SSRIs are for people with depression, anxiety, and issues like OCD. Paranoid schizophrenics need to take Anti-psychotics, which is hard to do when they suffer paranoid delusions.
Since mentally ill people have “rights”, they don’t get involuntarily committed anymore and instead roam the streets or are left to family members to try and cope.
SSRIs can cause averse reactions in people, but that comes nowhere near to being close to explaining away it all.
I agree drug prescriptions are overly relied upon by incompetent medical professionals, but the fact is certain people NEED to take medication to be dealt with, and psychiatric institutes are the best place for such long-term patients.
Quoting from Robert Whitakers answer to one critic's review of "Anatomy of an Epidemic":
"The logic behind outpatient commitment laws is that antipsychotic medication is a necessary good for people with a diagnosis of severe mental illness. The medications are known to be helpful, but -- or so the argument goes -- people with 'severe mental illness' lack insight into their disease and this is why they reject the medication.
However, if the history of science presented in Anatomy of an Epidemic is correct, antipsychotic medications, over the long term, worsen long-term outcomes in the aggregate, and thus a person refusing to take antipsychotic medications may, in fact, have good medical reason for doing so. And if that is so, the logic for forced treatment collapses.
We need to go over Torrey’s review, step by step. This may be a bit exhausting, but since his critical review can ultimately be seen as a defense of his advocacy of forced treatment, I think it will be worthwhile. In the end, we will be able to judge whether his is an honest review, or dishonest in kind, and if it is the latter, that—by itself—will reveal much about the scientific merits of outpatient commitment laws."
What I suggest is that your reply is simply too facile and untutored to pass as a valid argument for continuing the use of SSRIs. Again, often the delusions of those affected, when historically treated, are less damaging to them and to society, than replacing them with the effects induced by SSRIs. SSRIs are not necessary for the treatment of psychoses, regardless of what big pharma recommends and which the layman has been led to believe.
Have you ever seen it through with a friend who is trying to get off SSRIs without adequately trained counsel? If not, then let me recommend you keep your opinions in restraint until you have. Benzodiazepines are far more addictive than cocaine or heroine, and harder to get off.
http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/AntiDepressants/breggin31-49.pdf
The report [51] provided a clinical window into the development of obsessive violence and a school shooter
mentality. A twelve-year-old boy on fluoxetine developed nightmares about becoming a school
shooter and then began to lose track of reality concerning these events. This case occurred in a controlled clinical
trial and the investigators did not know that the child was getting fluoxetine until they broke the
double-blind code. The child’s reaction occurred long before any of the well-known school shootings
had taken place. Therefore, his reaction was not inspired by the school shootings; it was not a “copycat”:
[51] R. King, M. Riddle, P. Chappell, M. Hardin, G. Anderson, P. Lombroso and L. Scahill, Emergence of self-destructive
phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine treatment, Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry 30 (1991), 179–186.