“Big Pharma is one of the largest and most profitable businesses in America, and in order to sell their chemical goods to allegedly treat the mind/psyche, pharmaceutical companies must convince society that people’s mental and behavioral problems are caused by their bodily chemicals.”
Daniel R. Berger, The Chemical Imbalance Delusion
An epidemic of mental illness has spread across the modern world. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, 25 percent of all American adults suffer from at least one mental illness, as do 15 percent of all children. Many in the field of psychiatry claim that psychiatric drugs are the most effective tool we have to counter this epidemic, and as a result, these drugs are heavily prescribed in the Western world. In this series of videos, we explore the lies and propaganda that are used to justify the use of psychiatric drugs, and we expose the deep corruption that exists at the heart of the unholy alliance of modern psychiatry and Big Pharma.
In this first video, we expose the “big lie” that supports the millions of psychiatric drug prescriptions written each year and the billions of dollars of profits that pharmaceutical companies earn from their sales. This lie is that chemical (or neurotransmitter) imbalances are a primary cause of mental illness, and that taking psychiatric drugs corrects for these imbalances.
“If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma…”
Isabella Blagden, The Crown of a Life
In the late 19th century, psychiatry suffered low status among the medical professions. There were few generally agreed upon treatments for mental illness, and while medical doctors were rapidly improving their capacity to understand and treat disorders of the body, psychiatry was relatively stagnant with respect to understanding the disorders of the mind.
The fate of psychiatry changed, however, when the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin put forth a bold and revolutionary theory. Kraepelin hypothesized that mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, are the result of underlying physical pathologies in the brain and body. Kraeplin’s theory caught on like wildfire as it aligned with materialism, the dominant scientific paradigm at the time. Materialism is a philosophical position which claims that matter is the primary, sole, and fundamental element of reality, and that our mind is an emergent property of, and reducible to, the interaction of the material parts of our brain.
In aligning psychiatry with the materialist position, and hence the scientific community at large, Kraeplin’s theory radically improved the status of psychiatry. Kraeplin became the founder of modern psychiatry, and the widespread acceptance of his theory ushered in a wave of experimental psychiatric treatments targeting the brain and bodily malfunctions believed to underly mental illness. In his book Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, James Davies writes:
“In the 1920s, these [treatments] included…surgically removing parts of the patient’s body—their teeth, tonsils, colons, spleens, and uteri...injecting patients with horse serum, using carbon dioxide to induce convulsions and comas, injecting patients with cyanide, and giving them hypothermia…Another treatment was malaria therapy, injecting the patient with the malaria parasite in the hope that the high temperatures malaria produced would kill the virus then thought responsible for mental disease…many patients failed to recover from the malaria disease.”
James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
The ineffectiveness of these early 20th century treatments did not stop psychiatrists from developing new experimental treatments. In the 1930s, insulin shock therapy was invented, which involved giving patients high doses of insulin that would trigger intense seizures and place the patient in a coma. Davies writes that:
“After this procedure, granted, patients would appear to feel calmer, but they would often show memory loss and other neurological abnormalities such as loss of speech. Five percent of all patients actually died from this treatment.”
James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
In the 1940s, lobotomy, or the surgical removal of parts of the brain thought to be responsible for mental disorders, was invented. And by the 1970s one million people in the United States had been lobotomized. Another treatment which grew in popularity in the 1940s was electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, which involved adminstering electric shocks to the brain of a depressed patient in order to induce severe seizures. In the words of Davies, all these outlandish and barbaric treatments “won impetus and legitimacy from psychiatry’s enduring conviction that there must be a physical basis for mental disorder…this originated with Kraeplin’s assumption: if our emotional maladies are biologically caused, then the body is where our efforts must be directed.” (James Davies, Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good)
After half a century of experimenting with psychiatric treatments that not only proved ineffective but often harmed, handicapped, or killed patients, the field of psychiatry faced a crisis. General medicine was advancing via revolutionary breakthroughs such as the first organ transplants and blood transfusions, as well as the discovery of antibiotics and insulin. Psychiatry, in contrast, had found little success within the materialist paradigm that dominated scientific discourse. This all changed in the 1950s with the development of the first generation of psychiatric drugs.
