Why Are We STILL Mass Prescribing SSRI's?

New century same old story

For nearly two thousand years, doctors killed their patients with absolute certainty. They watched as the sick grew weaker with each drop of blood drawn, yet responded to these deaths by insisting they simply hadn't bled their patients enough. This unwavering conviction in bloodletting persisted even as evidence mounted against it - a stark reminder that belief can be stronger than evidence, even among the most educated minds.

Fast forward to the 1980s, when doctors worldwide dismissed Barry Marshall's evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria, clinging instead to their belief that stress was the culprit. Marshall's frustration with this rigid thinking led him to conduct perhaps the most dramatic experiment in modern medicine - drinking a bacterial cocktail to give himself ulcers, then curing them with antibiotics. Even this extraordinary proof wasn't enough to immediately overcome entrenched beliefs, as doctors continued treating ulcers with stress reduction for years afterward.

Belief perseverance isn't just stubbornness - it's the mind's fortress against facts, where evidence crashes against the walls of established thinking and dies at the gate. It's what happens when doctors keep bleeding patients to death while insisting the next one just needs more leeches. It's not simply refusing to change your mind; it's doubling down on wrong even as the bodies pile up.

In a cruel twist of human psychology, the more educated and invested someone is in their belief, the stronger their immunity to contradicting evidence becomes. The very expertise that should make someone more receptive to new evidence often serves as armor against it, creating an impenetrable shield of certainty that grows stronger with each degree, publication, and year of experience.

The perpetuation of medical myths isn't simply about ignorance - it's engineered by a sophisticated machine of influence that begins in medical school and extends through every aspect of a physician's career. Medical students don't just learn facts; they inherit beliefs. In the sterile halls of medical education, young minds are molded not only by science but by a hidden curriculum of pharmaceutical influence that shapes how future doctors will think about disease and treatment for decades to come.

This indoctrination is reinforced by a pharmaceutical industry that has mastered the art of controlling medical narratives. They don't just sell drugs - they sell stories. Stories about chemical imbalances and broken brains, marketed through an army of sales representatives who visit doctors' offices armed with selective research and free lunches. These stories are legitimized by "thought leaders" - prominent academics whose research is funded by the same companies whose drugs they study, who are paid to give talks promoting these narratives to their peers.

The system perpetuates itself through iron-fisted control of medical literature. Negative studies vanish into file drawers while industry-funded journals trumpet even the faintest statistical significance as breakthrough science. A drug needs only to beat a sugar pill by a few points on a questionnaire to be crowned as a miracle cure, while studies showing harm or ineffectiveness quietly disappear. This isn't just publication bias - it's the systematic manufacture of medical mythology through selective storytelling.

The very language of medicine is shaped by marketing departments, creating diagnostic frameworks that conveniently align with pharmaceutical solutions. Medical education becomes less about critical thinking and more about memorizing treatment algorithms that invariably lead to prescription pads.

But perhaps most insidious is how this system creates its own gravity. Doctors who question these narratives risk professional ostracism. Insurance companies only pay for "standard of care" treatments. Medical licenses can be threatened for deviating too far from accepted practice. The system doesn't just encourage belief perseverance - it demands it. In this environment, maintaining wrong beliefs isn't just easier than changing them - it's necessary for professional survival.

When a belief becomes deeply entrenched in medical practice, challenging it becomes labeled as dangerous heresy rather than necessary skepticism. The chemical imbalance narrative exemplifies how repeating a convenient story long enough transforms it from marketing slogan to established fact, regardless of scientific evidence. This matters because these beliefs drive real prescribing practices, affecting millions of lives through medications that alter brain chemistry based on theories that were never proven.

The famous physicist Max Planck observed that "science advances one funeral at a time," suggesting that new scientific truths triumph not by convincing opponents, but because those opponents eventually die. But in psychiatry, we cannot afford to wait for the old guard to fade away while millions more are funneled into an ever-expanding pipeline of psychiatric drugs. Each new DSM creates new diagnostic categories, each category demands new medications, and each medication generates new theories about chemical imbalances that justify its use.

Critical to scientific progress is listening to those who have been harmed. Yet the psychiatric establishment has mastered the art of dismissing valid criticism by labeling critics as "anti-psychiatry" - a term that serves the same function as "anti-vaxxer" or "conspiracy theorist." These labels transform legitimate experiences and valid criticisms into fringe positions that can be safely ignored. This rhetorical sleight of hand protects established beliefs not through evidence, but by marginalizing dissent.

Those who have experienced harm from psychiatric drugs aren't "anti-psychiatry" any more than someone injured by a surgical error is "anti-surgeon." Their experiences represent crucial data in understanding both the limits and dangers of our current paradigm. Real science embraces criticism, acknowledges harm, and adjusts its practices based on evidence - not belief. Until psychiatry can engage with its critics without dismissing them, it cannot claim to be truly evidence-based.

The path forward requires amplifying these voices rather than silencing them, examining evidence rather than clinging to beliefs, and acknowledging that criticism of current psychiatric practices comes not from an "anti" position, but from a pro-human, pro-science, pro-truth perspective that demands better evidence and better outcomes for those seeking help.

Primary care physicians have become the front-line dispensers of SSRIs, caught in a system that demands quick solutions for complex human suffering. These doctors, already overwhelmed with impossible patient loads and limited time, become particularly vulnerable to pharmaceutical messaging and standardized treatment protocols. They're given simple narratives about chemical imbalances and handed pre-packaged solutions in pill form, with prescription pads becoming an easier option than navigating the messy reality of human distress.

The result is a kind of medical mission creep - SSRIs are now casually prescribed for everything from mild anxiety to menopausal symptoms, from social shyness to sleep issues. Patients aren't informed that these drugs create active neurological effects that can be mistaken for improvement, while the underlying risks and long-term consequences remain conveniently unmentioned. The numbing of emotion and dulling of both pain and joy gets reframed as "improvement," while the difficult process of withdrawal gets labeled as "proof" that the drugs were needed in the first place.

As we approach the milestone of 20% of the population taking these medications, we're creating a massive natural experiment in chemical alteration of human consciousness. The more people who take these drugs, the more who experience their adverse effects, and the more who find themselves trapped in a system that interprets their struggle to stop as evidence they should never stop.

It's a perfect business model - create customers who become chemically dependent on your product, while maintaining the fiction that this dependence is actually successful treatment. The bitter irony is that in trying to avoid the full spectrum of human emotion, we're creating a population increasingly unable to live fully as nature designed, ensuring a perpetual customer base searching for relief from problems the drugs themselves may be creating.

RESIST

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