Are antidepressants depopulation pills?

Niall McCrae

At last, the truth about antidepressants is getting out. Since the launch of Prozac in the 1980s, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were trumpeted as wonder drugs. They became one of the most widely prescribed classes of drug – and a lucrative market for Big Pharma. But the shine is coming off.  

The rationale for SSRIs is the serotonin hypothesis, which attributes depression to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Doctors have accepted this as absolute fact, despite limited evidence for the theory or for the effectiveness of the drugs that it generated. The idea that depression is caused by depletion in serotonin was refuted by a systematic review of studies by Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues, published this year in Molecular Psychiatry journal. There is little correlation between serotonin levels and clinical depression. 

As a mental health lecturer at King’s College London, I found it difficult to raise concern in psychiatric nursing trainees about the steadily growing use of antidepressants, which seems to be based more on marketing than therapeutic impact. When I began lecturing there were about 27 million prescriptions of antidepressants in England; each year I updated my slides, until my last lecture when the annual total reached 74 million (trebling in less than ten years). 

Last year 7.9 million Britons were taking them; rising to 8.3 million this year. 

In lectures I presented research and critiques on antidepressants showing how trials were manipulated and results misrepresented, but most students simply wanted to learn official treatment guidelines. As one in six adults is taking these tablets, inevitably several students in each group were taking the very pills that I was casting doubt upon. 

Antidepressants would be bad enough if they were merely ineffectual, but they are also harmful. A spate of articles has appeared this year on this iatrogenic damage. The latest expose was in the Mail on Sunday (2 October 2022) on the tendency of antidepressants to suppress sexual function. The report featured numerous young men and women who felt that their sexuality had been seriously impaired by the tablets. A male student aged 21 said: – 

‘It feels like someone has gone into my brain with a scalpel, carved some bits out and left me with this strange, numb, asexual person.’

More troubling is the reluctance of the medical profession to consider that this ubiquitous treatment for mental health problems is causing harm. According to the same student, ‘no doctor will even consider that it might be related to the SSRI’. Indeed, patients are not always informed of the hazards of antidepressants before they start taking them. Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) is a known adverse reaction but rarely mentioned by GPs. 

Another young man in the article was shown at a PSSD Network campaign event with a placard claiming: – 

‘Antidepressants saved my life…then ruined it’. 

The belief that these drugs prevent suicide is contentious, but not without merit. Psychiatrist David Healy, an expert on antidepressants and a long-standing critic of their hubristic marketing and excessive use, explains the positive effect of the drugs. They don’t lift mood, but they reduce the agitation and anxiety that often coexist with depression. In another word, they are anxiolytic, and as such should be stopped when these symptoms are ameliorated. As antidepressants their paucity is illustrated by many people taking them for year after year, with no prospect of release. The drugs are based on a debunked theory of brain chemistry, but they certainly cause chemical dependence.  In some cases a severe withdrawal syndrome arises when stopping the tablets; in some cases this has led to suicide. 

Since the turn of the millennium, pharmaceutical companies have pushed these pills for the younger generation, exploiting a media scare of a mental health crisis in that age group. Emotionally vulnerable adolescents have been duped into taking tablets that they do not need.  Sexual dysfunction in this developmental stage of life can have devastating effect. Male impotence can have lasting psychosomatic consequences. 

Male or female, sexual disinterest in body and mind is effectively infertility. Whether this is temporary or lasting probably depends on the duration of antidepressant use. Joanna Moncrieff, professor of psychiatry at University College London, observes that the majority of SSRI users are afflicted with some degree of sexual dysfunction, telling the Mail on Sunday that these drugs are ‘prescribed to sex offenders to curb their libido’. 

So, while there is much talk about the Covid-19 vaccines being used as a bioweapon, what about antidepressants?  Are teenagers being targeted for the depopulation agenda, which is a known obsession of the likes of Bill Gates?  Whether intentional or not, clearly younger people are losing their sexual vitality, while being lured by subversive sexual ideology to deny their basic biological being. 

Postscript 

In the same edition of the Mail on Sunday, GP columnist Doctor Ellie urged readers to get their fifth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. ‘All it cost me was a slightly sore arm’, she wrote. Six times more people have taken these injections as the number on antidepressants, leaving a much larger and longer trail of harm, yet there is no investigation by the newspaper. Perhaps, as with antidepressants, decades will pass before the truth is told.  But such is the mistrust of doctors after the Covid-19 scam, that I doubt whether we’ll wait – look how few are taking the so-called booster. Just say ‘no’.