The Side Effects of Antidepressants

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In the 1980s, as direct to consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals came became a legal in the United States. Pharma capitalized on that by saying we can create demand for psycho pharmaceuticals. The myth of the biological reality of mental illness is that the solution to our subjective psychic distress in society is a pill and this is exactly what all the ads say.

When psychiatrist Marco Ramos of Yale University prescribes antidepressants to patients in distress and they ask him how they work, Ramos admits: We don't really know. And too often, they don't work at all. Despite decades of brain research and billions of dollars spent, psychiatry has made little progress in understanding mental illness. Listen as Ramos explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how the myth of the biological basis for mental illness began, why it stubbornly persists, and why honesty about what we know and don't know is the best policy.