The death of so many people by the use of antidepressant medications is promoted by a pharmaceutical industrial complex in combination with the NRA, more powerful than any local government. One of the reasons why these big players maintain their power and monopoly, is their active support in keeping ordinary people like you and me in the dark as to any alternatives in the treatment of "mental illness". They promote their drugs to the various government agencies like the FDA and the Australian TGA, claiming the safety of drugs, in breach of the rules of scientific methods. This requires free access to the studies for independent scrutiny by peers prior to validation.
It is clear that studies have shown that about 60 percent of people falling in the hands of psychiatrists and psychologists finish up with being "treatment resistant to depression". It cries out for alternative approaches. Yet everything is done to preserve the kind of profitable enterprises that ensure that patients remain treatment resistant and to demonize alternative approaches.
What is the person to do, knowing when a medical drug can make you into a mass murderer. Stop taking the drug, like #144623 above did.
The reality is that there are evidence-based alternatives to the treatment of depression for all sorts of mood disorders, namely by nutritional means. See for instance Alternative Mental Health articles.
The trouble is that these treatment models using nutritional biochemistry cannot be monopolized by professionals (drugs are patented, nutrient cannot be patented), hence undermining the mental health industry's financial basis. People with experience in psycho-nutritioinal therapy are banned to practice their craft in any public service, for not having the "qualifications" to practice nutritional psychotherapy.
You cannot re-eduacte psychiatrists out of their lucrative jobs and this goes as well for psychologists, who frankly have little comprehension how to treat mental illness at all. They hang on to the ingrained meaning of "mental Illness" as an illness of the mind, instead of the body. They remain ignorant about the biochemical aspects of mood disorders and contribute their portion in the 60% failure rate in treatment.
You may only expect reform in the mental health industry to come from bottom up. When patients themselves start to understand through education and research about the nutritional aspects of mental illness, can we hope to bring about a sea-change. The problem is that it is not always easy to obtain the latest articles on nutritional medicine when articles from experts such as Orthomolecular Medicine are banned and not published in the usually medical web sites, and even ignored.
However, the problem in public education is that many so-called self-help web sites for mental illness do not allow the exposition of alternate treatment approaches to their readers. The only exception being this very web site to my knowledge. The monitors of some of these self-help web sites do not brook any competition from scientific or theoretical approaches that is outside the concept of mental illness being defined as an illness of the mind, and not of the body. This means that outdated concepts in treatment are perpetuated by most of these web sites.
I have been banned from "Beyond Blue" "PTSD Org", and even "Yahoo Mental Health" web site, for referring readers to various educational articles about nutritional treatment of mood disorders on the ground of that I am presumably "scamming" or breaking the rules of "advertising" or "self-promotion". It is easy to call writing free educational articles as "advertising" or "scamming". And this without an opportunity to defend myself. It is not easy to spread knowledge without referring people to lengthy evidence-based articles. Also, much of the criticism against nutritional medicine shows a lack of the rules of scientific method by the critics as explained here.
This ignorance is not helped along by the bias against orthomolecular medicine by Wikipedia the so-called people's encyclopedia.
Thus despite the flooding of new information about alternative treatments for mood disorders, most people with these illnesses are caught up in a net of misinformation and censorship. In fact, most of these so-called self-help web sites are geared to steer people into the very mental health industry, that leave victims with "treatment resistant depression".