Terry Lynch > Quotes

“Have you heard or been told that chemical imbalances occur in depression? If so, you have been seriously misinformed.”
― Terry Lynch, Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance

“Reflecting on this, Dr. Duncan Double wrote, ‘the public has always understood that there may be difficulties in discontinuing antidepressants. The general public might reasonably have expected that psychiatrists, who are supposed to be specialists in disorders of the mind, would recognise psychological dependence, base their advice on clinical experience, and use their common sense’.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that the interests of the public would have been best served by properly evaluating the risk of drug dependence with SSRI antidepressants before they were unleashed upon the public. On the contrary, medical and drug company interests prevailed. These substances were launched without any evaluation of their dependence-creating potential. When people quickly reported problems coming off them, this was euphemistically minimised as ‘discontinuation syndrome’.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“In his report, Dr. Pūras warned that power and decision-making in mental health are concentrated in the hands of ‘biomedical gatekeepers’, particularly those representing biological psychiatry. Dr. Puras told the United Nations that these gatekeepers, supported by the pharmaceutical industry, maintain this power by adhering to two outdated concepts: that people experiencing mental distress and diagnosed with ‘mental disorders’ are dangerous, and that biomedical interventions are medically necessary in many cases. According to Dr. Puras, ‘these concepts perpetuate stigma and discrimination, as well as the practices of coercion that remain widely accepted in mental health systems today”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“the worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we are afraid’.”
― Terry Lynch, Selfhood: A Key to the Recovery of Emotional Wellbeing, Mental Health and the Prevention of Mental Health Problems

“Antidepressants on the other hand are widely seen as being medically prescribed substances. The consequences for the medical profession if – or more accurately, when – their true drug dependency potential is widely realised is potentially catastrophic, raising serious concerns about the legitimacy of psychiatric drug prescribing and the dubious prescribing practices of doctors in relation to the prescribing of psychiatric substances.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“In this letter to the Times, the two senior members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists – including its president Dr. Wendy Burn – wrote, ‘We know that in the vast majority of patients, any unpleasant symptoms experienced on discontinuing antidepressants have resolved within two weeks of stopping treatment’.[51] Since this statement was directly at odds with the results of the Royal College’s own survey, a formal complaint was made to the Royal College of Psychiatrists.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“These powerful forces have corrupted global mental health, setting mental health on a course that seriously deviates from the essence of emotional and mental health, creating a quasi-scientific body of claimed knowledge which is far more accurately described as a collection of false understandings.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“This evidence has not been incorporated into psychiatric textbooks or other mainstream psychiatric teaching fora anywhere. Doing so would risk seriously undermining psychiatry’s repeated assertions even the possibility of drug dependency does not arise with any currently prescribed psychiatric drugs other than benzodiazepines and other sleeping tablets.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“In the introduction to my 2001 best-selling book Beyond Prozac, I wrote that within so-called developed societies, much emotional and psychological distress has for decades been re-packaged as ‘mental disorders’. I wrote that I would refer to ‘mental illness/mental disorders’ within inverted commas, to illustrate ‘my disquiet at the widespread acceptance of these terms without debate about what the terms mean and what might be better words to use’.[3] I added that the experiences themselves were real and valid in their own right. This situation continues to this day. None of the psychiatric diagnoses have any scientific validity.[4] Throughout this book series therefore, I also use inverted commas when referring to these commonly accepted concepts. I do this to signify that these are not what they are claimed to be; they are not verified medical illnesses.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“British psychiatrist Duncan Double is a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network, a group of psychiatrists who have major concerns about current psychiatric practice. In a 2018 article Duncan Double wrote that the first official recognition in the medical literature that SSRI antidepressants can cause discontinuation problems was in a British Medical Journal editorial in 1998, more than ten years after the launch of the first SSRI, Prozac.[62] Double points out that the many members of the general public suspected six years earlier that antidepressants were addictive; ‘The Defeat Depression campaign was a five-year national programme launched in January 1992 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in association with the Royal College of General Practitioners. A door-to-door survey of public opinion was undertaken to obtain baseline data before the campaign started and most of the people questioned in the sample, that is 78%, thought that antidepressants were addictive. This finding caused some consternation amongst those running the campaign, because, as far as they were concerned, the public was misinformed on this issue’.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“James Moore is an example of how much one person can achieve when they feel strongly about a major widespread injustice, perpetrated primarily by a profession to whom people in great distress and desperation trust deeply and look to for supposedly honest, unbiased and expert help.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“Dr. Peter Breggin is an American psychiatrist, often referred to as ‘the conscience of psychiatry’. On his website Peter Breggin writes, ‘All psychiatric drugs have the potential to cause withdrawal reactions, including the antidepressants, stimulants, tranquillisers, antipsychotic drugs and ‘mood stabilizers’ such lithium.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“What is currently happening with SSRI antidepressants and prescribed drug dependence is a direct replica of the situation with benzodiazepines.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“Over the years it has become progressively clear to me that there are powerful forces operating within global mental health that purport to operate primarily in the public interest but are in fact operating primarily in their own interest. Global mental health has essentially been hijacked by powerful forces that benefit greatly from so doing.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“UK psychiatrist David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry, Bangor University, Wales – a former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology – has subsequently identified evidence of drug withdrawal problems within the original SSRI antidepressant pre-launch drug trials.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“We are now certain in our conclusion that, currently, the Royal College of Psychiatrists; Prioritises the interests of the College and the profession it represents over the wellbeing of patients; Is fully committed to the minimization of the withdrawal effects of antidepressants, regardless of the research evidence’.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“Indeed, the chemical imbalance story encourages us to think of ourselves as governed by the chemicals in our brains, with this chemical control seemingly disconnected from the many life events, that, at least according to past understandings of human nature, could be understood to dramatically alter one’s moods. We are mechanistic machines, and if our mood molecules are out of balance, with this imbalance presented to us as a “disease,” then it makes perfect sense to think that a solution must lie in a pill that fixes that imbalance. But is the claim true? Did scientific investigations find that this is indeed so? Every society would do itself a favor if it publicly sought to answer that question. In this book, Terry Lynch has done just that. And in so doing, he has told, step by step, how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry constructed and sold a false story to the public. By the end of this book, readers will be asking a new question: How could this falsehood have endured for so long? As Terry Lynch writes, there was never good scientific reason to believe that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain. The hypothesis that this might be so arose from an understanding of how an antidepressant acted on the brain. Once researchers discovered that an antidepressant increased the activity of serotonin in the brain, they hypothesized that perhaps people suffering from depression had too little serotonin. However, researchers then investigated whether this was so, and discovered that it was not. Even by the early 1980s, researchers were saying that it didn’t appear that a deficit in serotonin activity was a cause of depression.”
― Terry Lynch, Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance

“Earlier in this book under the ‘Antidepressant drug dependence’ heading, I mentioned the long-standing strategy of referring to drug withdrawal problems with antidepressants being incorrectly referred to as ‘discontinuation syndrome’. I wrote that the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry have for decades engaged in systematic public misinformation and deception, designed to wrongly enhance the public image of these substances, their prescribers and manufacturers.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“It certainly is true that there are issues of addiction and dependence associated with the opioids, but that is not the only reason for turning the medical spotlight on them. Doing so deflects the focus away from antidepressants onto drugs whose history of being prescribed widely by doctors is sufficiently removed from recent memory that the public do not readily link opioid addiction and dependency problems with doctor-initiated drug dependence.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“Produced in the wake of the benzodiazepine debacle, the SSRI antidepressants were not even tested for their addictive/drug dependency potential prior to being licensed for public consumption. Yet drug companies, psychiatrists and GPs alike felt it appropriate to unequivocally assure the public that these new substances were definitely not addictive or dependence-producing.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“And how safe are antidepressants when taken for decades? Why is there no systemic attempt to review long-term antidepressant prescribing?”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence

“In this new world of information at our fingertips, it takes a concerted effort to keep the public misinformed regarding important matters that concern them. There are several ways in which this can be done. One way is to consistently feed the public with misinformation and untruths as if these are truths, presented with sufficient authority and certainty to persuade even the most reflective of people. This is the method that has been adopted by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry in relation to mental health for over half a century. This strategy has been remarkably successful at systematically misinforming the public about the true nature of emotional and mental health problems and their alleviation.”
― Terry Lynch, The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence