Brian Daniels: Consumers need information on drugs given for depression

OFFICIAL figures have shown that antidepressant drug usage in Scotland is up again. That’s great news for the pharmaceutical companies and those with vested interests, but it’s not such good news for consumers.

In view of the ever-growing list of effects connected with the drugs, one has to question whether the consumer is being allowed to make a fully informed choice.

Antidepressants don’t have a very good track record; they have been linked to effects such as, but not limited to, anxiety, weight gain, impotence, heart disease, stroke risk, internal bleeding and birth defects, as well as alarming and paradoxical effects such as violence and aggression, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal behaviour.

For the consumer to be fully informed, he or she should be told – along with the effects of the drugs –that a “chemical imbalance of the brain”, the supposed reason for taking the drugs, is unproven opinion. Psychiatrists have shrouded the idea of the chemical imbalance in medical legitimacy, when there is no test to support the idea. Furthermore, there is no way of checking for a correct “chemical balance” in a person’s brain.

It’s not scientific fact. It’s a marketing tool.

There is no doubt people do experience health issues and upsets in life that may result in mental troubles. But to represent that these troubles can be alleviated only with dangerous drugs like antidepressants is both dishonest and harmful.

Real medicine addresses actual physical disease that can be seen under a microscope, while psychiatric diagnoses and “medicine” are devoted solely to the categorisation and “treatment” of symptoms.

The resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but by ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric doctor completes a thorough physical examination to find undiagnosed physical conditions manifesting as 
so-called mental illness.

It’s time to practice real medicine, rather than psychiatry.

• Brian Daniels is the national spokesperson for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (United Kingdom)