Kennedy on SSRIs

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is getting a lot of heat during his current confirmation hearings for having criticized SSRI antidepressants in the past. Specifically, he is alleged to have said that they cause school shootings, and that they are addictive.

Obviously, there is a lot of money for drug companies in SSRIs, because people who take them are usually on them for a long time, often for life. We ought to be suspicious.

Doctors, in turn, like pills; it is their entire business. You go to your doctor with a complaint, and they will prescribe one, even if they do not believe it will do anything. You have to keep the customer satisfied. They pride themselves on the “placebo effect.”

And insurers, patients, and the government like pills too. A pill for depression looks ideal: no expensive and intrusive therapy sessions with a psychiatrist. No need for any life changes.

Moreover, “Big Pharma,” the drug companies, finance the campaigns of many politicians. Their advertising sustains a lot of the media. So they are in a position to silence any doubts, as they seem to be doing here.

We ought to begin from the suspicion that SSRIs are being overprescribed. 

RFK Jr. is right. 

Whenever another mass shooting happens, there is always an outcry to ban guns. Which is either folly or deliberate misdirection. There are lots more guns in private hands in countries like Switzerland or Israel than in the US, yet no more school shootings there. The number of mass shootings per capita is actually pretty constant country to country across the developed world, despite varying gun laws and levels of gun ownership. Even take away all guns: those intent on mass murder can resort to cars, or IEDs. The UK government has actually, absurdly, recently introduced a bill banning the sale of knives. Guns are not the issue.

Those wanting to defend the right to bear arms then resort to blaming the shootings on mental illness. After all, the shooters invariably have a history of mental illness. So what is needed is not fewer guns, but more money for mental health. These people must get treatment.

This idea, however, is equally folly or misdirection. The killers have a history of mental illness. That means they have been diagnosed; they are in the system; they have been receiving treatment. Treatment has not worked. The incidence of mass shootings or mass killings is consistent across jurisdictions despite varying levels of investment in the mental health system. Lack of treatment is not the problem.

Further, this association of violence with mental illness is profoundly discriminatory towards the mentally ill. The mentally ill as a demographic are actually statistically less likely to be violent than the general population. Stigmatizing them as violent and dangerous gives them more stigma and more problems when they are already the most stigmatized and suffering among us. It is scapegoating the most vulnerable.

RFK has rightly deduced that the problem has to be with the treatment. These killers are all taking SSRIs.

And it is not hard to see what is going on.

So far as we know, there is no such underlying disease as “depression.” This is true of everything we class as “mental illness.” What we have is a set of symptoms, listed in the DSM, which may be caused by all kinds of underlying conditions. We prescribe SSRIs for a certain set of symptoms, called “depression,” in the same way we might prescribe aspirin for pain or fever, without knowing what is causing the pain or fever.

This means SSRIs are at best only suppressing symptoms while leaving the underlying condition to fester and perhaps grow. Without SSRIs, the problem might instead be addressed and solved. Instead, tragically, modern psychiatry, given their present SSRI approach, expects most with symptoms of depression to recur in time and only get worse as the patient ages.

The initial thesis on which they were introduced, that depression was caused by a “chemical imbalance in the brain,” specifically a lack of serotonin, has been disproven by subsequent research. If they work, we do not know why they work.

But what they do, subjectively, is to deaden emotions. This includes happiness, love, laughter, but also unpleasant emotions like anxiety, fear, and sorrow—the symptoms labelled “depression.” 

This means that, rather like alcohol, they also deaden the conscience. They deaden feelings of guilt.

This is good for those feeling unwarranted anxiety and sorrow, usually as a result of being abused. 

This is bad for those feeling anxiety and sorrow due to their past bad actions or their overblown self-esteem being frustrated by the realities of life.

The former, when they feel bad, want to kill themselves. They see themselves as worthless. The SSRIs, unfortunately, can make them more likely to commit suicide, by taking away their fears and inhibitions. This problem is well known.

The latter, when they feel bad, want to kill anyone around them, as many other people as possible. Hence, mass shootings.

And the awful truth is that either form of “depression” does have a cure, that SSRIs, psychiatry, and the pharmaceutical industry suppress.

It is called religion. Religion can recalibrate one’s sense of values and self-worth. It has worked for thousands of years. 

We have been moving away from it in recent years, largely due to the rise of psychology and psychiatry as a “scientific” substitute.

Mass murder is only one of the results; along with a rising tide of depression, mental illness, drug addictions, social breakdown, family breakdown, and suicide.

All the Way with RFK

 

I am glad RFK Jr. is in the race. I might disagree with him on many things, I might never vote for him, but he is speaking sense and raising important issues others are not talking about.

RFK is right in this clip on the connection of mass shootings to SSRIs. 

The problem is not guns. Other countries have stricter or looser gun regulations than the US, more or fewer guns, but this does not correlate with the number of mass shootings. Nor do they correlate state by state.

The problem is not mental illness. We do not need more money for mental health. The reality is, all these shooters were already being treated. And other nations spend more or less money on “mental health,” but this does not correlate with the statistics on mass shooting. 

What does correlate, and possibly 1:1, is the treatments we are using for “mental illness”: the problem is SSRIs. That is, Prozac and its kin, the standard treatments we use for depression and anxiety.

Or rather, the problem is our inability to diagnose. SSRIs may be helpful for many, for those suffering anxiety and grief over false guilt and moral confusion produced by an abusive childhood or other abuse. But many others also suffer anxiety and grief, but over their own bad behaviour. The anxiety and the grief are actually their conscience calling them to account.

SSRIs deaden the ill-feelings in either case. 

In the first case, this is beneficial. They can allow the unjustly suffering to lead relatively normal lives—at the expense of never dealing with the problem causing the pain. 

In the case of the latter, this is catastrophic. It frees the narcissistic predator of all restraints. 

Modern psychiatry/psychology cannot see the difference, and cannot accept the difference, because it will not recognize, and denies, all moral issues. All it sees are the symptoms, of anxiety and grief, and so prescribes the same pill.

In either case, the better treatment is a call to true religion; to straighten out a smashed moral compass.

Nor is it that hard to make an accurate diagnosis, were we not in denial of morality generally. The effects of SSRIs are like those of alcohol. Either eases inhibitions. 

So observe someone drunk. If they remain good company, and simply become more talkative and sociable, they are safe for SSRIs. If the difference is notable, they are naturally too inhibited. If they just become sleepy and dopey, this is a bad sign, they are an addictive personality, who do not need more comfort, but at least they will not likely become violent. If they become critical of those around them, pick fights, or show outbursts of anger, they are a risk for violence with SSRIs. They need what inhibitions they still have.

If a true depressive feels bad, they blame and may harm themselves. If a narcissist feels bad—and they inevitably will, for the universe will always disappoint their sense of their just desserts—they will blame and seek to harm whoever else is available.

Mass Shooters and SSRIs

 

Can't vouch for any of this, but it is interesting.

I think antidepressants are dangerous when they're given, as they commonly are, to narcissists. 

They reduce inhibitions. That is their main effect.

This is somewhat helpful for the truly depressed if only a bandaid solution: like alcohol. It dulls down without dealing with the problem.

It is lethal for narcissists, who often have symptoms indistinguishable from depression for the DSM and so to mainstream psychiatry. Like alcohol, it can lead in narcissists to violence and greater cruelty. But without incapacitating them, as alcohol will.

Tom Cruise Vindicated?

 

A new metastudy from the UK finds no evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels--the theory on which it has been treated since about 1980. The theory over 80% of us still believe with a religious fervor.

“The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”

Prozac and all the SSRIs work as placebos. The dirty secret nobody wants to point out is that placebos do work.

But the “chemical imbalance” line was always a con. Michael Knowles pointedly wonders how Tom Cruise, an actor, knew all this years ago. 

It should have been obvious to any thinking person all along that it was no explanation at all. If chemical balance causes depression, what caused the chemical imbalance? If depression is associated with low serotonin levels in the brain, which is cause, and which effect?

If he hadn’t figured it out for himself, Cruise knew this because he was a Scientologist. Scientology has been calling out psychiatry on this for decades. 

Scientology has been dismissed everywhere as a dangerous cult; but Leonard Cohen, no less, although he did not himself become a scientologist, is on record as saying that they had the real deal. Dangerous, perhaps—but to whom? They might have been unjustly tarred because they were telling inconvenient truths, the way the powers that be now tar any dissent as “racist,” “white supremacist,” or “alt-right.” When someone or something is too generally and broadly condemned, we have a right to be suspicious. Remember Goldstein and the two-minute hate.

The “chemical imbalance” line worked because it was something people wanted to believe. It was a placebo, like the pills themselves. First, it offered a simple cure—just take a pill. Second, it sounded suitably materialistic and amoral, and so “scientific.” Third, it absolved everyone from blame.

It has always been a popular idea, long predating science. It is the theory of the humours: mental problems are/were caused by some imbalance of fluids in the brain. They were restored to balance by drawing bad blood, giving enemas, or cutting a hole in the skull to let the vapours out. SSRI pills supposedly work the same way.

And pills worked because we are conditioned to believe in pills. They seem properly medical and scientific, and science is our religion. The proper cure for spiritual distress, aka “mental illness,” is always faith healing. That is to say, faith.

This is why people cling to their preferred psychological theory with a fervour only seen elsewhere in religion; and not indeed in religion since perhaps the 18th century. It is as though denying another’s psychological faith, whether it is in “chemical imbalance,” the Freudian subconscious, Jung, or Abraham Maslow, puts one at risk of auto da fe and then eternal hellfire. Perhaps you, like I, have repeatedly seen this.

L. Ron Hubbard, being a science fiction novelist, understood the imagination and the willing suspension of disbelief. He understood faith healing. Cohen, as a poet and songwriter, recognized the insight. Scientology tends to appeal to artists and actors generally. They see that imagination is the key, and Hubbard and Scientology have worked out a satisfying cosmology—far more complete and satisfying than the barren cosmology of conventional science, although Hubbard is shrewd enough to claim a scientific basis. We are conditioned to worship science.

Still, when it comes to truly combatting mental illness, neither pills nor a consciously constructed fantasy world can really compete with actual faith. And Hubbard omits the essential moral dimension.

Cohen ultimately found that Judaism worked better. Like the other universalist faiths, it has a complete and coherent account of human experience, and includes the moral imperative.

And that is what is needed to cure mental illness. Mental illness comes from a loss of meaning.

The Real Motive Behind the London Murders

 

All the authorities and the media are still insisting that the man who mowed down a Muslim family of five in London Ontario was motivated by “Islamophobia.” We have seen no evidence for it. Nothing on his social media; he belonged to no “hate groups”; his best friend seems to have been a Muslim who saw in him no trace of animosity towards Islam.

At the same time, those who have been ignoring the preferred narrative might have learned, from his parents’ divorce papers, that he shared one unusual trait with most recent mass murderers: he was taking medication for depression.

This will, unfortunately, lead those who did not fall for the “racism” fallacy to fall for the “mental illness” fallacy: that the problem is the mentally ill, and the solution more money for mental health.

This man—I am avoiding using his name, because others will kill for the chance at fame—call him V—did not murder because he was a racist. He also did not murder because he was mentally ill. The mentally ill, statistically, are no more violent than the rest of us. And more money for mental health is not going to help: he was already being treated.

The problem is the pills.

The SSRIs, the standard antidepressants, work by flooding our brains with jolly juice, happiness hormones. This obviously will lessen the symptoms of depression. Whether that is good or bad depends on why we are depressed. 

Some people are depressed because they are nursing, through abuse, an overly sensitive conscience. The antidepressant can help them to function normally. They start with too many inhibitions on their actions.

Others are depressed because they are nursing a properly guilty conscience. They start with too few inhibitions on their actions. Give them antidepressants, and all hell may break loose.

It is clear that V was in the latter category.

“As his parents’ marriage faltered, [he] became ‘frighteningly angry’ and was particularly disrespectful to his mother, ‘raising his voice and towering over her in an intimidating way, and pounding on doors,’ the report said.

“His mother said she locked herself in her room to avoid him.”

There is this easy way to tell a narcissist from a melancholic: get them drunk. Are they an angry or a funny drunk? 

When they feel bad, really bad, do they want to kill themselves, or everybody else?

The diagnosis is simple enough; and these are opposite problems. But it is invisible to current psychiatry because it seems only reported symptoms, and either the abused melancholic or the narcissist will report feelings of anxiety and sadness; and it is invisible to current psychiatry because current psychiatry refuses to recognize the ethical element of human existence. It tells everyone to ignore their conscience.

Until we fix this, many more people will needlessly die.