Product Description

By the author of Talking Back to Prozac and Your Drug May Be Your Problem, the answers to over 100 questions about antidepressants. Known as "the Ralph Nader of psychiatry," Dr. Peter Breggin has been the medical expert in countless court cases involving the use or misuse of psychoactive medications. This unusual position has given him unprecedented access to private pharmaceutical research and correspondence files, information from which informs this straight-talking guide to the most prescribed and controversial category of American drugs: antidepressants. From how these drugs work in the brain to how they treat (or don't treat) depression and obsessive-compulsive, panic, and other disorders; from the documented side and withdrawal effects to what every parent needs to know about antidepressants and teenagers, The Anti-Depressant Fact Book is up-to-the minute and easy-to-access. Hard-hitting and enlightening, every current, former, and prospective antidepressant-user will want to read this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #537871 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

not recomended!
Totally biased with little or no evidence to support the claims made. No explanation of the mechanisms of 'receptor damage' ' permanent brain damage' or any other statements of 'facts' made. Appears to be little more than a personal view or crusade, drawn out for some 200 pages and liberally scattered with plugs for the author's other outpourings.

Don't bother!

Excellent Book on the Dangers of Antidepressant Drugs
These drugs are complete poison and also useless. All the people I know who use these drugs continue to suffer and so we can conclude that Irvin Kirsch, the author of THe Emperors New Drugs, is right and that these drugs are no more effective than placebo's. What these drugs do is stone people a little, more so at first, and then the placebo effect kicks in. If you are not cured within a few months by the placebo efect you are liable to stay on these useless drugs for a considerable time getting addicted and further into problems.

All psychiatrists know, say's Irvin Kirsch, that people treated with antidepressants are far more vulnerable to depression afterwards. Whereass there is no chemical imballance involved with depression - a now disproven theory which was really just a marketing slogan created by drug companies - there is such an imballance after a person has been treated with these drugs. These medicines can cause a true biological vulnerabilty which can be considered brain damage, which wasn't there in the first place. Joseph Glenmullen, shows in his book, Proxac Backlash, photographs of monkey's brains 3 days after treatment with a serotonin boosting drug. The serotonin system before treatment is like the Milky Way, but after treatment there is absolutely nothing left. The rest of the monkeys were killed 18 months later but their brains showed no improvement at all. Chilling stuff.

Lots of people want to believe that their illness is physical and genetic because this makes them feel a bit better about themselves, 'It's not my fault, I have a real illness'. And it isn't their fault but the drug companies love this view as now they have a hoodwinked customer as well as hooked one because drugs have made their condition worse. Although feeling that you have a medical condition might make you feel less bad about yourself, you will also consider yourself doomed forever and this causes learned helplessness, one of the real triggers of depression. And who would want to marry you if they were to believe you could pass this dreadful condition on?

You might think that you inhereted your depression but the latest research shows that this is not the case. Read The Plastic Brain, by Sharon Begley. In this book she talks about research that shows how calm rats produce calm pups that grow into calm adults, and that neurotic rats produce neurotic pups that grow into anxious adults. If you swap the pups around so the calm mothers get the neurotic pups and the neurotic mothers then get the calm pups, the calm rats go on to produce calm grown up rats, and the neurotic rats cause the calm pups to become neurotic. There is absolutely loads more research showing this to be the case. Genetic research still fails to show any significance of genes in the involvement of depression. All the latest reserch on the short serotonin gene has finally proved that this gene has nothing to do with depression.

I state all this in length because I know lots of people will be mad at me because they can't tollerate this truth. The marketing behind antidepressnts has been so successful that people believe this rubbish like they believe the world is round. But think about it, if your depreesion is caused by life experiences you can cure yourself, so why get mad at me for bringing you hope. There is no biological imballance in your brain other than the one that stress has put there, and that isn't an imballance anyway, that's just a normal reaction to stress. Find the root cause of your probelms and you can be free forever.

Peter Breggin's book is another excellent book on the themes I have discussed above.

Kavy