subscribe to our free newsletter and receive concise and in-depth articles exploring topics similar to those we cover on this YouTube channel sign up at academyof ideas.com newsletter or find a link in the pinned comment below big Pharma is one of the largest and most profitable businesses in America and in order to sell their chemical Goods to allegedly treat the Mind psyche pharmaceutical companies must convince society that people's mental and behavioral problems are caused by the bodily chemicals an epidemic of mental illness has spread across the modern world according to the National Institute for mental health 25% of All American adults suffer from at least one mental illness as do 15% of all children many in the field of Psychiatry claim that psychiatric drugs are the most effective tool we have to counter this epidemic and as a result these drugs are heavily prescribed in the Western World in the series of videos we explore the lies and propaganda that are used to justify the use of psychiatric drugs and we expose the Deep corruption that exists at the heart of the Unholy Alliance of modern Psychiatry and big Pharma in this first video we expose the big lie that supports the millions of psychiatric drug prescriptions written each year and the billions of dollars of profits that pharmaceutical companies earn from their sales this lie is that chemical or neurotransmitter imbalances are a primary cause of mental illness and that taking psychiatric drugs corrects for these imbalances if a lie is only printed often enough it becomes a quasi truth and if such a truth is repeated often enough it becomes an article of belief a Dogma in the late 19th century Psychiatry suffered low status among the medical professions there were few generally agreed upon treatments for mental illness and while medical doctors were rapidly improving their capacity to understand and treat the disorders of the body Psychiatry was relatively stagnant with respect to understanding the disorders of the Mind the fate of Psychiatry changed however when the German psychiatrist Amil kraan put forth a bold and revolutionary theory kraan hypothesized that mental disorders such as depression anxiety and schizophrenia are the result of underlying physical pathologies in the brain and body klan's Theory caught on like wildfire as it aligned with materialism the dominant scientific Paradigm at the time materialism is a philosophical position which claims that matter is the primary Sole and fundamental element of reality and that our mind is an emergent property of and reducible to the interaction of material parts of our brain in aligning Psychiatry with the materialist position and hence the scient ific community at large crain's Theory radically improved the status of Psychiatry crappin became the founder of modern Psychiatry and the widespread acceptance of his theory ushered in a wave of experimental psychiatric treatments targeting the brain and bodily malfunctions believed to underly mental illness in his book cracked why Psychiatry is doing more harm than good James Davies writes in the 1920s these treatments included surgically removing parts of the patient body their teeth tonsils colons spleens and uteri injecting patients with horse serum using carbon dioxide to induce convulsions and Comas injecting patients with Cyanide and giving them hypothermia another treatment was malaria therapy injecting the patient with the malaria parasite in the hope that the high temperatures malaria produced would kill the virus then thought responsible for mental disease many patients failed to recover from the Aria disease the ineffectiveness of these early 20th century treatments did not stop psychiatrists from developing new experimental treatments in the 1930s insulin shock therapy was invented which involved giving patients high doses of insulin that would trigger intense seizures and place the patient in a coma Davies writes that after this procedure granted patients would appear to feel calmer but they would often show memory loss and other neurological abnormalities such as loss of speech 5% of all patients actually died from this treatment in the 1940s labotomy or the surgical removal of parts of the brain thought to be responsible for mental disorders was invented and by the 1970s 1 million people in the United States had been lobotomized another treatment which grew in popularity in the 1940s was electroconvulsive therapy or ECT which involved administering electric shocks to the brain of a depressed patient in order to induce severe seizures in the words of Davies all these outlandish and barbaric treatments one impetus and legitimacy from psychiatry's enduring conviction that there must be a physical basis for mental disorder this originated with crain's assumption if our emotional maladies are biologically caused then the body is where our efforts must be directed after half a century of experimenting with psychiatric treatments that not only proved ineffective but often harmed handicapped or killed patients the field of Psychiatry faced a Crisis general medicine was advancing via revolutionary breakthroughs such as the first organ transplants and blood transfusions as well as the discovery of antibiotics and Insulin psychiatry in contrast had found little success within the materialist Paradigm that dominated scientific discourse this all changed in the 1950 s with the development of the first generation of psychiatric drugs prior to the 1950s sedatives and stimulants were commonly prescribed in psychiatric institutions to subdue and control a psychotic or heavily depressed patient however psychiatrists were not publicly open regarding how they were using these drugs official reticence about the old drugs conveys the impression that they were a source of embarrassment writes the British psychiatrist Joanna monrie however in the 1950s after a new collection of psychiatric drugs were discovered psychiatrists started to publicly Embrace their use chlorpromazine the first neuroleptic or antis psychotic which was marketed under the name of Thorazine was discovered when researchers searching for antimalarial drugs discovered that chlorpromazine functioned as a major tranquilizer which induced in patients a euphoric quietude patients are calm andom with a relaxed and detached expression the first anxiolytic or anti-anxiety drug was a minor tranquilizer which was discovered by researchers searching for a drug to treat gram negative microbes while the first anti-depressant was a psychological stimulant that was discovered by researchers searching for a drug treatment for tuberculosis these discoveries initiated what is called the psychopharmacological Revolution and in the words of monrie these drugs were greeted with immense enthusiasm verging on Zeal one contemporary Observer noted that the atmosphere at conferences on the new drugs was akin to religious revivalist meetings from this time on textbooks started to cover drug treatments in detail and proclaimed their transformative effects pharmaceutical companies realized that psychiatric drugs could be marketed and sold not only to institutionalized patients but to the general public and so they began investing heavily in the research and development of psychiatric drugs in 1955 Wallace Laboratories brought mobam mate to the market selling it under the name miltown and marketing it as a minor tranquilizer that could ease anxiety and worry following an extensive marketing campaign demand for miltown soared the public rush to obtain this new drug was such that Wallace Laboratories and Carter products which were jointly selling mobam mate struggled to keep up with the demand following the success of miltown in 1963 the drug maker Hoffman lar Ro brought Valium the first benzo dipene to Market Valium was marketed primarily to anxious Housewives and from 1965 to 1981 it was the bestselling drug in the West in the theme of the Rolling Stone song Mother's Little Helper in 1967 one in three American adults filled a prescription for a psychoactive medication with a total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million wrote Robert Whitaker this first generation of psychiatric drugs were not only highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies they also granted the field of Psychiatry the status and legitimacy it had long been seeking for as Joanna monrie writes these first generation drugs were an intervention on the body and as drug treatment grew in importance in other areas of medicine they confirmed the desired parallels between Psychiatry and Physical Medicine the success these drugs conferred on Psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies was shortlived as the public soon became aware that consuming these drugs produced negative side effects while Hoffman larash claimed that Valium provided pure Anxiety Relief and was safe harmless and non-addicting many users reported physical dependence terrible withdrawal effects as well as insomnia panic attacks and heightened levels of anxiety in 1975 the US justice department classified benzodiazapines as schedule for drugs under the control substance act prescriptions for Valium as well as other psychiatric drugs plummeted and a growing public awareness of the harmful nature of psychiatric drugs led to the development of an anti Psychiatry movement the intellectual father of the anti Psychiatry movement Thomas sass argued that psychiatrists were agents of social control and that the diagnosis and medication of the mentally ill was a way to subdue individuals who are reacting in an undesirable manner to life in a sick and oppressive Society in 1975 sas's idea found legitimacy when a highly publicized government investigation into the use of neuroleptics in juvenile institutions was hijacked by ex-patients who testified that the drugs caused excruciating pain and turned them into emotional zombies one patient said that such drugs are used not to heal or help but to torture and control it is that simple this anti Psychiatry movement reached popular Consciousness via the Oscar winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which portrayed Mental Hospitals as facilities of torture and control the anti- Psychiatry movement as well as the drop in the sales of psychiatric drugs led the director of the American Psychiatric association Melvin sapin to state in 1980 that the profession is under severe Siege a solution was needed to save Psychiatry as well as the profits of pharmaceutical companies and a solution was found pharmaceutical scientists gave Amil klan's Theory a modern spin they claimed that mental illness is caused by neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain and that psychiatric drugs correct for such imbalances fix a broken brain and cure mental disorders this idea became known as the chemical imbalance Theory the of mental illness regarding the researcher Who is credited with popularizing this Theory James Davies writes in the early 1960s a young medical researcher stumbled upon an idea that would launch a paradigm shift in Psychiatry the researcher was called Joseph schildkraut and the idea he advanced was rather simple fluctuations in our moods may be due to chemical imbalances in our brains to be sure schildkraut was not the first person to entertain this compelling idea it had been floating around the psychiatric community in one form or another since the mid1 1950s when the first anti-depressants started to be used but for some reason when schildkraut published his hypothesis in the American Journal of psychiatry in 1965 his views took the community by storm although schildkraut admitted his theory was at best a reductionist simplification that could neither be rejected nor confirmed on the basis of data currently available pharmaceutical scientists and psychiatrists ran with this Theory and started to act as if it were true not only for depression but for all mental disorders yet as they lacked hard evidence to support it the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders was Advanced through a line of reasoning that is illogic unscientific and bordering on absurd for example with respect to depression pharmaceutical scientists identified how drugs to treat depression increased levels of norpine and serotonin in the brain and thus they claimed that depression is caused by low levels of norepinephrine and serotonin similarly they noticed that neuroleptics or antis psychotics decreased dopamine Transmission in the brain and hence they proposed that schizophrenia is due to excessive levels of dopamine or as Robert Whitaker explains this became the storytelling formula that was relied upon by pharmaceutical companies again and again researchers would identify the mechanism of action for a class of drugs how the drugs either lowered or raised levels of a brain neurotransmitter and soon the public would be told that people treated with those medications suffered from the opposite problem the following passage by the psychiatrist Robert Taylor hammers home just how absurd and pseudoscientific this line of reasoning is in the absence of any real progress and psycho pharmacology psycho drug makers have relied on marketing gimmicks by far the most successful one portrays psycho drugs as treatment for specific chemical imbalances in the brain since psycho drugs alter brain chemicals so the pitch goes the conditions they target must be caused by chemical imbalances a similar line of illogical reasoning would have us believe that aspirin deficiency causes headache since when we take aspirin the headache gets better or as Joanna monrie explains regarding the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders that took off in the 1970s the drug companies were trying to capture that huge Market of people who once took tranquilizers but because the old model of how drugs work had been tarish they needed a new model to reassert their value and necessity so now these drugs were cast as curing us rather than changing us and that's where the idea of the chemical imbalance came in it was perfect because it implied that these drugs actually corrected a defect in the brain if you have a brain disorder a chemical imbalance in this is going to correct that imbalance then obviously you must take it and this unthinking acceptance of the disease centered view has dominated mainstream Psychiatry for the last 20 or 30 years to convince the public of the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in history was conducted the major parties involved included the American Psychiatric association or APA big Pharma the nonprofit organization National Alliance on Mental Illness or nmi as well as the National Institute of Mental Health or n or as Robert Whitaker writes a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases pharmaceutical companies provided the Financial Muscle the APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the Enterprise the NIMH put the government's stamp of approval on the story n Ami provided a moral Authority this was a coalition that could convince American Society of almost anything this propaganda campaign initially focused on convincing the public that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance Depression was likely chosen as the initial Target of this campaign because of the fact that most people experiened depression at some point in life and so a massive Market exists for drugs promoted as anti-depressant in 1984 the NIMH launched an educational program called depression awareness recognition and treatment or Dart whose stated purpose was to change public attitudes so that there is greater acceptance of depression as a disorder rather than a weakness the NIMH director Lewis Jud in 1990 unequivocally claimed two decades of research have shown that psychiatric disorders are diseases and illnesses like any other diseases and illnesses newspapers magazines and books by renowned psychiatrists were also used in this propaganda campaign in 1989 New York Magazine placed the anti-depressant drug Prozac on its cover with the headline bye-bye Blues a new wonder drug for depression one year later Newsweek magazines cover read Prozac a breakthrough for depression in the same year one of America's most famous science writers at the time Natalie Angier of the New York Times wrote wrote that anti-depressants work by restoring the balance of neurotransmitter activity in the brain correcting an abnormal excess or inhibition of the electrochemical signals that control mood thoughts appetite pain and other Sensations in 1993 the Brown University psychiatrist Peter Kramer published the book listening to Prozac which spent 21 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and in which he stated that Prozac was making some patients better than well and ushering in a new era of cosmetic psychopharmacology the United States was not the only country to spread big farmers propaganda the Royal colleges of psychiatrists in the UK set up a defeat depression Campaign which was funded by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lily the makers of proac the campaign in the words of monrie sought to persuade General Practitioners that they should diagnose more people as depressed and prescribe more anti-depressants the campaign also aimed to reduce the general Public's resistance to taking drugs for depression in both the UK and America these propaganda campaigns were enormously successful this selling of depression which was being done under the guise of a public education campaign turned into one of the most effective marketing efforts ever devised writes Robert Whitaker between 1992 and 2002 the number of prescriptions issued for anti-depressants in the UK increased by 2 235% in 1992 sales of Prozac in the United States reached $1 billion pharmaceutical companies were swimming in profits impatients flocked to psychiatrists to be told which chemical imbalance was responsible for their mental distress and which drugs would fix their brain the widespread acceptance of the chemical imbalance Theory gave the field of Psychiatry the legitimacy it was looking for for as the psychiatrist David Healey explained it set the stage for psychiatrists to become real doctors or as Robert Whitaker writes doctors in Internal Medicine had their antibiotics and now psychiatrists could have their anti-d disease pills too the problem with this public relations campaign is that the chemical imbalanced theory that was sold to the public is false it is a big lie many Professionals in the public have been falsely convinced that biochemical imbalances in the brain Drive mental suffering such as the serotonin theory of depression or the dopamine theory of so-call schizophrenia yet the evidence for any biological basis for psychiatric disorders is utterly lacking or as the psychiatrist Joanna monrie echoes in the introduction to the myth of the chemical cure this book exposes the traditional view that psychiatric drugs Target underlying diseases or correct chemical imbalances as fraud it traces the emergence of this View and suggests that it was adopted not because there was any evidence to support it but because it served the vested interest of the psychiatric profession the pharmaceutical industry in the modern State you're watching the first video in our four-part series on the Corruptions of Psychiatry and the big lies of big Pharma the entire series is available exclusively to our supporting members to access it and over 100 other membership videos join our membership program at academyof ideas.com members you can cancel your membership at any time some stud ities funded by the pharmaceutical industry have concluded that low serotonin levels are implicated in depression which seems to suggest that drugs to raise these levels May improve depressive symptoms but the methodology of these studies has been revealed as highly flawed monre notes that contradictory evidence has been overlooked or reframed as supportive follow-up Studies have found no connection between serotonin levels in depression and metaanalyses Of Studies have further dispelled the myth that serot tonin is implicated in depression and as Johan Hari explains if depression and anxiety are caused by a chemical imbalance and anti-depressants work by fixing that imbalance then you have to account for something odd that scientists kept finding anti-depressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect in clinical trials as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain and they have the same effect as drugs that increase another chemical norpine and they have the same effect as drugs that increase another chemical dopamine in other words no matter what chemical you Tinker with you get the same outcome or as nir gamy a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at novaris Institute one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world explains our bestselling psychopharmacology textbook consists of pure speculations presented as pretty pictures which we mistake for science we have a huge amount of neurobiology research now to conclude that neurotransmitter theories of psychopharmacology basically are false the dopamine and serotonin hypotheses of schizophrenia and depression are wrong one of the problems with studies that seek to prove the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness is that we possess no real understanding of how neurotransmitter levels influence or impact Human Experience furthermore neurotransmitter levels in the brain are constantly fluctuating and there is no agreed upon standard of what constant healthy levels as there is no known normal balance of neurotransmitters there is no way to know what an imbalance would look like and no way to test if a brain is chemically imbalanced or as the professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Hospital David Kaiser writes patients have been diagnosed with chemical imbalances despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim and there is no real conception of what a correct balance would look like yet conclusions such as depression as a biochemical imbalance are created out of nothing more than semantics and The Wishful Thinking of scientists and psychiatrists and a public that will believe anything now that has the stamp of approval of Medical Science while the chemical imbalanced theory of mental disorders is what the professor amortis of Psychiatry Ronald pies called an urban legend this Theory continues to be widely promoted as an Undisputed Truth by the psychiatric industry big Pharma government agencies in the main mream media for example in 2005 the American Psychiatric association stated that anti-depressants may be prescribed to correct imbalances in the levels of chemicals in the brain while in 2019 Shannon hodj a correspondent for CNN which receives millions of dollars each month in advertising for big Pharma stated that researchers identified the chemical imbalances that correlate with problems such as depression and Ed treatments such as Prozac or Zoloft which block the reabsorption of Serotonin so more of it can remain floating around in the brain the more serotonin floating around the happier we feel in an article titled psychiatry's incurable hubris the psychotherapist Gary Greenberg notes how the widespread acceptance of the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders has been an act of mass deception perpetuated on an unsuspecting public the chemical imbalance Theory May Fail as science but as rhetoric it has turned out to be a wild success or as Joanna monrie Echoes it appears that recent propaganda has been effective enough to persuade a large section of the population that their biochemistry is aai and that they need drug treatment to correct it but if the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders is a big lie and there is no known neurotransmitter imbalances for psychiatric drugs to fix then what are psychiatric drugs doing to the brain and mind in the next video we examine this question to watch the rest of this series as well as over 100 other membership videos join our membership program at academyof ideas.com members Academy of ideas is the work of two brothers from Canada we are not affiliated with any organization Corporation or university we rely on the support of individuals like you thank you