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  • Despite 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants being filled each year, more than one in 20 Americans report being depressed
  • The serotonin theory (which claims depression results from "an imbalance of serotonin and other neurotransmitters" in your brain) is the most commonly used rationale for using antidepressant drugs, but has never been proven
  • Research has concluded there is little evidence that SSRIs (a popular group of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and others) have any benefit to people with mild to moderate depression, and they work no better than a placebo
  • Some antidepressants actually increase your risk for violent thoughts and behaviors, including suicide. Clues to tell if a loved one is at risk for suicide are discussed. Antidepressant drugs are also associated with side effects such as diabetes, immune system dysfunction, stillbirths, brittle bones, strokes and death
  • Natural measures for depression involve addressing negative emotions, improving your nutrition (including making sure you’re getting enough good omega-3 fats), getting regular exercise, and optimizing your vitamin D levels

Please Don't Visit This Type of Doctor Unless You Absolutely Have to

March 07, 2011 | 402,701 views
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By Dr. Mercola



The use of antidepressant drugs—medicine's answer for depression—doubled in just one decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.


Because they don't work at addressing the cause.




Detecting Depression in Yourself or a Loved One

Unfortunately, about two-thirds of people with depression go undiagnosed. Untreated depression is the number one cause of suicide, which is a sad testament to the clinical astuteness of most physicians. The diagnostic clues provided in this past article are telling indicators that you or someone you love might be suffering from this illness, so please review them now.


One set of diagnostic criteria used to assess depression is known as "SIGECAPS," which stands for sleep, interest, guilt, energy, concentration, appetite, psychomotor and suicide. If four or more of these items are a concern, it strongly suggests major depression.

However, it is important to watch for symptoms besides mood changes, considering relevant information from family and friends as well.

If you have been feeling down for two weeks or more and have lost interest in activities you once enjoyed, I'd encourage you to consider the treatment options for healing depression suggested later in this article, as opposed to immediately leaping into potentially dangerous drugs.

Notes on Suicide: When to Worry



Help the person to seek immediate assistance from heir doctor or the nearest hospital emergency room, or call 911. Eliminate access to firearms or other potential suicide aids, including unsupervised access to medications.


  • Acquiring a weapon
  • Hoarding medication
  • No plan for the future
  • Putting affairs in order
  • Making or changing a will
  • Giving away personal belongings
  • Mending grievances
  • Checking on insurance policies
  • Withdrawing from people

Your suicide risk is higher if you have recently experienced any of the following extremely stressful life situations (this is certainly not a comprehensive list):

  • Loss of a significant relationship or death of a loved one
  • Diagnosis of a terminal illness
  • Loss of financial security or livelihood
  • Loss of home or employment
  • Abuse, rape or other serious emotional trauma

People sometimes become more suicidal as they begin the climb up out of depression, which is one means by which antidepressant drugs can increase suicide risk.

One of the reasons for this is, as lethargy (which is common in depression) lifts, you can more easily find the energy to carry out a suicide plan. Another possible reason is that you might feel more in control and therefore at peace with your situation once you've made a decision to end your own life.

This is important to keep in mind because people may appear as if they are feeling better, when in fact, they are more at risk.

Remember that these are only general guidelines, and often your own intuition is the best indicator that someone you love is really in trouble.



Why Antidepressant Drugs Don't Work

Every time a new study about the efficacy of antidepressants hits the journals, we see antidepressants plunge further into the abyss.

A recent study in the January 2010 issue of JAMA concludes that there is little evidence that SSRIs (a popular group of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and others) have any benefit to people with mild to moderate depression, and they work no better than a placebo.

That means that SSRIs are 33 percent effectiveas a placebo. And a study presented at the Neuroscience conference in 2009 tells a similar story. Researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine shared two major findings:

  1. Antidepressant drugs were not invented for depression. Researchers used certain drugs to manipulate the behavior of stressed animals, and then concluded (erroneously) that the drugs would be "good antidepressants." But chronic stress does not cause the same molecular changes that depression does, making the hypothesis incorrect.

    So, antidepressants were actually designed to treat stress, rather than depression—which is one reason they are so ineffective.

  2. An imbalance of neurotransmitters in your brain may not trigger depressive symptoms in the way that has long been believed. Instead, the biochemical events that lead to depression appear to start in the development and functioning of neurons. This means antidepressants focus on the effect of depression and completely miss the cause… yet another reason why they are so ineffective for most people.

Unfortunately, the lead researcher is hoping the research will "open up new routes to develop new antidepressants," when in reality a drug solution is not the answer.


In an interview, Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitaker explained that research suggests the use of antidepressant drugs may actually result in more relapses back into depression in the long run. In other words, these drugs may be turning depression into a more chronic condition.

The other worrisome effect is that antidepressant drugs appear to be converting people from unipolar depression into bipolar—meaning, fluctuating between mania and depression—and this disorder has much poorer long-term outcomes.

These are not new revelations.

Back in 2002, a meta-analysis of published clinical trials indicated that 75 percent of the response to antidepressants could be duplicated by placebo. Many antidepressants may actually make your "mental illness" worse. When your body doesn't feel good, your mood crashes along with it.

The List of Terrifying Antidepressant Drug Side Effects Grows

Depression—or described another way, "unrepaired emotional short-circuiting"— can cause far more profound negative health consequences than all the damaged food and toxins you expose yourself to daily.

Psychiatric drugs kill 42,000 people every year—that's 12,000 MORE people than successfully commit suicide due to depression! And the death count continues to rise.

Antidepressants are the largest category of psychiatric drugs. It wouldn't be so bad if antidepressants were harmless sugar pills, occasionally showing benefit simply because you believe they will work.

But in addition to being ineffective, they are far from harmless and are now associated with many serious health problems:

  • Suicidal thoughts and feelings and violent behavior: Your risk for suicide may be twice as high if you take SSRIs; seven out of twelve school shootings were by children who were either on antidepressants or withdrawing from them.

Diabetes or stroke will kill you, but suicide is much quicker. The link between suicide and antidepressants is so strong that these drugs have been mandated to have suicide warnings. Let's consider one of the newer psychotropic medications that is now being given to people for depression: Abilify (also called aripiprazole).

Abilify is licensed for the treatment of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and major depression (when taken with antidepressants). It is used to augment the effects of the antidepressants—because, of course, they work so poorly!

But did you know that Abilify has 75 different side effects associated with it?

How absurd is it to take a drug that works about as well as a sugar pill but exposes you to this minefield of ills?

Andy Behrman, a former spokesman for Abilify and Bristol Myers Squibb, which manufactures Abilify, stopped taking the drug in order to avoid the final side effects—coma and death. He made a short video warning you about the drug.

If a former spokesman for the company is sticking his neck out to warn you, how warm and fuzzy does that make you feel about what the pharmaceutical companies are telling you?

Even More Reasons to Avoid Antidepressants, as if You Need Any More

Professor of Medicine Lennard J. Davis wrote an excellent article about SSRIs for the January 2010 issue of Psychology Today. He points out that physicians routinely prescribe not one, but two or three SSRIs and other psychopharmacological drugs in combination—with really no studies to back them up.

Physicians who engage in what is known as "polypharmacy" are hoping that if one didn't work, maybe two or three will.

Davis writes:

"Doctors are in essence performing uncontrolled experiments on their patients, hoping that in some scattershot way they might hit on a solution. But of course drugs have dangerous interactions and most physicians are shooting in the dark with all the dangers that attend such bad marksmanship."

In fact, the entire serotonin hypothesis for depression should be given a serious review.

You have heard for years that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of your neurotransmitters, mainly serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, but there's a serious lack of research to prove it.

This theory has become so indoctrinated into our culture and media that most people just accept it as fact, simply because they've heard it so often. Even mental health practitioners!

But there is no way to measure your serotonin or your dopamine without cutting open your head. Scientists can't even decide on what a "normal" serotonin level is, much less an abnormal one.

Why do some depressed folks have high serotonin levels, while many happy folks have low ones?

Your brain is far too complex for this overly simplistic explanation to work. More and more "psychiatric diseases" are appearing in the literature all the time, and many could be considered "lifestyle disorders":

  • Do you shop too much? You might have Compulsive Shipping Disorder.

You get the idea.

The point is, each of these new "diseases" gets added to the next edition of the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) if enough people show up with those traits. And increasingly, the criteria for inclusion involves whether or not the disorder responds to a category of drugs.

If it does, the phenomenon is dubbed a disease.

Of the 297 mental disorders described in the DSM, none can be objectively measured by empirical tests. In other words, they're completely subjective. Mental illness symptoms within this manual are arbitrarily assigned by a subjective voting system by a psychiatric panel.

So, they're making up diseases to fit the drugs—not the other way around.

It's almost impossible to see a psychiatrist today without being diagnosed with a mental disorder because so many behavior variations are described as pathology. And you have a 99 percent chance of emerging from your psychiatrist's office with a prescription in hand.

Why so much reliance on popping a pill for every emotional ill?

Because writing a prescription is much faster and lucrative approach for the conventional model. Additionally most practitioners have yet to accept the far more effective energetic psychological approaches.

If Antidepressants Don't Work, Then What Does?

There are five important strategies to consider if you are facing depression. These strategies have nothing but positive effects and are generally very inexpensive to implement.

1. Do a Bit of Emotional Housekeeping

It is helpful to view depression as a sign that your body and life are out of balance, rather than as a disease. What you need to do is regain your balance.

One of the key ways to do this involves addressing negative emotions that may be trapped beneath your level of awareness. My favorite method of emotional cleansing is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a form of psychological acupressure.

If you have severe depression, it would be best to consult with a mental health professional who is also an EFT practitioner. But for most of you with depression symptoms, this is a technique you can learn to do effectively on your own. In fact, it's so easy that children are learning it.

There are other effective stress-management methods you could try as well, such as meditation, journaling, breathing exercises, yoga, or simply sharing your feelings with a close friend.

Experiment with a number of approaches, and then pick the methods you find most helpful but please remember that although it is very easy to learn EFT and far less expensive to use it yourself, it is nearly always better to seek a professional to perform EFT with you as it truly is an art that takes many years of refined practice to maximize its effectiveness.

2. Get Regular Exercise

Regular exercise is one of the "secret weapons" to overcoming depression. It works by helping to normalize your insulin levels while boosting the "feel good" hormones in your brain.



And also—and these are amazing studies—exercise can increase the number of cells in your brain, in the region of the brain called the hippocampus. These studies were first done on animals, and they're very important because sometimes in depression, there are fewer of those cells in the hippocampus.


For more information, please review my article about the many ways exercise can benefit your brain.

3. Improve Your General Nutrition


Avoiding sugar (particularly fructose) and grains will help normalize your insulin and leptin levels, which is another important aspect of depression. Sugar causes chronic inflammation, which disrupts your body's normal immune function and can wreak havoc on your brain.

Sugar also suppresses a key growth hormone called BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor), which promotes healthy brain neurons and plays a vital role in memory. BDNF levels are critically low in people with depression, which animal models suggest may actually be causative.

4. Supplement Your Diet with Omega-3 Fatty Acids

I strongly recommend taking a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat, like krill oil. This may be the single most important nutrient for optimal brain function, thereby preventing depression.

DHA is one of the Omega-3 fatty acids in fish and krill oil, and your brain is highly dependent on it. Low DHA levels have been linked to depression, memory loss, Schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease.

5. Let the Sun Shine Down on You


One study even found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to depression than those who received adequate vitamin D. You can optimize your vitamin D either by sunlight exposure or by using a safe tanning bed, or by taking a high-quality vitamin D3 supplement.

6. Think Twice Before Filling that Prescription

As Davis suggests in his article, "Think twice, be skeptical, and question a simplistic diagnosis you might receive after discussing your condition for a short time with a rushed practitioner."

This is sound advice indeed.

It is easy to become seduced into thinking a pill might relieve your pain, especially when it comes with the endorsement of your physician. Feeling depressed is never pleasant, and you naturally want to escape it as quickly as possible.

But drugs should always be your last choice, and antidepressants are no exception.

There is a better way! You wouldn't want to expose yourself to the enormous risks these drugs present, especially for so little gain. Hang in there, and if you implement the healthy strategies above, I bet you'll soon find yourself feeling better.

Depression Articles


Depression and Exercise

Depression and Diet

Other Causative Factors

Antidepressant Drugs

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), aka "Winter Blues

Postpartum Depression


Food Democracy Now
Mercury Free Dentistry
Fluoride Action Network
National Vaccine Information Center
Institute for Responsible Technology
Organic Consumers Association
Center for Nutrtion Advocacy
Cornucopia Institute
Vitamin D Council
GrassrootsHealth - Vitamin D*action
Alliance for Natural Health USA
American Holistic Veterinary Medical Foundation
The Rabies Challenge Fund
Cropped Catis Mexico