There’s a Mail Online article about high numbers of antidepressant prescriptions in Blaenau Gwent. The article is dated June 29, and was drawn to my attention by Nanu Grewal from Australia.
The article is about a town in Wales where reportedly one sixth of the population is taking antidepressants. That’s about 17%.
So presumably all these people have brain disease. Or perhaps it’s because the unemployment rate is double the national average. That in itself is depressing, but to make matters even worse, a “diagnosis” of depression can reportedly help a person qualify for additional government benefits – a strong temptation for people living below the poverty line.
Psychiatry routinely blames the high prescribing rates on the GPs. But it was the psychiatrists, willingly corrupted by pharmaceutical dollars, who invented and promoted the “illnesses” that make the prescribing possible.
It was psychiatrists, again corrupted by pharmaceutical dollars, who widened the “diagnostic” net to the point where virtually anyone who wants these pills can go to a GP and get them under the guise of medicine, and at the expense of health insurance plans, national and commercial. In 2011, Britain’s National Health Service spent £270M ($410M) on antidepressants – a 23% increase over 2010!
The problem is not confined to the UK. Reportedly one-in-eight Americans take antidepressants, and for American women between the ages of 50 and 64, the rate is nearly one-in-four.
And people are still being told the lie that their depression is something they can do nothing about. It’s an illness- “just like diabetes” – and the only remedy is to take the pills for life.
And the pharmaceutical industry and their psychiatric “thought leaders” laugh all the way to the bank.
The damage and disempowerment inflicted on the people who take these products is written off as collateral damage, to be litigated and silenced by pharmaceutical money – a grotesque “cost of doing business.”
Can anyone stop this scandalous squandering of human life? As I’ve said many times, psychiatry is not something good that needs some minor corrections. Psychiatry is something fundamentally flawed and rotten that has spread its spurious and destructive concepts and practices to virtually every corner of the globe. Apart from a very few individual exceptions, there is no acknowledgement from psychiatry of the damage they have done. No apologies. No corrective action. As DSM-5 makes perfectly clear, all we can expect is more of the same. More profits for psychiatry-pharma; more damage and disempowerment for those who get drawn into their wide-flung web.