While most people see illegal drugs as a major threat to society, few recognise the devastating toll a new breed of drug is having on our cultures—psychiatric prescription drugs.

Once reserved for the mentally disturbed, today it is increasingly difficult to find someone who hasn’t taken some form of psychiatric drug.

These drugs have become a supposed cure-all for the stresses of modern living, used in British schools, German nursing homes and drug rehabilitation centres and prisons throughout Europe. They are relied upon to “help” with everything from weight control, mathematical and writing problems, to flagging self-confidence, anxiety, sleeping disorders and those day-to-day upsets.

Medical drugs treat, prevent or cure disease or improve physical health. Psychiatric drugs, on the other hand, act only to temporarily suppress unwanted feelings and include harmful side effects. These substances must also be taken indefinitely, opening the door wide to psychiatric drug addiction—now a major societal problem.

Drugs are big business. World-wide sales of antidepressants is at more than €15 billion a year, while antipsychotic drugs sales now reach almost €10 billion. It is hardly surprising that international statistics show an ever-increasing percentage of people, of all ages, relying heavily and routinely on psychiatric drugs. In Spain alone, the use of antidepressants rose 247% in the 1990s, with the sales of antidepressants increasing three-fold and anti-anxiety drugs by four-fold since 2000. “Western European countries face epidemic levels of citizens being hooked on tranquillisers as well as antidepressants”, reports author Beverly Eakman.

Psychiatric drugs have long been a CCHR target. Uniformly harmful, their use continues to escalate. All these substances have been touted as miracles and marketed to unsuspecting patients and the general public alike. And when their shortcomings became evident, psychiatrists would usually blame it on the “mental illness”, and new drugs were prescribed to “treat” the vicious side effects of earlier drugs.

The psychiatrist has an ever-growing list of invented “mental disorders”, each with a corresponding psychiatric drug to prescribe. For a medical doctor to legally prescribe a drug, there has to be a recognised physical condition, a valid disease or illness with actual physical symptoms. But all the psychiatrist needs is his books: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or the International Classification of Diseases, Section on Mental Disorders (ICD-10). Basing his diagnoses thereon, he asserts that his drug is addressing a “chemical imbalance”, despite the consensus among many medical professionals that no scientific evidence exists to prove that “mental disorders” are “brain-based diseases” or that a chemical imbalance causes any of it.