Numbers Game
Many figures are offered by psychiatric spokespersons concerning how many Americans are “depressed.” These statistics are fed to news media with the message that those afflicted ought to seek “professional help.” Such “help” normally turns out to be what is easiest for psychiatrists to deliver and “therapies” for which they are equipped: brain-damaging psychiatric drugs or electro-convulsive shock. Depending on what psychiatric “expert” you ask, and when, the “depressed American” constitutes from 3 to 13 to 20 to 55 percent of the population. These percentages represent vast discrepancies, from 7.5 million to 137 million Americans. These figures come from psychiatric and psychological studies, and also from newspaper stories based on psychiatric pronouncements. It is obvious that a numbers game is being played and that figures offered by psychiatric authorities, including NIMH, are unreliable. The trend is inevitably toward larger and larger statistics. If depression is “pervasive,” it of course justifies massive “education” campaigns by drug companies, the psychiatric industry and our own federal government. A closely related area in which people have been fed false information under the guise of “education” is revelatory of a psychiatric hoax: That drugs are a “cure.” While psychiatrists prescribe antidepressants most frequently, many medical doctors, inundated with advertisers’ literature, free samples and so forth, today shovel out these deadly drugs a departure from the time-honored tradition of actually diagnosing an individual’s underlying physical condition. Freedom documented one example where a doctor offered an antidepressant as “treatment” to relieve a person’s headaches, when the patient actually had an undiagnosed broken neck.
The Selling of Depression continued... | Previous | Glossary of Scientology Terms | Contents | Next |
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