The Bigger It Is

Peter Hitchens writes:

I expect to have more to say about this, but today’s BMJ UCL/Nordic Cochrane Centre analysis of research on ‘antidepressants’ should surely change the terms on which we debate this subject.

I should say that all intelligent people should draw lessons about the difference between what they think is happening, and what is actually happening, from two major Hollywood films, The Big Short and Spotlight.

In both cases – the sub-prime mortgage disaster and the widespread unpunished sexual abuse of children by priests – complacency prevented serious concern for years.

In both cases the alarm was raised by outsiders, and most people refused to believe what was being said.

I believe that psychiatric medication contains a similar problem, which in a few years, everyone will acknowledge as fact.

But at the moment, it is still difficult to raise it without being accused of being a crank. Complacency rules. 

For some years now I have been more or less begging my readers to obtain the book Cracked by James Davies, and to study two clearly-written and straightforward articles on the subject by Dr Marcia Angell, a distinguished American doctor, and no kind of crank, in the New York Review of Books.

I link to them (yet again) here. They are devastating, not least because of their measured understatement. The alleged scientific theory, the Serotonin theory, which underpins the prescribing of such drugs is, to put it mildly, unproven.

The drug companies themselves have kept secret, until compelled to disgorge them by FoI requests,research results which suggest their pills are, again to put it mildly, not that effective.

Dr Angell’s articles, here and here, are themselves reviews of important recent books on the subject

I have also drawn attention to the huge sums of money involved, and to a recent case in which a major drug company was fined three billion dollars for (amongst other things) mis-selling ‘antidepressants’. See here.

Now comes the new report, a survey of research, which today led the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Not merely does it link the use of ‘antidepressants’ to increased risk of suicide among teenagers (a suggestion I have often been derided here for making by people whose argument can be summed up as ‘they were depressed- duh!’).

It also suggests that clinical trials have until now been misreported and dangers under-reported.

I urge you to read it. You might also note this crucial admission: ‘Dr Joanna Moncrieff from University College London said: "People in the United Kingdom are consuming more than four times as many antidepressants as they did two decades ago. Despite this, we still do not fully understand the effects of these drugs.’

Indeed we do not. People who are prescribed ‘antidepressants’ naturally assume that they are being given them on the same principle as they might be given an antibiotic or an anti-inflammatory, or some other drug aimed at treating physical infection or a diagnosed disease.

I think this greatly exaggerates our understanding of how mind-altering drugs work, or even whether they do work.

As to their side-effects, which can be considerable, these may actually be their effects. Yes, it is that vague.

And it is that big, with tens of millions of prescriptions for ‘antidepressants’ issued every year.  So how come there’s no big fuss about it?

Well, how come there was no big fuss about the bundling of worthless loans into dangerous financial instruments, which ended by exploding the world’s stock-markets and causing a global recession? How come priestly child abuse carried on in Boston for years, and nobody did anything?

Maybe the bigger it is, the harder it is to believe there’s anything wrong.