The Antidepressant Lie

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop nodding along with the lie that antidepressants are the magic bullet for depression. Because they’re not. And the fact that millions of people are still being sold this story — by pharmaceutical companies, by doctors who should know better, by a system that profits off our pain — is infuriating.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the people who’ve done the digging — like Johann Hari, who exposed the rotten core of the chemical imbalance theory in his book Lost Connections (Hari, 2018). Hari did what the mainstream wouldn’t: he asked the questions that Big Pharma doesn’t want you asking. Why, after decades of SSRI use, are we not seeing a massive drop in depression rates? Why are people still suffering — often worse than before — after being told a pill would "fix" their brain chemistry?

Because here’s the bombshell: the “chemical imbalance” theory? The idea that depression is caused by low serotonin? It was never scientifically proven. It was a marketing slogan. A PR stunt. And it worked — spectacularly — turning human suffering into a multi-billion-dollar market (Lacasse & Leo, 2005).

Jonathan R. Brown, a psychologist who’s long questioned the medicalization of human emotion, pulls no punches. He argues that diagnosing sadness or despair as a disorder-as something broken in the brain—is a dangerous oversimplification (Brown, 2015). Depression is not a disease in the same way cancer is. It’s a signal, not a malfunction. A scream from the soul that something is deeply wrong — with your life, with your relationships, with the way society treats people like machines.

And here’s where we need to remember the work of sociologist George Brown. Long before SSRIs flooded the market, Brown and colleagues were uncovering the deep social roots of depression — particularly in women — through rigorous studies of life events and social context. In a landmark study, Brown and Harris (1978) showed that depression was significantly related to experiences like loss, humiliation, and lack of social support — not brain chemistry. Their findings laid bare an uncomfortable truth: depression is often a rational response to difficult life circumstances.

But instead of listening to that scream, we are told to dull it. to numb it, to medicate it. And worse, the system convinces people that the problem is inside them, not in the world around them. That’s not healing. That’s gaslighting.

Hari makes it painfully clear: what we call depression is often a rational response to disconnection — from meaningful work, from community, from nature, from purpose. We’re social animals trapped in a sick system that isolates and dehumanizes us — and then we’re told to “fix” ourselves with a pill? (Hari, 2018)

And let’s not ignore the brutal irony here: many antidepressants don’t just fail to work for a significant number of people — they come with side effects that make things worse: emotional numbness, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, withdrawal symptoms that are sometimes worse than heroin (Fava, 2006; Davies & Read, 2019). But we’re still told: “Stick with it. Trust the science.” Except - the “science” has been bought and sold.

This isn’t just a personal betrayal. It’s a public health scandal. Millions of people are being misled, misdiagnosed, and mistreated because it’s easier — and more profitable — to drug a symptom than to fix the system causing the suffering in the first place.

We should be angry because we’ve been lied to. We should be angry because the people in charge are still lying. Because depression isn’t a Prozac deficiency — it’s a human cry for something better. And we deserve a world that answers that cry with justice, not just medication.

References

• Brown, J. D. (2015). The Self: A Reader. Routledge.

• Brown, G. W., & Harris, T. (1978). The Social Origins of Depression: A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women. Tavistock.

• Davies, J., & Read, J. (2019). A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based? Addictive Behaviors, 97, 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2018.08.027

• Fava, G. A. (2006). Can long-term treatment with antidepressant drugs worsen the course of depression? Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 67(6), 1056–1060.

• Hari, J. (2018). Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Lacasse, J. R., & Leo, J. (2005). Serotonin and depression: A disconnect between the advertisements and the scientific literature. PLOS Medicine, 2(12), e392. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392