Methinks, from the myriads of medical and/or quasi medical studies, not to mention numerous more pseudo reports, that ‘depression’ is one of the most clinically corrupted and manipulated of human experiences. For all of human history it was treated as a perfectly natural human expression which all human’s experience at times of grief or profound disorder. No doubt poor nutrition and/or lack of sleep and chronic worry may worsen depression, just as reportedly the side effects of other drugs, as well as those psychotropic conceptions allegedly meant to cure depression. After all, the brain requires as much care as the rest of the body.

So how do we dare take all those side effect laden pharmaceutical contraptions so readily? All those man-made poisons constantly advertised, and with ample warnings about the dangerous side effects…. on TV and elsewhere? What did our toil hardened and long suffering forebears do 70 years ago and for all human history–their lifespans considerably shorter than ours, severely underfed and overworked. Are we more hard working today; do we have more worries, with all our gadgets and machines to aid and abet everything we do, with so much food available to us that we manage to waste 40% of it a year? Or could it be the very modernity and ease of living is driving us crazy before we drop dead after an extended lifespan that too often involves poor quality health and loneliness around our nuclear families or far from them. How are we losing the millennial-long distrust of authority and now so pathetically look up at doctors or the modern voodoo priests of psychiatry as if they were omnipotent, all knowing gods. They in fact know far less than the greater lot of them will ever admit.

It’s ever clearer that the manipulation of depression as an illness mainly serves the money interests of big pharma and secondly the “pity-pot” wooing medical/welfare State. Maybe it also serves the managers of society, by drugging or shall we say in pacifying an ever growing segment of society in a nation undergoing painful transformations.

A shocking number of college and high school students are pacified or drugged, by both licit and illicit drugs. Another large group are the young, mid and older adults. Shockingly, and especially criminal, are about 2-3 million toddlers on such drugs, reports a psychologist in a recent NYT article. Good grief! tens and tens of millions consume psychotropic drugs and now reportedly ten percent of older adults smoke Marijuana to relax.

Such massive drug consumption may suit many….but the concern is that when a people is drugged, how in the world can they advocate for their own good, for necessary national changes, etc. They can’t. They won’t. So unbearable social or economic conditions are masked over by the veil of drugs and their dumbing and numbing effects.

So now it takes a study from the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, those who manipulated the definition of depression, to really? finally find out what a colossal medical malpractice the Depression Industry has become? “may be over medicated”? They do not reveal the whole truth, that many more than a mere 38% are wrongly medicated.

There’s no final, conclusive knowledge by any human organization to date on what exactly constitutes so-called clinical depression and what distinguishes it from ordinary depression of the human ages. The former is a highly questionable psychiatric contrivance. The entire pseudo science pertaining to much of psychiatry is based on peremptory supposition, speculation and guess work, made possible by society’s tacit consent to its own manipulation and medical/psychological self abuse.

Like a deadly metastasizing cancer, this pseudo science is accepted in our fateful day as a normality, as long as society kowtows to the medical/psychiatric industry, without critical questioning. Ergo, anyone who answers the questions on any medical form, “Do you often feel sad or do you sometimes feel like hurting yourself or someone else” easily receives a prescription for any or a number from a great assortment of psychotropic drugs.

We have become a tragically helpless society, hung up on our phobias, infantile in our powerlessness to act in our own self interest. We have become dependent on the transparent layers of self deceit, ill treatment and state sponsored drug abuse. The question is will we, as a society, finally wake up, rise up and halt our own self destruction. It does not look hopeful so far. But this latest psychiatric journal admittance of over drugging is unusual and just maybe offers just a tiny glimmer of hope.

The above was written by and submitted to Kettle Moraine Publications on October 26, 2015 by our old friend, Angie Carlson with reference to the embedded link. (J.B.)