What Everyone Needs to Know About Antidepressants
Previously, I discussed the dirty secret of the SSRI antidepressants—they trigger psychotic violence which typically results in suicide and sometimes in horrific homicide (e.g., mass shootings or violent stabbings of a loved one)
Remarkably, this side effect was discovered in their clinical trials, covered up by the drug companies, and then covered up by the FDA after the agency received a deluge of complaints (39,000 in the first nine years) once the first SSRI, Prozac, hit the market.
However, since that psychotic violence is such a distinct and alarming side effect, it motivated many of the families of those who died to sue those drug companies where, they got proof this had been covered this up to protect the sales of their lucrative antidepressants.
As a result (because of the discovery process), we have a much clearer picture of what actually happened with the SSRIs than many of the other terrible pharmaceuticals on the market.
Note: while many patients react badly to SSRIs, there is also a subset of patients (e.g., under methylators) who benefit greatly from them. Talented psychiatrists who are cognizant of the dangers of these drugs can typically identify the patients who will likely respond well to SSRIs and quickly pull SSRIs from those who do not. Unfortunately, doctors like this are rare, particularly since most psychiatric medications are given by general practitioners without that background, and the shortage of mental health resources frequently results in patients being put on psychiatric drugs rather than using more time intensive approaches such as psychotherapy. Likewise, in many SSRI disasters, a common theme emerges, the healthcare provider treating the patient received indications something was amiss in how they responded to the SSRI, but it was not followed up on or addressed due to them already being overloaded.
The Toxicology Bell Curve
In toxicology, you will typically see severe and extreme reactions occur much less frequently than moderate reactions:
Because of this, when a very concerning and unmistakable adverse reaction occurs (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccines causing sudden deaths in young healthy athletes) that suggests you are seeing the tip of the iceberg and far less severe injuries are also occurring much more frequently.
For example, Ed Dowd, using the available data sources, made what I believe at was the most accurate estimate of the damage from the COVID vaccines.
Note: these calculations were conservative to avoid being discredited for overestimating the impact. Sadly, since this chart was made in 2023, the serious complications have increased—for example, the increase in disabilities has roughly doubled and we are now facing a horrifying epidemic of COVID vaccine induced turbo cancers (which is affecting more and more people in my community 😢). Likewise, many polls (summarized here) have consistently shown an extraordinarily high rate of adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine (e.g., in the most recent November 2025 poll, 26 percent reported they had minor side effects from the vaccine and 10% reported major side effects—which equates to 63 million adults having minor reactions and 17 million having severe side effects).
In the case of the SSRIs, the psychotic violence they can create is just the visible tip of the iceberg, and there are many “less severe” ways they warp your mind.
For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients on antidepressants in New Zealand, 62 percent reported sexual difficulties, 60 percent felt emotionally numb, 52 percent felt not like themselves, 39 percent cared less about others, 47 percent had experienced agitation and 39 percent had experienced suicidal ideation.
Note: Other less common reported side effects (in order of decreasing frequency) in that survey included: insomnia, nightmares, ‘Fuzzy’/‘zombie,’ jaw grinding, sweating, blurred vision, constipation, disturbed/restless sleep, anxiety, heart palpitations, difficulty thinking, fatigue/exhaustion, strange/vivid dreams, stiff muscles/joints, ‘Brain zaps,’ mania, excessive yawning, panic attacks, memory loss, decreased motivation, night sweats, decreased appetite. This list matches what I’ve seen in many similar assessments (although others like feeling agitated, shaky or anxious, indigestion, stomach aches and diarrhea are also commonly reported).
Most importantly, the respondents to that survey reported that their prescribers did not warn them about many of these side effects (e.g., the emotional numbness or sexual dysfunction).
As many people I know have been severely impacted by these drugs and gaslighted by the doctors they sought care from, especially when they dealt with one of the most challenging aspects of these addictive drugs—how you get off them?
General Problems with SSRIs
Note: most of the issues described through this article apply to SSRIs and SNRIs. For ease of reading, I will just refer to SSRIs. Likewise, in some cases, “antidepressants” sometimes also includes other classes of antidepressant drugs (e.g., tricyclics).
One of the lesser known facts about the pharmaceutical industry is that more money is spent marketing drugs than developing them (this was even the case during COVID when the industry had been given a virtual monopoly because the government suppressed every off-patent medication).
In turn, you will frequently observe the industry concoct elaborate ways to make a useless (or worse) drug appear to be worth selling to all of America (in my opinion best encapsulated by the idiom “Putting Lipstick on a Pig”).
This I believe occurs because clinical trials cost so much to do and the company needs to guarantee a return on that investment (resulting in the same bag of tricks being used to inflate a drug’s benefits and downplay its harms) and because the drug regulators (who often are taking money from the industry) never hold them accountable for that behavior.
Note: numerous whistleblowers testified that the COVID-19 vaccine trials were not blinded and conducted in a fraudulent manner which deliberately overestimated the efficacy of the vaccines and concealed those who were severely injured by them. Despite this (even after receiving a formal complaint from a researcher at one Pfizer trial site), the FDA refused to do anything.
Since “depression” is so subjective, it is even easier to game its research, and as a result, when the “successful” studies of antidepressants are carefully examined, we find over and over that they actually provided minimal benefit to the recipients but severely harmed many of the test subjects (in essence exactly what happened with the COVID-19 vaccines and their predecessors, the disastrous HPV vaccines).
Note: the first SSRI, Prozac, was originally developed as a weight loss drug, but Eli Lilly pivoted to marketing it for depression as that metric was far more subjective and easy to falsify. John Virapen, Lilly’s executive assigned to secure its initial approval testified that Prozac’s data was so bad, regulators and psychiatrists dismissed his attempts with laughter…until Virapen bribed Sweden’s “impartial expert” to push it through. Following this, in 1987, FDA under Vice President George HW Bush (whose father was an Eli Lilly board member) overcame its initial doubts about Prozac, pushed it through and has defended it ever since, such as by gagging the FDA scientist who found SSRIs caused children to commit suicide (which may have been due to both George HW Bush and his son George W Bush stocking their administrations with Eli Lilly personnel)—all of which is discussed further here.
Fortunately, there are a few metrics you cannot cover up. One of the most well-known ones is overall mortality (how many people in total on vs. off the drug died) since you can’t reclassify death. Another is how many patients voluntarily chose to continue taking a medication:
•A review of 29 published and 11 unpublished clinical trials containing 3704 patients who received Paxil and 2687 who received a placebo, an equal proportion of patients in both groups left their study early (suggesting Paxil’s benefits did not outweigh its side effect), and that compared to placebo, 77 percent more stopped the drug because of side effects and 155 percent more stopped because they experienced suicidal tendencies.
•A study of 7525 patients, found that 56 percent of them chose to stop taking an SSRI within 4 months of being prescribed it.
•An international survey of 3,516 people from 14 patient advocacy groups found that 44 percent had permanently stopped taking a psychiatric drug due to its side effects.
•A survey of 500 patients found 81.5 percent were unsure if their anti-depressants were necessary.
Put differently, if patients feel worse on a medication they are taking to “feel good” than they do without it, that means the trials proclaiming the medications made patients feel better were a fraud.
Unfortunately, since there is so much money in the psych meds (as you can sell those pills indefinitely to as much of the population as you can give a “diagnosis” to), there is a vested interest to not reveal those side effects or provide resources for those who suffer from them (as doing so would effectively be an admission to those side effects existed).
This in turn becomes particularly problematic when the patient develops a severe acute reaction (e.g., the psychosis that can turn violent), a permanently debilitating chronic reaction, or severe withdrawals when they try to stop using these highly addictive drugs.
When people read other people’s stories, they realize that they’re not the only person that’s experiencing that problem. There are 6,000 relatively complete case histories [on SurvivingAntidepressants.org]. You realize it’s all the same story. It’s one story. And each person who experiences it is so surprised that it happened to them—people go through a period of absolute disbelief. They realize that they’ve been trusting their doctors to have a certain amount of knowledge, and their doctors don’t actually have that knowledge.
And you know, this is heartbreaking. I went through this, and I felt that the world had fallen out from underneath me. There wasn’t any medical safety net. So the sociological phenomenon exists, and has not yet filtered into medicine [this is also exactly what has happened with the COVID-19 vaccines]. Medicine has its own ways of gathering information, and in psychiatry, for some reason, they keep asking each other what the truth is instead of asking their patients. The patient voice is not very well recognized in psychiatry at all.
Note: Surviving Antidepressants is a popular website (with 500,000 views a month and 14,000 users from every imaginable demographic) that the founder was forced to make because no resources existed for those with SSRI complications. In the above interview, she highlights another common issue SSRI victims face. Because there is so much stigma towards mental illness, when a “psych patient” shares their reaction to a medication, it is often discounted and attributed to their existing mental illness rather than the drug and is “treated” by giving more of the drug—which often has disastrous consequences (e.g., this is a common story with the mass shooters).
Violent Behavior
When Prozac was first brought to market in the mid-1980s, the pharmaceutical industry had not yet convinced the world everyone was depressed and needed an antidepressant. So, instead (given that SSRIs work in a similar manner to a stimulant like Cocaine) Prozac was initially marketed as a “mood-lifter.”
Likewise, in 1985 when the FDA’s safety reviewer scrutinized Eli Lilly’s Prozac application, they realized Lilly had “failed” to report psychotic episodes of people on the drug and that Prozac’s adverse effects resembled that of a stimulant drug.
In turn, the warnings on the labels for SSRIs, such as anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, and mania match the effects commonly observed with stimulant street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Note: in the previously mentioned survey of 3,516 people which found 44% stopped a psych med due to side effects, a quarter reported this was due to the agitation they suffered.
In the previous article, I published a variety of studies showing that the manufacturers knew this violent behavior (e.g., suicide) was a common side effect of the SSRIs that was deliberately kept from the public.
Since a common argument used to debunk that assertion is claiming that this behavior was actually due to a pre-existing mental disorder, I would like to cite three studies which disprove this notion:
•A Cochrane review assessed 150 studies where healthy volunteers were given SSRIs, and found approximately one third of them deliberately omitted discussing SSRI side effects and about half of the studies were never made publicly available (presumably to hide their concerning data). Ultimately, 14 of the 150 studies were eligible for meta-analysis (since enough information existed in them for the researchers to know what actually happened), and in these 14 studies, SSRIs were found to double the risk of suicide.
•In 2000, David Healy published a study he had carried out with 20 healthy volunteers – all with no history of depression or other mental illness – and to his big surprise two (10%) of them became suicidal when they received Zoloft. One of them was on her way out the door to kill herself in front of a train or a car when a phone call saved her. Both volunteers remained disturbed several months later and seriously questioned the stability of their personalities.
•Eli Lilly showed in 1978 that cats who had been friendly for years began to growl and hiss on Prozac and became distinctly unfriendly. Once Prozac was stopped, the cats returned to their usual friendly behavior in a week or two.
Note: the FDA hypothesized that SSRIs can reduce violence in some but cause an increase in violence in others (which I suspect is linked to pre-existing genetic polymorphisms—as undermethylators respond quite well to SSRIs whereas hypermethylators can turn violent on them). Likewise a review of 84 animal studies showed that reduced aggression upon treatment with SSRI was most commonly observed, but sometimes the animals instead became more aggressive.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here midwesterndoctor.com
Header image: Everyday Health