This got my dander way up

How much did big pharma pay to float this through the media?

I'm not aware of anyone ever adequately demonstrating that psychiatric medication is more effective for more psychiatric problems than is therapy or lifestyle modification or the passage of time.

I am aware of the billions upon billions of dollars pharmaceutical companies make dealing this crap. I am further aware insurance companies would rather pay to drug people than pay for people to talk someone about their problem.

There are quite a range of "psychiatric meds" out there. There are several classes of antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, etc.
All of them have side effects, some of them very severe side effects. Some of the "side effects" are not actually side effects at all but DRUG EFFECTS which occur in the overwhelming majority of people who take the drug.

SSRIs, one of the huge money makers, are widely, irresponsibly prescribed and have been for well over a decade. They are considered a front line solution to depression, though no one actually knows how they "work." At low to moderate doses they make people fat, cause aggressive behavior, sleep disturbance, profound detachment, loss of empathy and the cessation or impossibility of orgasm.

Sounds similar to post traumatic stress disorder. Or amphetamine use.

Perhaps the detachment and loss of empathy triggered by the chemical tinkering help pull the depressed person back from their feeling of suffering. Though at what price?

These drugs have been prescribed to teen-agers at parental request by family doctors. That is one of the more disturbing parts of this to me, that a parent can have their child drugged when they don't like that child's behavior, and that the effects of the drug are likely to obliterate normal childhood processes that teach children to be functional adults.

But these drugs are prescribed to anyone who complains of depression and generally with no investigation whatever into the source of the depression.

People taking these drugs have committed both drug induced suicide and murder, and the drug companies have worked themselves into lather covering those things up. Perhaps the profound detachment generates this violence feature in people with certain kinds of thinking styles or inexperience, people who are having problems with self regulation or identity to begin with.

But thinking styles do not interest drug companies. ONLY profit interests drug companies. They care about law suits but not about your life. And now BushCo and friends have made it possible for them not to worry so much about lawsuits. They can devote themselves tirelessly to profit. Any collateral damage will be simply collateral damage.

Prozac, the prototype for all the other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, begin development in the laboratory as a weight loss drug, which is one reason the weight gain people have from it is almost ironic, if it weren't so destructive.

Anyway, point being, we all know what speed does to behavior. And mood. It does improve mood. While it wrecks your brain and body.

If anyone has studied the long term effects of these drugs on the brain or liver or blood chemistry they have hidden the results from the public. These drugs are hawked on the television air waves as though they are as cheerful and innocuous as talking M&Ms. Free speech rights of corporations, you know.

I deeply resent the wire service running this little blurb which I am fairly certain was released by drug companies in anticipation of their new line of products, the antidepressants patch.

This approach is the result of a lazy, disinterested benumbed Bush clone society that wants to push complexity out the window of the nearest sky scraper window and pretend everything is knowable, everything is simple and we have solutions, answers, understanding.
Just say no.
Just accept Jesus.
Just take your Paxil.
Saddam is a terrorist. Democracy in the middle east. Just take your zoloft. It doesn't matter if no one loved you when you were a child, if no one took care of you; just take your prozac because it is your brain chemistry causing the problem, not your experience of life. Vote Republican. Take your effexor. Don't stop gorging yourself on red meat while never moving strenuously, ever. . Just take your lipitor. Sad today? Take your wellbutrin.