The number of prescriptions for antidepressants keeps increasing--36 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in in 2008 and 70.9 million in 2018. Are these drugs always written with no other thought than the interests of the patient? Maybe not.

It all started with chlorpromazine (widely known as Thorazine), synthesized in December 1951 in laboratories in France. In 1952, Smith Kline purchased the rights to chlorpromazine and began marketing it as an anti-vomiting treatment while the company attempted to convince psychology departments and medical schools to test the drug as a treatment for mental illness. Eventually, Smith Kline convinced state governments that use of the drug would save them money since administering it would decrease the number of patients in mental institutions. In 1954, Thorazine received FDA approval and psychopharmacology was born.

The pharmaceutical industry soon recognized that psychiatry could be the goose that lay the golden egg and began to court psychiatrists and their professional organizations. In addition to a stream of free gifts and meals, drug companies offered hefty pay to psychiatrists to be consultants and speakers, and subsidized various professional conferences. More money was spent on psychiatrists than on physicians in any other specialty.

According to Dr. Robert Whitaker, author of three books on the practice of modern psychiatry, the psychiatric establishment has been selling “a false story.” It has promoted the notion that psychiatric medications fix chemical imbalances in the brain, “even though decades of research failed to corroborate this.” In fact, in 2019 a study published in BMJ Open reported that approximately 80% of the symptom improvement experienced in clinical trials of antidepressants is also observed in the placebo comparison group. Yet antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed form of drug with approximately one in ten Americans taking them.

Pharmaceutical companies’ antidepressant advertising campaign is helping to drive the increase in sales. Since patients can’t buy these drugs over the counter, it is obvious that the purpose of the ads is to initiate patient conversations with physicians. Is it, therefore, just coincidence that the proportion of the U.S. population receiving outpatient treatment for depression increased by more than 300 percent between 1987 and 1997? In 2005, the National Institutes of Health reported that “SSRI advertising has expanded the size of the antidepressant market, and SSRIs are now among the best-selling drugs in medical practice.” In the same year, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that “Patients' requests have a profound effect on physician prescribing in major depression” and “the medical marketplace is being shaped in a way that is advantageous to the pharmaceutical companies.”

Caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware.” Don’t take antidepressants just because a doctor prescribes them. Do the research. Make your own decision. Medication isn’t the only way to fight depressi