About 41 million Americans reportedly take at least one antidepressant drug.
On both sides of the Atlantic, medical doctors seemingly doing the bidding of Big Pharma continue to hand out antidepressant prescriptions like Halloween candy despite side effects that can exacerbate a patient’s condition, including but not limited to, suicidal thoughts.
Tragically, sometimes these thoughts transform into actions.
Think about the contradiction: A pharmaceutical drug meant to alleviate depression apparently causes a person to consider taking his or her own life as a side effect. Does that meet the standard of common sense?
According to psychiatry professor David Healy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, antidepressants induce about 4,000 additional suicides each year in the U.S. and in Europe, including about 250 in the U.K.
He also separately maintains that 25 percent of those on SSRIs are more anxious rather than less.
Some of the perpetrators of barbaric mass shootings incidents have also been said to be linked to SSRIs.
Writing in the U.K. Daily Mail last week, author Katinka Blackford Newman, who is leading an effort to publicize and archive the dangerous side effects of antidepressant drugs in Britain, recalled that a successful lawyer on an antidepressant/antipsychotic cocktail for stress threw himself under a train.
In another case, a recently unemployed woman prescribed antidepressants, whose daughter described her as a "zombie" while on the drugs, disappeared after talking about killing herself. In yet another tragedy, a 15-year-old boy who was prescribed antidepressants and who described himself as “brain fried” in a letter he left behind, “calmly” walked in front of a train after being discharged from a U.K. hospital.
Newman also contends that many patients can take these antidepressant drugs without adverse consequences.
She revealed that she developed an anxiety condition from drug toxicity known as akathisia, the inability to sit still, after being prescribed drugs for stress. Antidepressants also caused her to consider suicide by train after experiencing “anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity or physical/inner restlessness.”
About a month or so after going off the drugs while under medical supervision, Newman was able to resume her normal life.
“I had an instinct the drugs were making me ill and told doctors this on many occasions. They told me I didn’t understand my condition, which they insisted was depression. The refusal to listen to patients’ concerns about what the drugs are doing to them happens too frequently," she writes.
Newman called attention to a study published by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre suggesting that SSRIs “doubled the occurrence of events that can lead to suicide and violence” based on data derived from 612 healthy volunteers.
“The report provoked a row because it listed the following as events leading to suicide: agitation, nightmares, feeling jittery, nervousness, anxiety, restlessness, tremor, depression, abnormal dreams, abnormal thinking — all symptoms identified by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration as precursors to suicide.”
In a development that could make many Natural News readers depressed, however, the global market for SSRIs is projected to exceed $13 billion by 2018.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all regimen of what appears to be toxic pharmaceutical interventions, alternative therapies and lifestyle choices may provide part of the answer to depression.
While treatment specifics are and should be a private matter between healthcare professional and patent, the medical establishment and the population it seeks to serve should explore a full range of options for depression.
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