Big Pharma and the Big Lie – The Chemical Imbalance Theory of Mental Illness

Big

Pharma is one of the largest and most

profitable businesses in America and in

order to sell their chemical Goods to

allegedly treat the Mind psyche

pharmaceutical companies must convince

society that people's mental and

behavioral problems are caused by the

bodily

chemicals an epidemic of mental illness

has spread across the modern world

according to the National Institute for

mental health 25% of All American adults

suffer from at least one mental illness

as do 15% of all children many in the

field of Psychiatry claim that

psychiatric drugs are the most effective

tool we have to counter this epidemic

and as a result these drugs are heavily

prescribed in the Western World in the

series of videos we explore the lies and

propaganda that are used to justify the

use of psychiatric drugs and we expose

the Deep corruption that exists at the

heart of the Unholy Alliance of modern

Psychiatry and big Pharma in this first

video we expose the big lie that

supports the millions of psychiatric

drug prescriptions written each year and

the billions of dollars of profits that

pharmaceutical companies earn from their

sales this lie is that chemical or

neurotransmitter imbalances are a

primary cause of mental illness and that

taking psychiatric drugs corrects for

these

imbalances if a lie is only printed

often enough it becomes a quasi truth

and if such a truth is repeated often

enough it becomes an article of belief a

Dogma in the late 19th century

Psychiatry suffered low status among the

medical professions there were few

generally agreed upon treatments for

mental illness and while medical doctors

were rapidly improving their capacity to

understand and treat the disorders of

the body Psychiatry was relatively

stagnant with respect to understanding

the disorders of the Mind the fate of

Psychiatry changed however when the

German psychiatrist Amil kraan put forth

a bold and revolutionary theory kraan

hypothesized that mental disorders such

as depression anxiety and schizophrenia

are the result of underlying physical

pathologies in the brain and body klan's

Theory caught on like wildfire as it

aligned with materialism the dominant

scientific Paradigm at the time

materialism is a philosophical position

which claims that matter is the primary

Sole and fundamental element of reality

and that our mind is an emergent

property of and reducible to the

interaction of material parts of our

brain in aligning Psychiatry with the

materialist position and hence the

scient ific community at large crain's

Theory radically improved the status of

Psychiatry crappin became the founder of

modern Psychiatry and the widespread

acceptance of his theory ushered in a

wave of experimental psychiatric

treatments targeting the brain and

bodily malfunctions believed to underly

mental illness in his book cracked why

Psychiatry is doing more harm than good

James Davies writes in the 1920s these

treatments included surgically removing

parts of the patient body their teeth

tonsils colons spleens and uteri

injecting patients with horse serum

using carbon dioxide to induce

convulsions and Comas injecting patients

with Cyanide and giving them hypothermia

another treatment was malaria therapy

injecting the patient with the malaria

parasite in the hope that the high

temperatures malaria produced would kill

the virus then thought responsible for

mental disease many patients failed to

recover from the Aria

disease the ineffectiveness of these

early 20th century treatments did not

stop psychiatrists from developing new

experimental treatments in the 1930s

insulin shock therapy was invented which

involved giving patients high doses of

insulin that would trigger intense

seizures and place the patient in a coma

Davies writes that after this procedure

granted patients would appear to feel

calmer but they would often show memory

loss and other neurological

abnormalities such as loss of speech 5%

of all patients actually died from this

treatment in the 1940s labotomy or the

surgical removal of parts of the brain

thought to be responsible for mental

disorders was invented and by the 1970s

1 million people in the United States

had been lobotomized another treatment

which grew in popularity in the 1940s

was electroconvulsive therapy or ECT

which involved administering electric

shocks to the brain of a depressed

patient in order to induce severe

seizures in the words of Davies all

these outlandish and barbaric treatments

one impetus and legitimacy from

psychiatry's enduring conviction that

there must be a physical basis for

mental disorder this originated with

crain's assumption if our emotional

maladies are biologically caused then

the body is where our efforts must be

directed after half a century of

experimenting with psychiatric

treatments that not only proved

ineffective but often harmed handicapped

or killed patients the field of

Psychiatry faced a Crisis general

medicine was advancing via revolutionary

breakthroughs such as the first organ

transplants and blood transfusions as

well as the discovery of antibiotics and

Insulin psychiatry in contrast had found

little success within the materialist

Paradigm that dominated scientific

discourse this all changed in the 1950 s

with the development of the first

generation of psychiatric drugs prior to

the 1950s sedatives and stimulants were

commonly prescribed in psychiatric

institutions to subdue and control a

psychotic or heavily depressed patient

however psychiatrists were not publicly

open regarding how they were using these

drugs official reticence about the old

drugs conveys the impression that they

were a source of embarrassment writes

the British psychiatrist Joanna monrie

however in the 1950s after a new

collection of psychiatric drugs were

discovered psychiatrists started to

publicly Embrace their use

chlorpromazine the first neuroleptic or

antis psychotic which was marketed under

the name of Thorazine was discovered

when researchers searching for

antimalarial drugs discovered that

chlorpromazine functioned as a major

tranquilizer which induced in patients a

euphoric quietude patients are calm

andom

with a relaxed and detached expression

the first anxiolytic or anti-anxiety

drug was a minor tranquilizer which was

discovered by researchers searching for

a drug to treat gram negative microbes

while the first anti-depressant was a

psychological stimulant that was

discovered by researchers searching for

a drug treatment for

tuberculosis these discoveries initiated

what is called the psychopharmacological

Revolution and in the words of monrie

these drugs were greeted with immense

enthusiasm verging on Zeal one

contemporary Observer noted that the

atmosphere at conferences on the new

drugs was akin to religious revivalist

meetings from this time on textbooks

started to cover drug treatments in

detail and proclaimed their

transformative effects pharmaceutical

companies realized that psychiatric

drugs could be marketed and sold not

only to institutionalized patients but

to the general public and so they began

investing heavily in the research and

development of psychiatric drugs in 1955

Wallace Laboratories brought mobam mate

to the market selling it under the name

miltown and marketing it as a minor

tranquilizer that could ease anxiety and

worry following an extensive marketing

campaign demand for miltown soared the

public rush to obtain this new drug was

such that Wallace Laboratories and

Carter products which were jointly

selling mobam mate struggled to keep up

with the demand following the success of

miltown in 1963 the drug maker Hoffman

lar Ro brought Valium the first benzo

dipene to Market Valium was marketed

primarily to anxious Housewives and from

1965 to 1981 it was the bestselling drug

in the West in the theme of the Rolling

Stone song Mother's Little Helper in

1967 one in three American adults filled

a prescription for a psychoactive

medication with a total sales of such

drugs reaching $692 million wrote Robert

Whitaker this first generation of

psychiatric drugs were not only highly

profitable for pharmaceutical companies

they also granted the field of

Psychiatry the status and legitimacy it

had long been seeking for as Joanna

monrie writes these first generation

drugs were an intervention on the body

and as drug treatment grew in importance

in other areas of medicine they

confirmed the desired parallels between

Psychiatry and Physical

Medicine the success these drugs

conferred on Psychiatry and

pharmaceutical companies was shortlived

as the public soon became aware that

consuming these drugs produced negative

side effects while Hoffman larash

claimed that Valium provided pure

Anxiety Relief and was safe harmless and

non-addicting many users reported

physical dependence terrible withdrawal

effects as well as insomnia panic

attacks and heightened levels of anxiety

in 1975 the US justice department

classified benzodiazapines as schedule

for drugs under the control substance

act prescriptions for Valium as well as

other psychiatric drugs plummeted and a

growing public awareness of the harmful

nature of psychiatric drugs led to the

development of an anti Psychiatry

movement the intellectual father of the

anti Psychiatry movement Thomas sass

argued that psychiatrists were agents of

social control and that the diagnosis

and medication of the mentally ill was a

way to subdue individuals who are

reacting in an undesirable manner to

life in a sick and oppressive Society in

1975 sas's idea found legitimacy when a

highly publicized government

investigation into the use of

neuroleptics in juvenile institutions

was hijacked by ex-patients who

testified that the drugs caused

excruciating pain and turned them into

emotional zombies one patient said that

such drugs are used not to heal or help

but to torture and control it is that

simple this anti Psychiatry movement

reached popular Consciousness via the

Oscar winning movie One Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest which portrayed Mental

Hospitals as facilities of torture and

control the anti- Psychiatry movement as

well as the drop in the sales of

psychiatric drugs led the director of

the American Psychiatric association

Melvin sapin to state in 1980 that the

profession is under severe Siege a

solution was needed to save Psychiatry

as well as the profits of pharmaceutical

companies and a solution was found

pharmaceutical scientists gave Amil

klan's Theory a modern spin they claimed

that mental illness is caused by

neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain

and that psychiatric drugs correct for

such imbalances fix a broken brain and

cure mental disorders this idea became

known as the chemical imbalance Theory

the of mental illness regarding the

researcher Who is credited with

popularizing this Theory James Davies

writes in the early 1960s a young

medical researcher stumbled upon an idea

that would launch a paradigm shift in

Psychiatry the researcher was called

Joseph schildkraut and the idea he

advanced was rather simple fluctuations

in our moods may be due to chemical

imbalances in our brains to be sure

schildkraut was not the first person to

entertain this compelling idea

it had been floating around the

psychiatric community in one form or

another since the mid1 1950s when the

first anti-depressants started to be

used but for some reason when

schildkraut published his hypothesis in

the American Journal of psychiatry in

1965 his views took the community by

storm although schildkraut admitted his

theory was at best a reductionist

simplification that could neither be

rejected nor confirmed on the basis of

data currently available pharmaceutical

scientists and psychiatrists ran with

this Theory and started to act as if it

were true not only for depression but

for all mental disorders yet as they

lacked hard evidence to support it the

chemical imbalance theory of mental

disorders was Advanced through a line of

reasoning that is illogic unscientific

and bordering on absurd for example with

respect to depression pharmaceutical

scientists identified how drugs to treat

depression increased levels of norpine

and serotonin in the brain and thus they

claimed that depression is caused by low

levels of norepinephrine and serotonin

similarly they noticed that neuroleptics

or antis psychotics decreased dopamine

Transmission in the brain and hence they

proposed that schizophrenia is due to

excessive levels of dopamine or as

Robert Whitaker explains this became the

storytelling formula that was relied

upon by pharmaceutical companies again

and again researchers would identify the

mechanism of action for a class of drugs

how the drugs either lowered or raised

levels of a brain neurotransmitter and

soon the public would be told that

people treated with those medications

suffered from the opposite problem the

following passage by the psychiatrist

Robert Taylor hammers home just how

absurd and pseudoscientific this line of

reasoning is in the absence of any real

progress and psycho pharmacology psycho

drug makers have relied on marketing

gimmicks by far the most successful one

portrays psycho drugs as treatment for

specific chemical imbalances in the

brain since psycho drugs alter brain

chemicals so the pitch goes the

conditions they target must be caused by

chemical imbalances a similar line of

illogical reasoning would have us

believe that aspirin deficiency causes

headache since when we take aspirin the

headache gets better or as Joanna monrie

explains regarding the chemical

imbalance theory of mental disorders

that took off in the 1970s

the drug companies were trying to

capture that huge Market of people who

once took tranquilizers but because the

old model of how drugs work had been

tarish they needed a new model to

reassert their value and necessity so

now these drugs were cast as curing us

rather than changing us and that's where

the idea of the chemical imbalance came

in it was perfect because it implied

that these drugs actually corrected a

defect in the brain if you have a brain

disorder a chemical imbalance in this is

going to correct that imbalance then

obviously you must take it and this

unthinking acceptance of the disease

centered view has dominated mainstream

Psychiatry for the last 20 or 30 years

to convince the public of the chemical

imbalance theory of mental disorders one

of the biggest propaganda campaigns in

history was conducted the major parties

involved included the American

Psychiatric association or APA big

Pharma the nonprofit organization

National Alliance on Mental Illness or

nmi as well as the National Institute of

Mental Health or n or as Robert Whitaker

writes a powerful quartet of voices came

together during the 1980s eager to

inform the public that mental disorders

were brain diseases pharmaceutical

companies provided the Financial Muscle

the APA and psychiatrists at top medical

schools conferred intellectual

legitimacy upon the Enterprise the NIMH

put the government's stamp of approval

on the story n Ami provided a moral

Authority this was a coalition that

could convince American Society of

almost

anything this propaganda campaign

initially focused on convincing the

public that depression is caused by a

chemical imbalance Depression was likely

chosen as the initial Target of this

campaign because of the fact that most

people experiened depression at some

point in life and so a massive Market

exists for drugs promoted as

anti-depressant in 1984 the NIMH

launched an educational program called

depression awareness recognition and

treatment or Dart whose stated purpose

was to change public attitudes so that

there is greater acceptance of

depression as a disorder rather than a

weakness the NIMH director Lewis Jud in

1990 unequivocally claimed two decades

of research have shown that psychiatric

disorders are diseases and illnesses

like any other diseases and illnesses

newspapers magazines and books by

renowned psychiatrists were also used in

this propaganda campaign in 1989 New

York Magazine placed the anti-depressant

drug Prozac on its cover with the

headline bye-bye Blues a new wonder drug

for depression one year later Newsweek

magazines cover read Prozac a

breakthrough for depression in the same

year one of America's most famous

science writers at the time Natalie

Angier of the New York Times wrote wrote

that anti-depressants work by restoring

the balance of neurotransmitter activity

in the brain correcting an abnormal

excess or inhibition of the

electrochemical signals that control

mood thoughts appetite pain and other

Sensations in 1993 the Brown University

psychiatrist Peter Kramer published the

book listening to Prozac which spent 21

weeks on the New York Times bestseller

list and in which he stated that Prozac

was making some patients better than

well and ushering in a new era of

cosmetic

psychopharmacology the United States was

not the only country to spread big

farmers propaganda the Royal colleges of

psychiatrists in the UK set up a defeat

depression Campaign which was funded by

the pharmaceutical company Eli Lily the

makers of proac the campaign in the

words of monrie sought to persuade

General Practitioners that they should

diagnose more people as depressed and

prescribe more anti-depressants the

campaign also aimed to reduce the

general Public's resistance to taking

drugs for depression in both the UK and

America these propaganda campaigns were

enormously successful this selling of

depression which was being done under

the guise of a public education campaign

turned into one of the most effective

marketing efforts ever devised writes

Robert Whitaker between 1992 and 2002

the number of prescriptions issued for

anti-depressants in the UK increased by

2

235% in 1992 sales of Prozac in the

United States reached $1 billion

pharmaceutical companies were swimming

in profits impatients flocked to

psychiatrists to be told which chemical

imbalance was responsible for their

mental distress and which drugs would

fix their brain the widespread

acceptance of the chemical imbalance

Theory gave the field of Psychiatry the

legitimacy it was looking for for as the

psychiatrist David Healey explained it

set the stage for psychiatrists to

become real doctors or as Robert

Whitaker writes doctors in Internal

Medicine had their antibiotics and now

psychiatrists could have their anti-d

disease pills too the problem with this

public relations campaign is that the

chemical imbalanced theory that was sold

to the public is false it is a big lie

many Professionals in the public have

been falsely convinced that biochemical

imbalances in the brain Drive mental

suffering such as the serotonin theory

of depression or the dopamine theory of

so-call schizophrenia yet the evidence

for any biological basis for psychiatric

disorders is utterly lacking or as the

psychiatrist Joanna monrie echoes in the

introduction to the myth of the chemical

cure this book exposes the traditional

view that psychiatric drugs Target

underlying diseases or correct chemical

imbalances as fraud it traces the

emergence of this View and suggests that

it was adopted not because there was any

evidence to support it but because it

served the vested interest of the

psychiatric profession the

pharmaceutical industry in the modern

State you're watching the first video in

our four-part series on the Corruptions

of Psychiatry and the big lies of big

Pharma the entire series is available

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academyof ideas.com members you can

cancel your membership at any time some

stud ities funded by the pharmaceutical

industry have concluded that low

serotonin levels are implicated in

depression which seems to suggest that

drugs to raise these levels May improve

depressive symptoms but the methodology

of these studies has been revealed as

highly flawed monre notes that

contradictory evidence has been

overlooked or reframed as supportive

follow-up Studies have found no

connection between serotonin levels in

depression and metaanalyses Of Studies

have further dispelled the myth that

serot tonin is implicated in depression

and as Johan Hari explains if depression

and anxiety are caused by a chemical

imbalance and anti-depressants work by

fixing that imbalance then you have to

account for something odd that

scientists kept finding anti-depressant

drugs that increase serotonin in the

brain have the same modest effect in

clinical trials as drugs that reduce

serotonin in the brain and they have the

same effect as drugs that increase

another chemical norpine

and they have the same effect as drugs

that increase another chemical dopamine

in other words no matter what chemical

you Tinker with you get the same outcome

or as nir gamy a psychiatrist and

neuroscientist at novaris Institute one

of the largest pharmaceutical companies

in the world explains our bestselling

psychopharmacology textbook consists of

pure speculations presented as pretty

pictures which we mistake for science we

have a huge amount of neurobiology

research now to conclude that

neurotransmitter theories of

psychopharmacology basically are false

the dopamine and serotonin hypotheses of

schizophrenia and depression are wrong

one of the problems with studies that

seek to prove the chemical imbalance

theory of mental illness is that we

possess no real understanding of how

neurotransmitter levels influence or

impact Human Experience furthermore

neurotransmitter levels in the brain are

constantly fluctuating and there is no

agreed upon standard of what constant

healthy levels as there is no known

normal balance of neurotransmitters

there is no way to know what an

imbalance would look like and no way to

test if a brain is chemically imbalanced

or as the professor of Psychiatry at

Northwestern University Hospital David

Kaiser writes patients have been

diagnosed with chemical imbalances

despite the fact that no test exists to

support such a claim and there is no

real conception of what a correct

balance would look like yet conclusions

such as depression as a biochemical

imbalance are created out of nothing

more than semantics and The Wishful

Thinking of scientists and psychiatrists

and a public that will believe anything

now that has the stamp of approval of

Medical

Science while the chemical imbalanced

theory of mental disorders is what the

professor amortis of Psychiatry Ronald

pies called an urban legend this Theory

continues to be widely promoted as an

Undisputed Truth by the psychiatric

industry big Pharma government agencies

in the main mream media for example in

2005 the American Psychiatric

association stated that anti-depressants

may be prescribed to correct imbalances

in the levels of chemicals in the brain

while in 2019 Shannon hodj a

correspondent for CNN which receives

millions of dollars each month in

advertising for big Pharma stated that

researchers identified the chemical

imbalances that correlate with problems

such as depression and Ed treatments

such as Prozac or Zoloft which block the

reabsorption of Serotonin so more of it

can remain floating around in the brain

the more serotonin floating around the

happier we feel in an article titled

psychiatry's incurable hubris the

psychotherapist Gary Greenberg notes how

the widespread acceptance of the

chemical imbalance theory of mental

disorders has been an act of mass

deception perpetuated on an unsuspecting

public the chemical imbalance Theory May

Fail as science but as rhetoric it has

turned out to be a wild success or as

Joanna monrie Echoes it appears that

recent propaganda has been effective

enough to persuade a large section of

the population that their biochemistry

is aai and that they need drug treatment

to correct it but if the chemical

imbalance theory of mental disorders is

a big lie and there is no known

neurotransmitter imbalances for

psychiatric drugs to fix then what are

psychiatric drugs doing to the brain and

mind