Robert Whitaker’s website — Links to studies showing that depression with much greater frequency becomes a life long chronic problem with the advent of the use of drugs.
Antidepressants/Depression
A. The Natural Course of DepressionPrior to the widespread use of antidepressants, the National Institute of Mental Health told the public that people regularly recovered from a depressive episode, and often never experienced a second episode. As the NIMH’s Jonathan Cole wrote in 1964: “Depression is, on the whole, one of the psychiatric conditions with the best prognosis for eventual recovery, with or without treatment.” Given this understanding of the natural course of depression, the NIMH’s experts believed that antidepressants might shorten the time to recovery, but they wouldn’t be able to boost long-term recovery rates. The reason, explained Dean Schuyler, head of the depression section at the NIMH, in 1974, was that most depressive episodes “will run their course and teminate with virtually complete recovery without specific intervention.”
B. The Chronicity Problem Appears
Once psychiatrists began treating their depressed patients with antidepressants, at least a few observed that these patients, once they got better and stopped taking the drugs, regularly became depressed again. While the drugs might help people over the short-term, they were putting them onto a more chronic long-term path. click here to numerous studies showing the incident of chronicity associated with drug treatment
For extensive interpretation of these studies as well as a look at real people in case studies buy and read Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America