With 11% of Americans on antidepressants and one in four women of reproductive age, one would assume these pharmaceutical products are well-studied and clinically indicated. As I have discussed, unfortunately, psychiatric research suffers from profound conflict of interest and corruption of its data set. We are also turning a blind eye to adverse effects that strike at random. Most antidepressants are, in fact, prescribed by non-specialists, who are reportedly becoming more and more comfortable prescribing all classes of psychotropics.
Because antidepressants are prescribed for an impossibly long list of maladies, this fact alone would undermine any beliefs about their ability to precisely correct a chemical imbalance at the root of everything from phobias to binge eating, to borderline personality, to melancholic depression.
