ok, I’ve been depressed lately. So, I’ll take that anti-depressant drug they advertise on TV all the time. You know the commercial where the woman is sad looking at the ground but once she takes the pills , she is skipping through a meadow of flowers. But then they disclose the series of side effects that will leave you a paraplegic. It can cause blindness, rectal bleeding, shortness of breath, immobility and hearing loss. Now after all those side effects, how could I possible NOT be depressed? And why do they approve these drugs to be sold anyway?

There is a Harvard guy that is proving that the drugs don’t even work and it is causing trouble between the drug makers and scientists. The Billion dollar industry isn’t about to give up on their candy. The medical community is at war battling with the scientific research and the writings of a physiologist named Irving Kirsch. His views should be of interest to the 17 Million Americans that take the drugs including children as young as six years old.

The pharmaceutical industry brings in 11.3 Billion Dollars a year selling these drugs. Do you think they are going to stop selling the drugs any time soon with that kind of money coming in? Even if there is research that proves that the drugs are ineffective and just plain bad for you? NO and the doctors and the FDA is in bed with these people too.

Irving is the Associate Director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School. His research challenges the effectiveness of anti-depressants. He says, “The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an anti-depressant is minimal for most people.” So, this guy is saying if I took a sugar pill, it would have the same effect as the drug!

Well then what about the people who say that they are feeling better after taking the drug? That can be called the placebo effect! That is the experiment he conducted of giving people pills that do not contain any medication in it and created an expectation of healing that the actual symptoms are elevated. It can be compared to the idiot teenager who tries pot for the first time and pretends that he is high just to feel included with the experienced pot heads. He really wasn’t high at all.

Kirsch who has been studying placebo effects for 30 years, says sugar pills can treat any number of disorders. Things like irritable bowl syndrome, repetitive strain injuries, ulcers, Parkinson disease even traumatic knee pain. If your Doctor tells you to take it , and reassures you that it will help you. You can feel better and you do not need the crap they are pushing on you with side effects that ruin other parts of your body.

Through the Freedom of Information Act he was able to get the findings of their research of their drugs from the drug companies. They even found no real benefit of their drugs; instead the drug companies published their most successful findings and left out or hid the findings that proved that their drugs weren’t necessary. You can make lots of money from something new pushed on the people, you can’t make much money off a sugar pill or placebo.

The only place you saw benefit from the drugs were in cases of extreme depression. So, if psychiatrists say the drugs work and the drug companies and their scientists say the drugs work and patients say the drugs work, maybe this Irving guy is wrong? Can so many people go to such lengths just to preserve a money filled industry of pills?

Since the introduction of Prozac in the 1980’s prescriptions for these drugs have gone up 400%. with the drug companies spending billions on advertising. The mildly depressed are not getting any benefit from the chemicals in the pill. The FDA only requires that companies show that their pill is effective in 2 clinical trials even if many other drug trials failed.

In Great Britain they do not allow drug companies to push their mildly effective products on their people. England does not let their companies publish just the point of view that will sell them more pills. There, only the most sever patients get the drugs and they are spending a Billion dollars on training for talk therapists to treat mild depression. America wake up, stop being so depressed and stop paying for all the ineffective drugs the industry is pushing on us.