Remember Those Condemned to Swallow

Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

Patrick D. Hahn Samizdat Writer’s Co-operative, 2020

A book review by Mira de Vries, MeTZelf

Has your doctor prescribed you an antidepressant? Are you planning to have the prescription filled? Read this book first.

SSRIs, falsely called antidepressants, are poisons. They do not relieve depression but do have grave undesirable effects, including homicidal and suicidal behavior.

This is Hahn’s message, told very well. His style is direct and concise, without the fancy language that inflates other works on this subject. As the book was published recently at the time of this review, it overcomes the dismissive objection that it is “outdated.”

However Hahn has nothing new to add that those of us following the SSRI hoax for two or three decades haven’t heard yet. He quotes from the same great names we know already, among them Breggin, Healy, Angell, and Whitaker. So the book is particularly valuable to someone who is new to this subject.

Thankfully Hahn makes no recommendations. Apparently he credits the reader with being smart enough to draw his own conclusions. He does slip in three crucial factors that most writers tend to miss:

• Mental health care is hokum. “Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?“
• While no field is as misguided as psychiatry, the makers of SSRIs provide us with fake medicines in the somatic fields as well. “…most lucrative classes of drugs, such as statins, produce no clinical benefits at all…”
• What launches ineffective and dangerous drugs onto the market is government. “Every cog in this machine is greased with drug company money.” He goes on to list these cogs, among them: universities, mainstream media, continuing education courses, professional organizations, the FDA, and most importantly: “Congress, in which both sides of the aisle are bought and paid for by the drug companies.”

What Hahn fails to point out is that except for the children every one of the victims in the tragic tales recounted in his book took these drugs voluntarily. Their stories became known either because they survived or because they had family who cared about them.

I hope Hahn writes another excellent book, but then about the victims of neuroleptics, falsely called antipsychotics. Similar to how we never heard the stories of what was experienced in the gas chambers during the Holocaust because nobody survived them, we don’t hear the stories of psychiatry’s worst victims. These people cannot tell their own experiences because it is extremely rare that they survive sufficiently undamaged to speak at all, let alone coherently, once they are released from their locked wards. Neuroleptics are routinely administered by force to people who have no family who cares about them, or if they do, who understands the issues. The bad publicity around SSRIs can be analogized to news reports about thalidomide that shocked the world in the 1960s because it affected European infants. The paucity of similar publicity around neuroleptics can be analogized a use of thalidomide in the late 20th and early 21st century that doesn’t raise an eyebrow because it affects infants in favelas and townships.

Adults who in the era of the information highway took or take SSRIs voluntarily must share responsibility for the consequences. It’s time to defend the victims of neuroleptic coercion.

Editorial Note

Mira de Vries came to Samizdat highly recommended by Jim Gottstein among others.  She calls it as she sees it which can be uncomfortable for many who are not used to being treated with reverence.   Her note about MeTZelf is below.

MeTZelf – Association for Medical and Therapeutic Self-Determination – is an association based and legally registered in the Netherlands. Only people can become members, not organizations or businesses. Our members live in the Netherlands, and in the neighboring countries of Belgium and Germany. Our activities are aimed at achieving our goals and values, disseminating information, and offering mutual support. They are mainly in the Dutch language.

All of our activities are funded privately by our member activists. We receive no subsidy from any source whatsoever. Financial donations are not accepted at this time, though we very much welcome contributions of time and effort.

MeTZelf maintains contacts with a number of local as well as international organizations which share, at least in part, our goals and values. Some of these organizations are among the ones listed on the links page.

Learn More: MeTZelf.info