Psychiatric Drugs Cause The Very Effects They're Prescribed To Alleviate

Over the longterm, antidepressants increase depression, anti-anxiety drugs increase anxiety, anti-psychotic drugs increase psychosis. So describes Robert Whitaker in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, where he investigates why the number of disabled mentally ill in the US has tripled over the past two decades. The book won the Investigative Reporters and Editors award for best investigative journalism in 2010.

In Whitaker's words:



Excerpt:

"Benzodiazepines are very effective in alleviating anxiety for a couple weeks but if you go down the road you find that people who stay on benzodiazepines end up much more anxious than, say, a placebo group. ... You get the opposite of what you think you're going to get."

Why does this happen? He says, "the brain is trying to compensate for the drugs' presence."

There's a word he used, a word Dr. Gottlieb uses, a word that repeatedly crops up in psychiatric literature .... resilience. The risk in medicating a normal range of human emotion is that it thwarts development of resilience - the ability to bounce back and cope with what life presents.
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