The American Medical Establishment Didn’t Discover A Mental Health Crisis, It Created One
The American Medical Establishment Didn’t Discover A Mental Health Crisis, It Created One
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American medical establishment has been working for over 100 years to fabricate a mental health crisis, but with contemporary perceptions of depression and sadness at all-time highs, coupled with prescription drug use run rampant, they may have created a real one.
An enormous amount of Americans are diagnosed with some form of mental illness, invariably leading them to be prescribed intense regimens of drugs that manufacturers and doctors claim will resolve the issues.
However, as many experts at the MAHA Institute’s Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit on Monday noted, outcomes for long-term use of common medications like Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) or benzodiazepines, are often more negative than the underlying reason patients were given them in the first place: increased suicidal ideation, more intense depression, a strong correlation with tendency toward violence (e.g. school shooters), and much more.
As Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in his keynote address to the summit, a huge portion of Americans of all age groups are systematically placed on psychological drugs, while there is very little proven efficacy of such drugs, particularly over long periods.
But the job of some panelists at the summit was to find out how exactly American society got to the place where its populace was both overmedicalized and much worse off in terms of mental health outcomes.
One explanation became exceedingly clear: The American medical establishment has been attempting to describe the norms of human existence in highly medical and scientific terms, declaring that typical things like occasional sadness or rambunctiousness in young boys at school is actually a mental health concern or brain chemical imbalance.
Human Existence As Mental Illness
“We were bootlegging humanism,” David Cohen, Professor of Social Welfare and Associate Dean at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School for Public Affairs, who specializes in the study of “psychoactive drugs across shifting boundaries of medical, recreational, and illicit uses,” said.
“They medicalize every challenge of human existence … every struggle, every developmental challenge, every moral dilemma, every obsession, every distraction, every misbehavior became a mental health concern to be treated by mental health professionals,” he said. “We were promoting sort of a technical fix to continue managing more social, legal, moral, ethical, religious problems in a different way.”
The push to start medicalizing mental health has been ongoing for the past 120 years, Cohen said, where at one point there was a concern for the small group of people who were being sent to asylums, but now the mental health crisis has reached epidemic levels. The “sociopolitical psycho-bio, industrial medical complex” he said, includes about two million medical professionals dedicated to identifying, diagnosing, and treating (mostly with drugs) the American populace.
Probably the largest turning point in that time happened in 1968 with the introduction of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-3). The DSM-3 “dropped on the doorstep over 100 refurbished or brand new diagnoses,” including Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Borderline Personality Disorder, and Panic Disorder.
Under the DSM framework, about 50 percent of the U.S. population meets criteria for lifetime diagnosis of a mental disorder, Cohen said, adding that 65 percent of adults in the U.S. in 2024 reported concerns with a family member’s mental health, while 77 percent ranked mental health as a major concern “on par with the economy.”
“The burgeoning mental health professions rushed in to join in that re-labeling of virtually everything that plagues us in life. But that scientific promise never materialized,” Cohen said. “Forty-six years after DSM-3, not a single mental disorder in that book ever graduated to a general medical condition — not one. They still remain a species — a special species — of something medical — but not quite — that we can define any way we want, but it’s still some medical problem. In other words, we know a mental disorder when we see it, but no one can tell you, ‘What is it?'”
That is because there is little or no physiological evidence for many of these disorders.
Jeffrey Lacasse, a professor at Florida State University specializing in mental health and psychiatric medications, explained that paired with the DSM-3 was the idea that mental disorders are a “chemical imbalance in the brain.”
Infamously, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Prozac in 1987, and it was marketed as such. However, Lacasse explained that there was no evidence to believe the “chemical imbalance” theory by the 1970s, and by the mid-2000s, the theory was dead and advertisements claiming the theory had largely disappeared.
Despite the lack of evidence, Lacasse said 88 percent of the public still believe the theory.
Cohen said it speaks to the “total scientific failure, but astounding cultural success” of convincing Americans to think in terms of mental illness, and particularly in terms of chemical imbalances in the brain.
“Who doesn’t know five diagnoses that you belong — friends, co-workers, family members, yourself, without any diagnostician? This thing is a complete part of the culture… Why? Because in America, the DSM has remained our only way to determine a person’s eligibility for help,” Cohen said. “Using public funds or third-party reimbursement during times of distress or misbehavior, asking for help, being a resident or a citizen just won’t do it. We’ve got to pronounce your problem as a disease or a medical problem before we respond to it with companionship, shelter, or drugs.”
Schools Are The Gateway To Drugging Children
As The Federalist reported, schools often act as a pipeline convincing students that they are a different gender, and then encourage them to seek increasing levels of intervention — from social “transition,” to chemical castration drugs, to genital mutilation surgeries.
So, too, are they pathways to other forms of mental health medicalization in children.
Gretchen Watson, a clinical psychologist, noted that universal mental health screenings are now happening in one-third of American schools, where children “as young as eight” are asked “leading questions” about suicide.
Watson quoted them:
- In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?
- In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?
- In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?
- Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how, when?
- Are you having thoughts of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.
The screenings include other questions, such as, “How often have you felt that you have something important to contribute to society?” and “What strategies have you found helpful in managing your mental health?”
Watson noted how harmful and unhealthy it is to ask young children to think in those terms.
“You’ve got to wonder if these questions aren’t planting confusing ideas in young children’s minds, priming them for anxiety and depression,” she said, adding that 90 percent of the children the screenings identify as “at risk” are actually normal.
Some of the most prolific screening programs, such as TeenScreen used in 43 states, identify 84 percent false-positives and are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Watson said, concerned with the ability to market mental illness to children.
Watson identified Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a “gateway diagnosis that opened the door to the medicalization of childhood and to drug cocktails for young children.”
She used Hampton Roads, Virginia, which she referred to as the “country’s first ADHD hot spot,” as a case study in diagnosis, drugging children, and educational outcomes.
There, in 1999, 19 percent of elementary students were diagnosed with ADHD, resulting in 84 percent of them being given drugs, 28 percent being given two or more drugs, and nine percent on three or more, simultaneously.
Watson said that level of prescribing in children was “unheard of” at the time, and that the medicated children actually had worse educational outcomes than that of the ADHD-diagnosed children who were not medicated.
That resulted in many in Hampton Roads, over the next four years, to stop the drugging. Watson said that ADHD diagnoses themselves reduced by 32 percent, as they implemented “non-drug interventions that were associated with educational improvements,” resulting in “70 percent reduction in discipline referrals, significant decreases in ADHD symptoms from the beginning to the end of the school year, and higher test scores on every subject of the statewide academic testing.”
However, despite that four-year span of improvement, “psychiatric overtreatment has become a national crisis,” including in Hampton Roads.
Nationally, by 2015, over 40 percent of children and young adults between the ages of two and 24 were on multiple psychiatric drugs, with combinations including stimulants, antidepressants, and antipsychotics, Watson said.
Hampton Roads, for its part, opened a psychiatric hospital in 2022 “to contend with the continual uptick in psychiatric emergencies and police reports of mental violence among children treated for mental health problems,” Watson said, adding, in 2023, a six-year-old on ADHD medications went to school with a gun and shot his teacher.
Designed To Fail
“While psychiatric drugs can suppress certain behaviors over the short term, they are rarely effective long term,” Watson said.
But long-term use — over the span of months and years — is the norm in American society. That use builds dependence, which results in intense withdrawal symptoms when most patients try to ween themselves off the drugs.
However, as Watson and Cohen pointed out, those withdrawal symptoms are not generally considered by clinicians as withdrawal — but rather, mental health relapse. In other words, doctors consider withdrawal symptoms to be a continuation or reemergence of the underlying issue that the patient was prescribed the drug to alleviate in the first place.
Watson noted how doctors will start stacking medications on top of one another, stating, “this pattern of prescribing medication to treat the effects of other medications is known as the ‘prescribing cascade,’ and it accounts for a significant portion of children in this country who experience psychiatric emergencies.” Drugs are seldom tested in combination with each other, let alone over long periods of time.
Cohen added that the faux-relapse is actually a consideration built into the drugs themselves.
Studies on these drugs are already short, but when testing for how patients do off the drugs, researchers will automatically assume that clear relapse symptoms are just illness regression, causing them to conclude that it is best to simply keep the patients on these drugs forever.
“They know it could be withdrawal, they have instruments to measure withdrawal, but they always conclude, 90 percent of the time, it’s relapse,” he said. “In other words, it’s central for the industry to continue to say that the drugs are useful because they use removing people from the drugs as a central feature.”
The “darker side,” he said, is that “withdrawal is exploited … in the clinic with your patient.”
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