I keep getting slammed on Twitter by folks who want to read my essays as medical advice rather than philosophy. Yes, I understand that SSRIs cannot be stopped at will -- indeed, it's not clear if they can be stopped at all for some people, at least in a world in which we have outlawed all the effective alternatives -- and nothing I write should be interpreted as promoting such an attempt. Nor do I mean to criticize psychiatrists for prescribing SSRIs to those who are already dependent upon them. That would be like saying: "In an ideal world, SSRIs would not exist, therefore in THIS world, depressed patients A, B & C must suddenly go cold turkey." I have never said such a thing and anyone who has concluded otherwise, with due respect, needs to improve their reading skills. That said, I refuse to be bullied into silence by psychiatrists who claim that any criticism of such drugs causes some people to stop using them and hence should be stifled in the name of patient safety.
April 2025 Update
This criticism (which is nothing less than the self-interested militarizing of ignorance) is based on the logical fallacy that a human being makes decisions about important matters like healthcare based on one single input: in this case, my own personal criticisms of SSRIs. The truth, however, is that people are influenced by a wide variety of inputs, genetic, biochemical, and environmental. Indeed, the very fact that they have decided to read my criticisms suggests that they already have been given a reason to believe that I might be onto something. And if they do not seek an adequate number and variety of inputs on a given topic or fail to understand the nuances of my arguments, this itself is due to previous factors, such as an inadequate education and/or an impulsive nature, etc., and not the supposed evil nature of the free and open debate of which I am apparently "guilty." We might just as well go back and blame a parent or a teacher for the faulty decisions that such people might make in the here and now. But if we start holding free and open debate responsible for specific negative outcomes, it will be the end of freedom of speech in America1. And who will benefit in such a case? Big Pharma and the Drug Warriors. And as the Church Lady used to say on Saturday Night Live: "How convenient!"
While we're on the subject of poorly educated readers and their inability to discern nuance, let me add another caveat: viz. that when I refer to "psychiatrists" below in a disapproving tone, I mean specifically those doctors who hold the belief that SSRIs and SNRIs are somehow good in and of themselves, and not just thanks to the all-too-convenient fact that we have outlawed almost every other depression-busting drug in the entire world. Psychiatrists as such can be great people -- but only to the extent that they are empathic. The problem is that their job is nearly impossible in the age of the Drug War, which has outlawed all the psychoactive tools that could make interpersonal communication both pertinent and free-flowing. Indeed, a list of the positive effects of many outlawed drugs reads just like a psychiatrist's wish list for therapeutic outcomes!
Finally, I claim that psychiatrists are hypocritical when they insist that SSRIs help and yet do not (by their very silence) maintain that outlawed drugs help. An angry guy tweeted back in upper case that psychiatrists are NOT hypocritical, that SSRIs cause dependence and cannot be stopped without supervision! He apparently read something that I never wrote. Of course SSRIs cannot be stopped easily: that's the whole problem. Psychiatrists become hypocritical when they promote the daily use of SSRIs while claiming (if only by their ongoing silence about prohibition and hence their complicity in that program) that it's wrong -- indeed criminal -- to use most other drugs on a daily basis. That's where the hypocrisy arises. It has nothing to do with the ideal withdrawal process for those on SSRIs. In fact, there can be no satisfactory withdrawal process from such drugs until we learn to use drugs to fight drugs.
But that's a topic for which I'll wait to be misunderstood on another occasion ;) So now back to the "essay proper"...
The whole problem with the Drug War is that it is leading to suicide and needless suffering. It outlaws medicines that would definitely stop a suicidal individual from killing themselves, provided we taught safe use and gave them access to such drugs. So it's pretty damn disconcerting when a psychiatrist tries to flip the script and claim that critics of the status quo are encouraging suicide. The whole drug-hating system is set up to encourage suicide 7 and suffering, under the puritanical notion that it is better to die and/or suffer than to use "drugs." It is only thanks to this "philosophy" that the pill mill even exists. No one in their right mind would choose to become a ward of the healthcare state if America had not criminalized godsend medicines and taught us to fear rather than to understand them."Calls for a slight attack of despair."
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
A lot of drug use represents an understandable attempt to fend off performance anxiety. Performers can lose their livelihood if they become too self-conscious. We only call such use "recreational" because we are oblivious to the common-sense psychology.
It is evil to give the depressed drugs to help them die while barring them from using drugs that could make them wish to live.
The confusion arises because materialists insist that every psychological problem is actually a physical problem, hence the disease-mongering of the DSM. This is antithetical to the shamanic approach, which sees people holistically, as people, not patients.
Westerners have "just said no" to pain relief, mood elevation and religious insight.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
Drug warriors blame all of the problems that they cause on "drugs" and then insist that the entire WORLD accept their jaundiced view of the natural bounty that God himself told us was good.
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