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Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants

Here's why that's nonsense

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher





December 7, 2023



Author's Follow-up: February 22, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


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"...


I keep encountering psychiatrists who tell me that it is wrong to denounce antidepressants 2 because it causes folks to give them up prematurely, presumably leading to potential suicides.

This argument is rich coming from psychiatrists. It is precisely their failure to promote the therapeutic use of substances like MDMA and laughing gas that makes suicide likely.

Moreover, this bizarre logical fallacy - that a subject is too "fraught" to even be discussed - is just another product of Drug War ideology, which tells us that ANY talk about the positive effects of "drugs" is wrong. We need more talk, not less, and we need to discuss all drugs freely and without favoritism - and not be told that SSRIs are exempt from criticism because it's just too dangerous to speak truthfully about them.

In fact, I have never counseled anyone to give up SSRIs, period, full stop. My argument has always been that SSRIs should be replaced with far more inspiring medicines that do not turn the user into an eternal patient. Speaking as an SSRI junkie myself, I find them very dispiriting because they have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state. But I have yet to hear any psychiatrist in the world denounce this aspect of use - and yet all of them, by their silence, continue to support the outlawing of drugs like coca and opium 3 . And why? Because they might render the user dependent.

What? For the latter drugs, dependency is a "bug" and can, if desired, be avoided with careful use. But for SSRIs, dependency is an actual feature. That is how they work. They are drugs that are meant to be taken for life.

This was not originally the case, of course. When they were introduced, they were intended for moderate-term use at most. We only started hearing the mantra "keep taking your meds" after it became apparent to psychiatrists that these antidepressants were damn hard to quit. Rather than apologizing for this pharmacological dystopia that they had foisted on one out of four American women, however, psychiatrists made a virtue of necessity and announced that - "Oh, by the way, the drug you're taking may very well have to be taken for a lifetime in order to keep depression at bay."

As Richard Whitaker points out, these drugs seem to cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to fix. The body comes to accept this new chemical soup as "normal" biochemistry, hence the user discomfort when the drugs are withdrawn. But I will not go into detail here about my many issues with antidepressants. My views on this topic may be found in the depression-related essays listed below. My argument here is against the absurd modern practice on the part of psychiatrists of basically charging the critics of the pill mill with murder.

The idea that we should not even discuss these topics is outrageous and yet par for the course in a drug-war society in which all talk about drugs is full of hypocritical assumptions and biases. If we're going to argue nastily like that, then I hereby charge psychiatrists with murder for their failure to provide laughing gas to their suicidal patients. We provide EPI pens for the allergic, but no "feel-good" drugs for the depressed. This is puritanism with a vengeance. This is Mary Baker Eddy on steroids. "Let them die: as long as they remain spiritually pure by foreswearing drug use!"

I mention laughing gas in particular here, because psychiatrists cannot tell me that the drug was illegal during their "watch." But I would add here that if psychiatrists were really interested in their patient's welfare (rather than in white-washing their use of SSRIs), they would be clamoring for the repeal of laws that keep their suicidal clients from using drugs like MDMA 4 and coca as needed to cheer themselves whenever a suicidal fit comes upon them.

I can appreciate that veteran psychiatrists in particular are touchy on this topic. After all, who wants to admit that they have spent their career contributing to the creation of the biggest pharmacological dystopia in human history, the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life (source: Julie Holland). But my goal is not to blame anyone for the past but to guide them to a brighter future. Psychiatrists are not responsible for the milieu in which they live, in which purblind materialism 5 was the very air that they breathed (the materialism that leads prominent drug researchers like Robert Glatter to ask amazingly naive questions like, "Can laughing gas 6 help those with treatment resistant depression" - answer: of course it can help!) . Besides, it is the empathy of the psychiatrist that makes them a real professional, not their ability to wield a politically correct prescribing pen.

All I'm doing is trying to "call out" the philosophical problems connected with their current prescribing method and to remind them that the antidepressant pill mill only makes sense in a world in which Mother Nature's godsends have been rendered invisible by the drug-war orthodoxy of substance demonization. If psychiatrists refuse to listen to that message, the least they can do is to refrain from shooting the messenger.

Author's Follow-up: December 7, 2023

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.






Author's Follow-up: December 29, 2023



It's a strange criticism, one that can only be imagined in the Janus-faced age of the Drug War, to be told that you're a murderer for being honest about drugs. But then that's the whole problem with America: our leaders, from Clinton, to Obama, TO Biden, all believe that it is wrong to talk honestly about drugs. Let's say that again so that the absurdity can sink in: they all believe that it is WRONG to talk honestly about drugs. In that statement we see what a sorry pass we've come to as a nation by following the warped fearmongering logic of the Drug War to its natural absurd conclusion: namely that we should pretend that ignorance is the best policy for a free and supposedly scientific country. It certainly dampens my esteem for Rhodes Scholars when I reflect that Bill Clinton holds such a view8. As far as antidepressants, it's a little convenient that we should be told to refrain from criticizing the very drugs involved in the great psychiatric pill mill -- drugs which have created nothing less than the greatest mass dependency of all time, not to mention the fact that it's the most demoralizing treatment protocol imaginable to turn one's client into a patient for life. I wonder how many psychiatric patients have killed themselves for that reason alone, the fact that they have to show up every three months at a clinic to be treated like a sick child by a clinician who might be half or even one-third their age.

By the way, those who start blaming deaths on free and open debate are creating a new form of argumentum ad hominem that deserves its own name as a brand-new logical fallacy -- argumentum ad homicida, perhaps?

Strange. Not only can such psychiatrists IGNORE the mass chemical dependency that they themselves have created, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women take a Big Pharma med every day of their life, but now these same doctors are telling us that we're committing the moral equivalent of murder if we suggest that this wholesale doping has been a mistake.

Mind you, I'm not saying that SSRIs don't have a place. What I'm saying is that if they DO have a place, it is only because prohibition has outlawed all the common sense approaches to improving mood and mentation. Otherwise there would never have been any call to create drugs inspired by reductive science to try to fight the supposed "real" cause of human sadness -- for the last thing we need is a cure for human sadness -- especially since the definition of happiness -- of the proper default mindset for the human being -- should not be decided by a drug manufacturer! We NEED to treat the symptoms -- because its the height of hubris to say that we know how folks SHOULD feel and that we can make a drug to ensure that everyone feels that way. That's Stepford Wives. That's the doping of America to make us consumer friendly -- or the type of personality that Wall Street can live with. Certainly I've never heard a long-term SSRI or SNRI user complain of the mental freedom and inspiration that they derive from their constant pill taking.

And it does make one mildly nauseous to see the contempt that Americans hold for drug users -- knowing that most of these same Americans think that it's actually the duty of chronic depressives like myself to "keep taking my meds." It reminds one that science is a religion in America and it can do no wrong. That's why even otherwise sane individuals like Carl Hart tell me that folks like myself should keep taking their meds and that his book is not for the depressed or anxious.

He's got this interesting idea that science has got depression well in hand -- which I find surprising, having spent the last 40 years of my life on one mind-numbing Big Pharma 9 10 med after another, always depressed, and wondering for the life of me why I'm not allowed to reach down and use the uplifting medicine that grows at my very feet. It's bad enough when demagogue politicians tell me to refrain, but when Carl Hart himself tells me that they're right, that I should indeed shut up and take my meds, I can't help feeling just the slightest bit teed off. It puts me in mind of a curious line from "The Castle" by Franz Kafka, in the Mark Harman translation:

"Calls for a slight attack of despair."




Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




It is no wonder that the Drug War sticks around like an unwelcome guest. Depression would not be a "thing" if it were not for drug prohibition. There would be no disease mongering to create highly-paid jobs in psychiatry and pharmacology. And so we have outlawed all the substances that can inspire and elate. In fact, if there had been a Drug War in the Punjab in 1500 B.C., there would be no Hindu religion today. The Hindu religion owes its very existence to the use of a drug that inspired and elated.

And so I find it quite frightening when psychiatrists tell us we cannot even criticize the status quo. This reminds me that it is just a matter of time before free speech is officially outlawed on the subject of drugs, just as it is already tacitly outlawed by ostracization and unspoken limits. The Colorado legislature even considered a law in 2024 to outlaw free speech about drugs. And so even my isolated and lonely pushback in defense of common sense will become illegal.

But let me add some comments for those psychiatrists who dare to tell me that I am committing murder by being honest. Let us now consider what the psychiatrists are doing by refusing to promote the use of godsend medicine that we have outlawed.

They are leading to unnecessary suicides for starters. When a cousin of mine went to the local E.R. for severe depression, did they give her substances that would cheer her up in real-time and inspire her with new religiosity? Oh, no, that would not be scientific! They gave her absolutely NOTHING to cheer her up -- but rather started her on pills that may or may not make her less gloomy in a few weeks -- drugs which she will have to take for a lifetime, even if they do not work.

What about the autistic? Do we give them drugs that inspire compassion? Of course not! That would not be scientific. We say, "Screw them -- until such time as we can find a drug that works for autistics according to the inhuman ideology of behaviorism!"

The Drug War outlaws substances that can end depression. They can end depression so well that their use has inspired entire religions. And yet you, intolerant psychiatrist, are refusing to point out these obvious truths -- to the contrary, you are calling me a murderer for doing so.

I'll say it again: This is the sorry pass that we come to when an erstwhile freedom-loving people live by a superstition like the Drug War: they eventually become intolerant of education and knowledge itself.

What an abomination.

Drugs are no worse than fire. Both have negative uses in specific cases -- but to outlaw them for that reason is insane and productive of immense harm.










Notes:

1: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts (up)
5: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors (up)
6: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide (up)
7: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use (up)
8: The Bill Clinton Fallacy (up)
9: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science (up)
10: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? (up)


Antidepressants




WARNING: Don't bother trying to get off antidepressants unless you are truly committed to the idea in the name of healthcare liberty. You have to be committed to such a goal heart and soul, merely to have a chance at success. For long-term users, it can be a real challenge. It is interesting how psychiatrists flip the script on this subject, by the way: they claim that the hideous withdrawal symptoms somehow prove that the user needed the drug all along. But this is obvious nonsense. This can be seen in the fact that these same psychiatrists would never say such a thing about heroin users: that their angst upon quitting the drug is a sign that the drug was actually working for them.

Note that I am not saying that antidepressants are drugs from hell -- but rather that they BECOME drugs from hell thanks to drug prohibition. Drug prohibition outlaws all drugs that could help you get off of antidepressants and so live a fulfilled life without becoming a ward of the healthcare state. We need merely to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Why do we fail to do so? Because we judge drugs based on the following silly and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anybody at any dose in any circumstances...

Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?

Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.

The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.

So do antidepressants make sense?

This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that drug war prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.

Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.



  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap
  • And don't get me started on antidepressants!
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Depressed? Here's why!
  • Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
  • How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What Malcolm X got right about drugs
  • Why SSRIs are Crap





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!

    To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.

    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's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.

    All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.

    Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.

    Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.

    William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.

    In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.

    We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    Drug War Agitprop
    The Book of the Damned continued


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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