The Barbaric State of Mental Health Care in the age of drug prohibition
Why electroshock therapy remains the go-to treatment for ending severe depression in America
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 22, 2026
The following comments are written in response to an article on the Mad in America website entitled "Which Would You Prefer: Electroshock or a Safe Taper?" by Jennifer Giordano. 1
My answer to your question is neither.
I believe that shock therapy is a crime in an age when we do not let people use the plants and fungi that grow at their very feet. Why should we be forced to potentially damage our brain by a government that denies us our access to Mother Nature? I would rather suffer while protesting the drug prohibition that outlaws my right to heal than to undergo ECT.
My tapering to get off Venlafaxine failed miserably after a year, when my depression suddenly returned far worse than ever. But my answer is not shock therapy. I have decided to live the remainder of my life “on Venlafaxine” just so that I can think straight, that’s just how thoroughly my brain chemistry seems to have been changed by this drug. I think it shows how low the healthcare field has sunk thanks to drug prohibition that their go-to fix for people in my situation is damaging the brain. The FDA won’t approve of drugs that grow at our feet, yet they champion shock therapy2. This is absolutely bizarre, and it can only be drug-propaganda that keeps people from seeing it as such.
I think that healthcare officials have a moral duty to speak up against the drug prohibition that has turned depressed people like myself into a patient for life, without yet “curing” my depression — as if depression should be cured in the first place, but rather just symptomatically treated. My idea of a “cure” for depression would not be the same as what a Big Pharma chemist considers to be a cure, in any case.
There are plenty of drugs that could end my depression in a trice. Anyone who denies this is unfamiliar with pharmacology, ethnobotany, drug literature, drug history, and psychological common sense, for that matter.
The government lied and told us that “drugs” fry the brain. How ironic that it is drug prohibition itself that actually forces us to fry brains. Like so many other social evils in America, ECT only makes sense to those who reckon without drug prohibition and how it has outlawed our right to heal.
Drug Prohibition Downside #1,529:
aviation accidents caused by pilots who failed to use mind-sharpening drugs to improve their situational awareness. (See, for instance, Comair flight 5191)
Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
The outlawing of opium eventually resulted in an "opioid crisis"? The message is clear: people want self-transcendence. If we don't let them find it safely, they will find it dangerously.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
The Partnership for a Drug Free America should be put on trial for having blatantly lied to Americans in the 1980s about drugs, while using our taxpayer money to do so!
The following comments are written in response to an article on the Mad in America website entitled "Which Would You Prefer: Electroshock or a Safe Taper?" by Jennifer Giordano. 1
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