They Call It “Informed Consent.” It Isn’t.

Over 30 million Americans have been told a 19 billion dollar lie. Find out what doctors don’t tell you about SSRI side effects, antidepressant effectiveness, and antidepressant risks that affect more people than you think.

There is a $19 billion lie being told in medicine right now involving 30 million Americans and probably not even one of them knows it’s going on. It involves a sugar pill and a number so tiny you can barely see it. This is a form that all the doctors are supposed to give you before you accept a treatment or a medication, right? And there’s three pages of fine print of legalese and massive confusion. And so what I did is I read every single line and it just didn’t make sense to me.

It was totally confusing. There was conflicting information. This took me between 8 and 9 hours to wrap my wits around it because I just couldn’t understand it. And the average patient in the waiting room probably spends about 30 seconds to look this over and then they just sign off. It’s called an informed consent.

You are basically signing off that you understand the risks, the benefits, and the harms of that medication. And so today I’m going to make this super simple and I’m going to show you what’s not communicated in this form. Because if they truly informed you and you really understood what you’re getting yourself into, you would never in a million years sign off on this informed consent. A clinical psychologist named Irving Kirsch used to believe in antidepressants. He even recommended that certain patients take them.

But then he did something that no one ever did before. He filed a number of FOIA request, which is a Freedom of Information Act request, and he wanted the raw data from every single antidepressant trial that existed. There’s actually 74 of them. The drug companies keep the raw data confidential. And what he found was they only published the ones that work, okay?

31% of these publications were never published because they didn’t come out right. Another 15% were rewritten to make them look positive. Medical doctors actually don’t get the raw data to be able to know if it’s correct or not. What he actually found is the drug companies have inflated their results by 32%. Now, the entire antidepressant industry, the $19 billion industry, uses this one scale called the Hamilton Depression Scale and it goes from zero to 51.

These are items that are answered by the doctor, not the patient. So if someone actually looks depressed, they can check off that they’re depressed. This is how they diagnose depression. Not by blood test, not by anything objective, it’s this subjective Hamilton Depression Scale. And by the way, Hamilton never designed this scale to diagnose depression, but that’s what’s used as the gold standard.

But the way this works is the higher the number, the more severe depression you have, okay? What I want you to do right now is envision this from zero to 51 as 51 ft across this whiteboard. And so what the drug companies did is they tested a drug against a placebo, a sugar pill. And here’s what they found. The placebo, the sugar pill, reduced depression by just under 10 points, 9.

6 points. Now watch this. The drug only added a tiny additional 1. 8 points. The placebo, the sugar pill, does the heavy lifting.

In fact, 82% of the improvement is based on this sugar pill placebo. Only a little tiny bit of the improvement, a sliver of improvement with depression, is the drug on this zero to 51 scale. Now let that sink in for a second. Because we’re talking about a $19 billion industry based on this improvement right here. And what’s really wild is a good night’s sleep can lessen depression by six points.

That’s more than three times the effect of the drug. And here’s the thing that really got me. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute of Health said that you need at least three points for it to be considered clinically significant. Only in America do we allow this tiny number to be significant. So what does a patient get for 1.

8 points? Well, they get a black box warning, which for this medication indicates an increased risk of suicide. You get sexual dysfunction, decreased libido up to 74%. Then you get something called post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. What is that?

That means the sexual dysfunction happens when you stop the drug. But now I want to get into probably the worst side effect of all of these side effects, emotional blunting. Now, if you look at this informed consent, it’s missing. It’s not in the informed consent. Emotional blunting that affects between 40 and 60% of the patients.

So what is emotional blunting? You won’t be able to feel enjoyment anymore. You won’t be able to feel pleasure. You’re basically going to be numb. Yes, you will be less sad, you’ll have less depression, but you also not be able to experience any emotion, which by the way, this leads me to this side effect of discontinuation syndrome.

You can’t come off this drug easily. In fact, you have to go to a doctor to taper off the drug very slowly, sometimes over the course of months or even years. And some people at the expense of $30,000 a year just to come off a drug that they’re stuck on. Some other side effects include insomnia, nausea, anxiety, even depression. Now, what’s really bizarre about this is what they do with the placebo effect, okay?

They subtract it as noise. It’s not nothing, it’s something. It’s believing in something. It’s the patient’s own mind healing their body and they’re subtracting the heavy lifter, something that improves 82% of the lessening of depression. What they should be doing is looking at what does the heavy lifting and start diving into research on this and focus on lifestyle changes and things that don’t come with such a massive package of side effects and harms.

Well, the problem is not the doctor’s fault because this is all the doctor sees, right? They don’t get the raw data. And so both the doctor and the patient are misinformed, okay? So this is really not an informed consent. What I think we should do is create a quick visual of the true data showing the placebo benefit, the benefit from the drug, and all the real side effects as well as including all the published data.

I really don’t think it’s okay for taxpayers to indirectly pay for Big Pharma’s research and not be able to have access to the raw data to make sure that it’s correct. If we had all the raw data and all the trials that were done, we would be much more informed and then a patient can make the correct decision whether they want to get on a drug that they can never get off of. And really, if the benefits far outweigh the harms. If a patient really knew in advance that they’re not going to be able to come off this drug very easily and if they did, they would have major side effects, maybe they would try other things like exercise, St. John’s Wort, omega-3 fatty acids, working on their sleeping, anything that creates a better benefit to harm ratio.

If it took me 8 to 9 hours to really wrap my wits around this to understand it, just think about the average patient. They don’t have a clue what they’re getting themselves into. Now, I’m not telling anyone to come off their medication, okay? That’s between you and your doctor. I’m not saying depression is not real, okay?

It’s real. All I’m saying is patients need to have the true information in advance so they can determine if they want to do this or not. Because the way it is now, it’s all based in a lie. It’s slight of hand. Now, since we’re on the topic of depression, if you have not seen my video on alternative things to do for depression, you should watch this video right here.