[lbo-talk] let's argue about the cause of mental illness

[Miles Jackson]

Somebody Somebody wrote:
> Suicide rates in the U.S. have been on a slight uptick in recent years (5% over ten years ago), but they're still much lower than they were up until the 90's... when antidepressants began to be widely prescribed. I doubt this is a coincidence. The rise in acceptance of both talk therapy and prescriptions for mental illness has been a progressive historical development.
The antidepressant-suicide link is not a coincidence.  In experimental 
studies on the effects of SSRIs like Prozac, suicide rates are 
significantly higher in the drug groups than in the placebo groups.  For 
a small number of depressed people, SSRIs cause suicidal ideation and 
behavior.  And the scary thing is--these people cannot be effectively 
identified until you give them the SSRIs!


>  
>
> Why leftists would oppose this is beyond me. Just as we demand public health care, we should be agitating for public mental health care. Instead, we have radicals implicitly finding common ground with traditionalists, obscurantists, and Scientologists. But, really this is just part and parcel of the reactionary anti-technology undercurrent of the contemporary left.
>   

I agree wholeheartedly that we must integrate mental health care into 
our health care system.  However, that's a quite different goal than 
giving more and more people more and more psychoactive drugs.

Miles