How Big Pharma Sold Depression to the World – Dr. Joseph Mercola

When you read history textbooks, you will frequently notice events of the past (and the society going along with them) being cast in a negative light. Yet in many cases, when the exact same processes occurs in the modern era, it is not cast in the same negative light — even when many prominent dissidents are actively explaining why what we are doing is completely insane.

In turn, the hope I and many others share is that in the not-too-distant future, the way our society handled COVID-19 (e.g., locking down the country, suppressing off-patent treatments, mandating a clearly flawed vaccine and aggressively censoring anyone who spoke out against this) will be acknowledged as a profound mistake by the history books.

Remarkably, despite the propaganda apparatus doing everything it could to prop the COVID vaccine up, both due to its immense danger and a dedicated group of online activists who exposed that danger, public opinion has soured on the vaccines and we are now beginning to see official proceedings looking into them.

Likewise, the hope I and many others hold is that the public becoming aware of the immense dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines will make them open to recognizing how many other unsafe and ineffective pharmaceuticals have been pushed onto the market despite an overwhelming degree of evidence arguing against their safety and efficacy.

In my eyes, one of the worst offenders are the SSRI (and SNRI) antidepressants, drugs which have many parallels to illicit stimulants (e.g., cocaine) and which I suspect in the future will be viewed by the history textbooks the same way they now look at how dangerous drugs like heroin, cocaine, opium and methamphetamine were freely available in pharmacies of the past. In a recent series, I presented the wealth of evidence that the SSRIs:

Sometimes cause psychotic behavior which frequently results in suicide and sometimes in mass-murder (e.g., school shootings).	Cause abnormal thoughts and often make one feel as though they’ve “lost their mind.”
Cause aggressive behavior, agitation, insomnia, anxiety or restlessness and Bipolar disorder.	Cause sexual dysfunction and numbs one to the experience of life (e.g., it takes away what gives you joy and the emotional reactions to a dangerous situation).
Cause birth defects.	Are extremely addictive (the process one must go through to withdraw from them is extremely unfair).

The above symptoms are frighteningly common (e.g., sexual dysfunction affects approximately half of SSRI users), and in addition to these, a variety of other concerning (but less common) side effects also occur.

However, despite the litany of evidence arguing against the wisdom of mass prescribing these drugs, a deluge of complaints to the FDA (and public hearings) about the SSRIs, and numerous successful lawsuits filed against the manufacturers, nothing has been done about it. Rather, the FDA has done everything it could to fight for the industry and suppress the evidence of SSRI harm from seeing the light of day.

In a recent article, I attempted to detail exactly how this transpired as I felt the corruption and malfeasance demonstrated throughout the process provided a poignant case study to explain the FDA’s otherwise inexplicable behavior we’ve all seen throughout the pandemic.

Furthermore, I believe these acts are representative of a broader trend — the march towards economic feudalism we have seen enacted over the last 50 years, where unaccountable corporations are enshrined as the fourth branch of government and the majority of the (increasingly impoverished) population are forced into economic servitude under these corporations.

I believe like the feudal system of past, this system exists both to maximize the wealth of the upper class and to have an easy way to implement compliance throughout the entire population (e.g., by forcing people to get a vaccine they knew was extremely dangerous as otherwise they would be out of work).

Note: The relentless march to economic feudalism (e.g., how the lockdowns were a devastating assault on the working class) is discussed in further detail here. I am of the belief that maintaining a perpetual state of physical and mental illness is one tool the upper class uses to control the populace (as being sick takes away your ability to act independently while simultaneously making you dependent on the system for medical care).

In turn, one of the most concerning aspects of the lockdowns was the huge spike in mental health issues they created, and likewise psychiatric effects are a common side effect of the vaccines (e.g., an Israeli study found that about 26.4% of individuals with pre-existing anxiety or depression reported an exacerbation from the booster).

Unfortunately, while the psychiatric complications of the lockdowns are at last being discussed, the main solution being proposed to treat them is “more psychiatric care” (which means more drugs).

Halitosis

After Listerine was created in 1880, a variety of uses were proposed for it (e.g., as a surgical antiseptic or mouthwash) and the product had modest sales. Searching for a way to increase them, its marketing team eventually had an epiphany. Taking the latin word for breath (halitus), they added on “osis” to make it sound pathological and created a new disease that Listerine just so happened to “cure.”

Following this, an immense marketing campaign was made to familiarize the population with halitosis (bad breath) and to make them as fearful about it as possible.

“Who could forget Edna? The quintessential damsel with every trait that society admired — save for her unwitting battle with halitosis. Listerine’s gripping ad campaigns chronicled Edna’s heart-wrenching saga, emphasizing the social implications of bad breath [such as no one wanting to marry you].”

 

Note: At this time, many companies were profiting off of selling the emerging middle class ways to cater to their social anxieties.

This campaign, in turn, was remarkably successful, earning it a permanent place in the history books:

“Listerine skyrocketed from modest annual sales of about $100,000 in 1921 to a whopping $4 million by 1927. To provide context, in today’s currency, that’s an astounding rise from $1.3 million to $57.5 million. By the late 1920s, Listerine stood tall as America’s third-highest print advertiser.”

What’s particularly interesting about the halitosis saga is that while it is widely disparaged since it revolved around the creation of a largely fictious disease and preying on the insecurities of the public, it is simultaneously widely praised for its effectiveness.

In turn, countless groups have copied Listerine’s tactic of using fear to sell an unneeded product, but as time has moved forward, fewer and fewer people called out those fear based campaigns.

Recognizing how problematic it is when pharmaceutical companies had a blank check to push their products on the public, governments around the world wisely made advertising pharmaceutical directly to consumers illegal. Unfortunately this was the case until 1997, at which point Clinton “legalized” direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers.

Since the primary expenditure in the pharmaceutical industry is not drug development or production, but rather advertising, this change opened the flood gates to them buying out the America media (which is essentially why the mass media stopped discussing any dangerous drug on the market).

Note: This news article discusses Kim’s work to stop direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

Disease Branding

Within the pharmaceutical industry, the process of creating a new disease or increasing the public’s awareness of an existing condition is known as “disease branding,” and is one of the most common steps taken when attempting to sell a pharmaceutical.

While sometimes subtle, in many cases, these campaigns are blatant enough that many can spot them (e.g., consider how much fear the media stirred up about COVID in 2020 while simultaneously constantly telling us that a miraculous vaccine which could end all of that was right around the corner).

Note: Presently, many believe one of the most egregious examples of the medical industry creating a new disease to push its products is the sudden widespread emergence of “gender dysphoria.”

Mental health is a particularly unfortunate area for disease branding to enter into as virtually anything can be turned into a disease and sold with the same marketing tactics pioneered for Listerine:

“Patty Duke provided the 2008 American Psychiatric Association meeting with its celebrity patient story. AstraZeneca sponsored her talk, and the company spokesman who introduced her.

The Oscar-winning actress, clad in a pumpkin orange dress, told of how she had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar illness for twenty years, during which time she drank excessively and was sexually promiscuous.

Diagnosis and medication ‘made me marriage material,’ she said, and whenever she speaks to patient groups around the country, she hammers this point home. ‘I tell them, ‘Take your medicines!” she said. The drugs fix the disease ‘with very little downside!’

We are beyond blessed to have people like you who have chosen to take care of us and to lead us to a balanced life … I get my information from you and NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness], and if I resisted such information, I would deserve to have a net thrown over me. When I hear someone say, at one of my talks, ‘I don’t need the medication, I don’t take it,’ I tell them to ‘sit down, you are making a fool of yourself.'”

Note: While this presentation was met with thunderous applause by the attending psychiatrists, many safety issues exist with “Patty’s” medications, and I frequently observe them triggering personality changes which make it quite challenging for the individuals to have intimate relationships.

One of the most poignant examples of how depression was branded to the world comes from Japan, and is discussed within the documentary “Does Your Soul Have a Cold.”