You Can Become a Candidate for Drugs or Shock
With armies of lavishly equipped sales and marketing personnel swarming around America’s medical doctors, and barrages of multi-media advertisements aimed at consumers, the psychiatric architects of the depression war seek to get as many people as possible labeled “depressed.” These then join the ranks of candidates for the treatments: drugs and/or electric shock. Freedom probed further. Turning to the Internet, an “Online Depression Screening Test” was discovered, published by the New York University Department of Psychiatry. Headed “Are You Depressed?”, the test contains 10 benign questions which could be answered affirmatively by virtually anyone. Almost anybody taking the test would find it hard not to be classified as “depressed.” Drug companies also created a “national depression screening day,” held in October each year, conveniently following the arrival on the market of the latest line of antidepressants. These drugs, pumped as “more effective” and “producing less side effects,” are now among the most lucrative substances on the market, with some individual products grossing billions of dollars per year. In the United States alone, 43 million prescriptions were written in 1995 for one type of antidepressant alone, known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These substances, such as Effexor and Prozac, prevent the brain from reabsorbing a neurotransmitter1 known as serotonin. No one knows exactly how they do this and, far more importantly, no one knows what the long-term harm of altering the brain’s subtle chemistry in this manner will be.
The Selling of Depression continued... | Previous | Glossary of Scientology Terms | Contents | Next |
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