” They’ve done scientifically randomized controlled drug trials”
The trials were done by the companies pushing the drugs.
Depression is anger turned inward.
Our society no longer works in the fields all day to survive so we have lots of time to sit around and ruminate over perceived ills and grievances.
To quote Pete Steele of Type O Negative;
Idle hands may be the devil’s work
Unbridled minds you see are so much worse
Too much pity spent and wasting time
Irresponsibility not my only crime no
Obsessive thinking, depressed drinking
The person I once was, he’s dead
Exhume the past this time or be my last
This is my final quest to remove my mask yeah
Pete was given Prozac which he took for *years*.
Almost all of his songs are desperate internal dialogues about being freed from his numbness and despair.
In addition to the Prozac, he self-medicated with booze and coke to ‘feel’ again.
His ‘sudden rages’ were infamous and he did time on Rikers Island for beating the crap out of people.
he got odd the drugs, legal and illegal, stopped drinking and re-found God...just in time.
Now he’s dead, his heart having given out from the chemical excesses.
IMO, he would still be alive if not for the Prozac.
You can virtually track his physical/mental descent through his albums.
Ironically, in spite of his fame and success, he pined for the days when he was a maintenance man in Central Park.
The hard work made him -happy-.
“The trials were done by the companies pushing the drugs”
Oh, I see. It’s one of those arguments. Like how we can never prove Oswald was the shooter or OJ killed Ron and Nichols because maybe the cops planted evidence.
Do you honestly figure only drug companies run trials? All the hundreds of them? Not even the government weighed in? The same government whose official policy is to err on the side of death just to be sure one out of a billion dose doesn’t turn you green? You don’t imagine the NIH ran trials?
“Depression is anger turned inward”
Okay.
“Our society no longer works in the fields”
I’ve heard this before. Have you ever studied the religion, read the literature, or heard the music of agrarian societies? Not all of it, but much? They sound depressed as a weeping willow. Ever boiled Christianity down to its essentials? Basically, it’s that life sucks, then you die. One tho.g different now is that we’re more bored, and boredom is a vastly underestimated emotion. But there are equally burdensome things.