Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!

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Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 14, 2022

The American Psychiatric Association has been trying for decades to convince us that "Depression is Real." Unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that the "Drug War" is real as well and it is the Drug War that is responsible for the depression that folks like myself experience. Why? Because it criminalizes virtually all the medicine that could make me feel better and inspire me with new ways of thinking about the world.

Author's follow-up for December 16, 2025

Then why doesn't the APA spend its money on ending the war on godsend mind medicine, aka the Drug War, instead of telling everybody the obvious, that people really do get very depressed indeed in this life of ours?

Answer: When the APA tells us that "depression is real," what they really mean is that depression is a real physical disease and that only the APA and its dependence-causing pharmaceuticals can successfully combat it.

Bollocks, as the Brits say. Thanks to the Drug War, I've spent 40+ years on these "scientific" medicines that have done absolutely nothing to make my life joyful or to give me insight into my life. To the contrary, these dependence-causing "meds" turned me into an eternal patient, with all the demoralizing baggage that implies - like the fact that a 60-year-old has to travel 45 miles every three months to meet with a white-coated woman half his age to get permission to purchase yet another expensive batch of addictive Big Pharma pills, under the apparent theory that one never grows old enough to be trusted to use even legal drugs wisely in America.

Does the DEA get a kick out of turning Americans into little children like this when it comes to psychoactive medicine? Where is the modern Moliere who will hold this politico-pharmacological posturing up to the ridicule that it deserves?

Meanwhile, all the substances that are well known to provide joy and inspiration - shrooms, coca, opium ¹ -- have been outlawed, all based on the Drug War lie that certain politically disliked substances are bad in and of themselves without regard for why they are used, or where they are used, or when, or by whom.

In reality, there are no such drugs in the world. All medicines can have beneficial results for someone, at some dosage, for some reason, in some circumstance. But the Drug Warriors want us to fear godsend medicines, not understand them. And so they insist that the use of proscribed drugs must end in tragedy and addiction.

Of course to the extent that this is true, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by the Drug Warrior's promotion of fear over facts. (And of course the Drug Warrior will do everything in their power to make sure that the "drug user's" life ends in tragedy, if only by arresting them and sentencing them to longer prison terms than that meted out to most murderers.) The Drug Warrior wants us to be ignorant about the hypocritically defined category of "drugs" so that we won't question their childish demonization campaign against them - a propaganda campaign waged chiefly by the almost complete lack of positive mentions of demonized substances in both the popular media and in academic journals, where all the talk is about misuse and abuse, not the ability of such drugs to inspire whole new religions.

And so the APA is right, Depression is real. But guess what? The APA helped CAUSE this depression.

How? By putting its financial interests ahead of its patients' interests and accepting the fantastically lucrative monopoly on mood medicine that the Drug War hands them on a silver platter -- justifying their collaboration with that war by promoting the philosophically flawed conscience sop that the mental world is the natural domain of the materialist medical community, a self-interested tribe whose reductive impulses can never sign off on natural drugs that have the effrontery to "merely" make one feel better according to the user themselves. ("What does the user know about happiness after all?" asks the modern drug researcher. "Scientists will look at the relevant brain chemistry and tell the 'patient' when he or she is actually happy, thank you very much!")

So yes, APA, Depression is real all right, and you should know: you help cause it!

Author's Follow-up: July 15, 2022

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

The Drug War has such diabolical staying power because psychiatry has convinced us that conditions like depression are medical illnesses and therefore require the intervention of the healthcare establishment. If that were true, then our own role as the depressed is to sit back and see what nostrums that medical science can come up with on our behalf. In other words, psychiatry tells us, in essence, "Never mind the countless plant medicines that are now off-limits to you: those are just 'crutches,' don't you know? Only WE have the REAL cures to mental conditions like depression."

The problem here is not science, but philosophy. The fact is that all manner of reductionist symptoms can be associated with conditions like depression, but it is always a leap of faith to claim that those symptoms therefore CAUSE depression. A knotted eyebrow will commonly appear on the head of a worried person, but that does not mean that the knotted eyebrows cause us to worry. Even if a chemical intervention seems to "cure" depression in the mind of a drug researcher who has performed extensive trials, that still leaves us with the question, what does the researcher mean by "cured." Psychiatric practices like lobotomy have been considered successful cures for hyperactive patients, but who considered them successful? Certainly not the patients. No, they were successful in the eyes of tired nurses and administrators who thought to themselves, "Now, I'll finally get some peace of mind thanks to my overactive patients receiving lobotomies!" Likewise with these "cures" for depression: the question always is, "What do you mean by cure?" Based on my use of dependence-causing antidepressants ² for a lifetime now, I know that the word "cure" has a very different meaning for me than it did for the materialist researchers who came up with the "cure" that they created which I am now obliged to take every morning of my life.

The "cure" that I am looking for is one that will allow me to "live large," emotionally speaking, to experience earth's wonders like a child, with wide-open eyes, to truly hear music and to sense my place in the universe while gaining a feeling of brotherhood with the world at large and all who live therein. In short, I desire the advantages that have a history of being obtained by the wise use of the time-honored meds that the Drug War has outlawed. Believe me when I say that the makers of the SSRIs had no such ambitions as these when they crafted my "cure." In fact, judging by my experience on Big Pharma ³ ⁴ antidepressants, the researchers' goal was to cure me of such excessive ambitions altogether and to render me a reliable consumer instead, one who is so chemically dependent on their meds that I will be their employer's unwilling customer for life.

Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

When I wrote the above essay almost three years ago, I had yet to specifically name the fallacious theory whereby modern drug researchers are encouraged to ignore common sense: that theory is the behaviorism of JB Watson ⁵ ⁶. It is the hateful doctrine which holds that the only thing that counts in the realm of psychology is quantifiable data. The mere reported laughter and happiness of the patient: not so much. The evil nature of this doctrine is clear when we consider the simple common-sense truths that it prompts us to ignore:

1) the fact that drugs that grow new neurons in the brain and otherwise increase mental function have obvious therapeutic uses for dementia and Alzheimer's ⁷ patients.

2) the fact that drugs that inspire compassion in users (so-called empathogens) have obvious therapeutic uses for the autistic.

3) the fact that drugs that elate and inspire have obvious uses for the depressed -- and for everyone else, for that matter.

And yet Drug Warriors today -- and even their many accomplices and enablers among neo-liberals and progressives -- have been brainwashed into associating drug use only with adolescent hedonism.

What an abomination.

The Drug War proves that propaganda really works -- especially the propaganda of media censorship (the censorship of all positive reports of drugs use). If democracy and freedom are to survive, the species Homo sapiens has got to come to terms with this fact and so take steps to prevent future mass brainwashing of populations based on premises like that of the Drug War, which are so hateful and so antithetical to human happiness and to human spiritual, medical, psychological and philosophical progress.

Author's Follow-up:

May 08, 2025

How do we go about changing things? Here is a practical recommendation.

I propose that we pass a law making it illegal to demonize drugs in the abstract. If we wish to criticize a certain way of using a drug, fine. But the criticism of a drug in and of itself is no longer to be tolerated. This is because our acontextual demonization promotes laws that deny a drug to everyone -- not just to those whom we have personally deemed to be "abusers" of that drug ("abusers," by the way, being a very problematic word in this context, but that's a topic for another essay). This would be common sense in a sane world, in any case: a world in which we recognized that prohibition kills ⁸, not drugs, that ignorance kills, not drugs, that corrupt drug supply kills, not drugs, that prohibition-related violence kills, not drugs.

Author's Follow-up:

December 16, 2025

Depression would not be a "thing" in America had we listened to Sigmund Freud ⁹. He knew that cocaine was a godsend fix for that condition. But self-interested doctors wanted the drug to be criminalized so that they could set themselves up as the guardians of our psychological states. They had literally trillions to make over the years by demonizing cocaine. Of course, no one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. And Americans were happy to follow the doctor's lead in fearing cocaine. That is what we call 'following the science'¹⁰ in the age of the Drug War: following only the bad news about drugs and judging them completely out of context. And so our doctors worried about a handful of cases of misuse, while throwing hundreds of millions of the depressed under the bus and then turning them into wards of the healthcare state with highly dependence-causing medicines. That's why 'following the science' is such a bad idea in the age of drug prohibition: following the science means following statistically challenged doctor Spocks: statistically challenged scientists who would not know psychological common sense if it came up and bit them on the nose.

And so almost everybody in America -- including enemies of the Drug War -- have been brainwashed by Drug War lies, even those who style themselves as renegades. Indeed, even Wade Davis of Rolling Stone is bamboozled about drug prohibition. He wrote a piece in which he basically signed off on the outlawing of cocaine. Coca was fine, for Wade; it was a godsend demonized by imperialists; cocaine, however, was somehow beyond the pale, except for use as a board-certified anesthetic. And why was cocaine use so problematic? (Just wait till you hear Wade's statistically challenged answer!) Because, he says, it was connected with 400 cases of toxicity around the world. 400 cases.

Um...

Does Davis not realize that 3,000 people die from aspirin every year in the UK alone ¹¹? And that 49,000 people commit suicide in the United States every year ¹² -- to say nothing of the 178,000 who die from alcohol each year in the States alone ¹³ -- or the 60,000 young people who were disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades thanks to the drug prohibition that Davis is tacitly championing in his article ¹⁴. Did Wade fail his math class in grade school? Does he not realize that numbers like 49,000, 60,000 and 178,000 are much greater than 400? And, of course, those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the victims of the prohibition that he is silently championing -- and this in a magazine that prides itself on speaking truth to power! Hah!

Unfortunately, Americans are like Lieutenant Kaffee in "A Few Good Men" when it comes to the subject of drugs: they can't handle the truth! They would rather believe the Drug War lie that drugs can be judged up or down, without regard for details of use -- which is, of course, a progress stopper in medicine -- forcing untold people to suffer merely because we feel that our white American young people are too immature to use drugs wisely -- drugs that civilizations have used successfully without fanfare for millennia! But then what can we expect when we have been programmed for life. Americans received teddy bears for "saying no" to drugs as kids - and have been shielded ever since by our media from all positive talk about drugs -- to the point that the scripts of the very TV shows that they watch have been edited by the White House to conform with Drug War orthodoxy ¹⁵! Meanwhile, you could search high and low without finding a book about the benefits of PANACEAS -- like opium and coca. No, we would rather fear them than learn how to use them wisely. We are just like the cave people of yore who shouted "Fire bad!" We would rather fear dangerous substances than to learn how to use them wisely for the benefit of humanity.

By the way, I wrote a letter to the editor at Rolling Stone to point out this problem with Davis's article, and, as usual, I was ghosted completely ¹⁶. (The following essay contains that letter to the editor. It also contains a follow-up message that I wrote today, imploring the editors to publish my letter and thereby live up to their motto of speaking truth to power: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse.) It is impolite these days to see the drug situation realistically and with common sense. It is bad manners to suggest that our renegade journalists are wearing no leather jackets! And so even the left-wing lives in a world of make-believe thanks to drug hysteria. They claim to be against the Drug War, but they insist on upholding the mendacious drug-related pieties upon which it is based and "justified."

Speaking of the 49,000 suicides, it is psychologically obvious that most of these suicides would have been prevented if we had taught the safe use of cocaine to elevate mood. That is just psychological common sense. Unfortunately, that is the kind of common sense that Americans ignore today thanks to their scientistic belief in the soulless doctrines of Behaviorism, combined with their absurd belief that our drug-hating notions are somehow supported by science. No, they're supported by a strategic branding campaign designed to ignore all but negative aspects of drug use. Moreover, the Drug Warriors have brainwashed Americans since childhood to believe that we are -- and will always be -- children when it comes to drugs and that we could never use them wisely. Indeed, Americans are so bamboozled about drugs that they would prefer that their fellow Americans commit suicide rather than to use drugs -- they would prefer that gun violence destroys our inner cities rather than to have us use drugs -- they would prefer that we rescind all time-honored American freedoms in the name of fighting drugs rather than have Americans use drugs. This is why I say that drug prohibition represents the inversion of all normal values in an ostensibly free country.

Conclusion:

Cocaine was not outlawed out of health concerns. It was outlawed because doctors did not want people to thrive -- they wanted them to be dependent on the healthcare industry for life. Whether this motive was conscious or not is completely beside the point. They knew -- and they know -- in their "heart of hearts" that they have an enormous vested interest in the disempowered status quo -- they need the depressed to be dependent -- just as physical doctors have a huge vested interest in the continued outlawing of opium, the drug that has been considered a godsend for millennia and was used as such by such ancient doctors as Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus.

"In Galenic practice the most useful medicine was a theriaca, or antidote, named Electuarium theriacale magnum, a compound composed of several ingredients, among them opium and wine. " --Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers ¹⁷

Many doctors would not have jobs today if it were not for drug prohibition.

Again to quote Szasz:

"More often than not, the effective treatment of pain requires neither clinics nor doctors, but only a free market in drugs. However, such pharmaceutical freedom would make our highly paid pain researchers and pain clinicians unnecessary and unemployed." --Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs --p. 142 ¹⁸

Antidepressants

Notes for essay entitled Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!:

1: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
5: JB Watson Britannica (up)
6: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
7: What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition DWP (up)
8: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
9: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
10: Why it's wrong to follow the science in the age of the drug war DWP (up)
11: “Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn.” 2017. HuffPost UK. June 14, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/daily-aspirin-causes-more-than-3000-deaths-per-year-scientists-warn_uk_593fb481e4b0b13f2c6daa10. (up)
12: National Institute of Mental Health. 2025. “Suicide.” National Institute of Mental Health. March 2025. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide. (up)
13: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
14: Mexico's war on drugs: More than 60,000 people 'disappeared' 2020 (up)
15: “How the White House and the Media Package Government Propaganda as Entertainment.” 2000. World Socialist Web Site. January 24, 2000. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/01/drug-j24.html. (up)
16: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse DWP (up)
17: “Ceremonial Chemistry – Syracuse University Press.” 1974. Syr.edu. 2026. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1114/ceremonial-chemistry/. (up)
18: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.

The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."

Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.

I might as well say that no one can ever be taught to ride a horse safely. I would argue as follows: "Look at Christopher Reeves. He was a responsible and knowledgeable equestrian. But he couldn't handle horses. The fact is, NO ONE can handle horses!"

The Drug War is a crime against humanity.

The Drug War is based on two HUGE lies: 1) that prohibition has no downsides, & 2) that drug use has no upsides.

The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.

That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.

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Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!

Author's Follow-up: July 15, 2022

Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 08, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

December 16, 2025

Antidepressants

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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Diary of a Drug Fiend