Depression: The Story We're Told Is Marketing
- Corina F
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just named the pharmaceutical dependency crisis from the highest podium in American health. What he didn't say: the chemical imbalance theory has already been debunked.
MAY 11 |
On May 4th, 2026, the Secretary of Health and Human Services walked to a podium at the Make America Healthy Again Institute and named a truth that has been buried under fifty years of marketing copy. Kennedy laid out the numbers without flinching. Sixteen percent of American adults are now on antidepressants. One in ten of our children walks around with a psychiatric prescription metabolizing in their bloodstream and a third of our college students filled one in the past year alone. He called the situation what it is: A dependency crisis driven by overmedicalization.
Some really smart people have been shouting this into a vacuum for years. Now the conversation has finally caught up to what the bodies of data and the suicide statistics have been trying to tell us for a long time.
The story we have been told about our depression falls apart on contact with reality. We are broken machines, the story says, and a pill is the fix. Inside that story there is no room for the possibility that the suffering is information, that the body and the soul are speaking, and that the medicine the suffering is asking for is rarely (if ever) chemical.
I want to walk you through how we got here, what the science actually says, and what taking your power back looks like when the prescription pad gets put down. Take what follows as the testimony of someone who has known the dark. I know the voice that tells you you are worthless and the weight that arrives without invitation. I am not talking down to you, I am you.
The Modern Myth - Chemical Imbalance Theory
The story goes like this: Some people have brains that produce too little serotonin. That glitch in God’s hardware causes depression. A class of drugs called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors raises serotonin in the synapse, so of course, the depressed should take this magic bullet in an orange pill bottle. Often forever.
The story is elegant. It is wrong.
In 2022, a team led by Joanna Moncrieff at University College London published an umbrella review of every major systematic review and meta-analysis on the serotonin theory of depression. They examined six different lines of evidence: serotonin levels in body fluids, receptor binding, transporter levels, tryptophan depletion studies, genetic studies, and gene-environment interactions. The conclusion was unambiguous. There is no consistent evidence that depression is caused by lower serotonin concentration or activity. The marketing copy that has shaped a generation of prescriptions had no scientific foundation underneath it.
This was old news to anyone paying attention. As far back as the 1990s, Harvard psychologist Irving Kirsch, one of the world’s leading experts on the placebo effect, was meta-analyzing the studies that supposedly proved SSRIs worked. He kept finding the same thing. When you control properly for placebo, the chemical effect of these drugs on depression barely clears statistical noise.
The standard scale researchers use is called the Hamilton Scale. Zero is no depression, fifty-one is suicidal urgency, and regulators say a new intervention should lift a patient’s score by at least three points to be worth approving. Kirsch’s analysis found that, antidepressants drop depression scores by 1.8. For context, getting consistent good sleep improves (lowers) the same score by six.
The Active Placebo Trick
When Kirsch sorted the studies by drug class, the picture got stranger. He compared SSRIs against tricyclic antidepressants, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, and even antipsychotics all tested for the purpose of remediating depression. Drugs with wildly different chemistry, acting on entirely separate regions of the brain, all producing the same 1.8 improvement on the Hamilton Scale.
Come again? If the serotonin theory were true, SSRIs should have outperformed the rest. But they didn’t.
This is where Kirsch’s expertise in placebo became the key to the puzzle. The studies these drugs go through are called double-blind trials. Patients are told they will receive either an active drug to treat depression, or a sugar pill, and they should be unable to tell which. By law, the researchers must inform every participant of the active drug’s side effects up front, regardless of which arm of the study the patient ends up in.
Here is the problem. The side effects of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and amphetamines are viscerally obvious. Dry mouth, sexual numbness, the buzz of a stimulant, the flatness of sedation, different qualities of sleep, and changes in appetite. A patient who feels these effects knows they got the real drug; one who feels nothing knows they got the sugar pill. The blind, in other words, was already broken before the data started rolling in. Every patient who got any real drug and noticed the side effects, believed they were taking a new drug designed by some of the best biotech scientists in the world, that was going to make them less depressed.
In methodological terms, this is fatal. The patient who knows they have the real drug believes they will get better, and that belief alone is enough to trigger the placebo effect, which is in turn massive enough to swamp whatever small chemical effect the drug itself is producing. The reason every class of drug shows the same 1.8 improvement is that the 1.8 is mostly placebo, supercharged by the certainty that the patient has been given something real.
Kirsch named this the Active Placebo Hypothesis. The active drugs work, but they work because the side effects triggered a field of belief. The chemicals aren’t making patients feel better, their belief is making them feel better.
When Kirsch realized something was wrong with the published record, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request and pulled the studies the pharmaceutical companies had hidden from public view. The top six antidepressant makers had buried roughly forty percent of their research, almost all of it showing no clinically significant effect. The published record, the record doctors and patients had been making decisions on for decades, had been carefully curated.
Professor David Healy, who wrote the most thorough history of antidepressants in modern medicine, has put it plainly. “There was never any basis for the theory. It was just marketing copy.”
The Side of the Bargain Nobody Mentioned
Here is the part of the story the commercial leaves out. These drugs deliver little of what was promised, and quite a lot of what was hidden.
A 2024 systematic review published in Molecular Psychiatry found that 42.9% of patients experience withdrawal symptoms when coming off antidepressants. A 2025 study of long-term users in primary care found thatpeople who had been on the drugs for more than two years experienced withdrawal effects that were common, often severe, and longer-lasting. The longer you take them, the harder they are to leave.
The clinical literature has begun using a word that the marketing materials avoided for thirty years. Dependence.
This is what Kennedy is naming when he calls it a dependency crisis. Skip the recreational definition of addiction. The clinical bar is dependence: whether the brain adapts to the drug’s presence in a way that punishes the patient for trying to leave. By that measure these drugs are dependence-forming, and the people prescribed them have largely been kept in the dark.
Add to that the side effects nobody contests. Most patients gain significant weight. Three-quarters experience sexual dysfunction. Across the population the drugs raise suicide risk in the young, all-cause mortality and stroke in the old, type 2 diabetes risk in everyone, and birth defect rates in pregnant women whose obstetricians forgot to mention the risk when they wrote the prescription.
This is the bargain: Modest improvement that is mostly (or entirely) placebo, in exchange for real and durable harm. And we put one in ten of our children on it. Yikes.
What This Looks Like in 2026
Let me show you what this actually looks like inside one office on one afternoon.
A close friend of mine went to a psychiatrist a month ago because she was having a hard time staying focused and calm. She is the primary caretaker for her ailing, emotionally reactive father, and the strain of holding him together was eating at her ability to think clearly. She wanted help managing the load.
She drew a psychiatrist roughly her own age. After a brief intake the doctor leaned in and she said something close to, “Girl, what you need are some antidepressants. These are the two I take. I’m going to prescribe them to you.”
The two were Bupropion and Sertraline. My friend was surprised. She had walked in with a focus and stress problem and walked out with two psychiatric prescriptions for a condition that she wasn’t experiencing.
Set the casual diagnostic aside, because it gets worse. Both drugs carry an FDA black box warning for increased suicidal ideation. Just stop for a minute and think how crazy that is. How can someone with a clear conscience casually prescribe a drug in a non emergency situation, which might fuck up your brain so much that you die by your own hand. Additionally, Sertraline brings withdrawal symptoms in roughly half the patients who eventually try to come off it, and Bupropion adds elevated seizure risk and the kind of low-grade emotional flattening that the patient often mistakes for the disorder itself coming back.
To recap: A young woman walks into an office because she is having trouble focusing and managing stress. She walks out with a script for a drug whose headline side effect is the worst outcome depression can cause. The prescriber’s reasoning was that the drugs worked for her, so they would probably work for the woman in the chair. And that’s a generous explanation of the possible motives from the doctor. A JAMA study found that 57% of US physicians received a payment from pharmaceutical or medical device companies between 2013 and 2022, totaling roughly $12 billion across more than 800,000 physicians. Most of these payments are technically legal under US law (meals, speaker fees, consulting, travel), but a large body of research shows they correlate with prescribing behavior in ways that mirror what kickbacks would produce. Perverse incentives create perverse outcomes.
Another story worth mentioning is the story currently being told my Mikhaila Peterson about her father. Six years ago Jordan Peterson went cold turkey with his pharmaceutical dependency, with the help of a clinic in Russia. Today, he is still not the same person he once was. Mikhaila remembers when her dad used to smile, but it’s been a long time. And on social media, courageous creators like Ariella Sharf have documented their own struggles with the savage side effects of coming off SSRI’s.
This is all woven in with the dependency crisis Kennedy named, scaled down to n=1 anecdotal stories of real people. Multiply these anecdotes by the millions of unique but similar stories happening across the country, and you arrive at the numbers Kennedy read off the podium.
The Myth Is Not Just Physical, It’s Metaphysical
The deepest poison of the chemical-imbalance story is not just the drug, it’s the mindset that accompanies it.
If you are a broken machine, then you are powerless. If your suffering is the result of a defect in your wiring, then nothing in your relationships, your work, your spiritual life, your relationship to the natural world, your diet, your movement, your sleep, your trauma, your purpose, has anything to do with how you feel. You are at the mercy of chemistry, and the only move available to you is the one a stranger writes on a pad. Which, is total bullshit. Gardening as a depression intervention, lowered the score by 4.5 points. That’s 250% better than what the SSRI trials showed.
To understand what is really happening I am going to call in Dr. Stan Grof, the psychologist who pioneered transpersonal psychology and trained an entire generation of healers. On my podcast he told me something that took years to land. He said our names contain a lie. “You are not Aubrey,” he told me. “You are Aubreying. You are a verb, stop looking at yourself as a noun.”
Depression is part of the verbing. It is what your nervous system does when the life you are living is at war with the life you were built to live. It’s the soul going on strike, giving up hope and refusing to keep performing in a play whose script it has long stopped believing. The melancholy and unnamable weight are real, and they are also the signal. They are the system telling you that something has to change, and the something is rarely a molecule.
Comfort is the antagonist of growth. Your challenges are the guardians of the treasure. Most of the lessons I am most grateful for came when suffering forced me to listen to what I had been refusing to hear. The depression made me a better man because I treated it as a teacher rather than as a malfunction, and that distinction is the entire game.
The Panacea: Be of Service
If everything I have written so far feels like too much to do at once, here is the move I would make first.
Be of service. There are countless studies (pasted at the end of article) that support this as the strongest strategy available.
The strange grace of service is that it is far easier to believe you can help another person than it is to believe you can help yourself. When you are depressed, your own healing can feel unreachable. Someone else’s burden feels possible. Pick up groceries for your family, help a kid with homework, listen to a friend without preparing your reply. This doesn’t need to be a hundred hours at a soup kitchen (but it can be!).
The best research-backed intervention for depression that nobody wants to put on a billboard is the act of becoming useful to someone else.
The Bottom Line
Kennedy is right. We have an overmedication crisis, that is the result of broken philosophy and perverse financial incentives. The solution runs through the reclamation of the human capacity to suffer with meaning, to choose, to remember, and to serve.
If you are on an SSRI right now, do not stop today on impulse. Withdrawal is real and the literature on it is finally being honest. Find a clinician who takes the tapering protocols seriously, and as a tip, look for a doctor who describes themselves as either ‘holistic’ or ‘functional’. Then begin the slow work of rebuilding the parts of your life the pill has been carrying for you.
If you are watching someone you love drift further into the diagnosis-and-prescription cycle, be gentle with the truth. Remember: Truth and love are synonyms and need to maintain a balance. And if you are sitting somewhere right now under the unnamable weight, I understand. If you have been to a traditional doctor, the diagnosis they gave you is probably wrong. What you are doing is transforming, even when it feels like the opposite. The same nervous system that is making you suffer is asking you to become someone even deeper, with real soul. Move the body. Feel cold water on your face, draw fresh air in your lungs, and touch the grass under your feet. And more than anything, be kind to someone, even if that someone can’t be you (yet).
Blessings on your journey, the world needs you because you have something uniquely you can offer.
If you know someone who could benefit from reading this article, please share. Mahalo.
Credit to Erick Godsey for research support on this article.
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