This month President Biden signed the bill to ease access for mental health treatments to 175 million Americans with private health insurance. This addendum to the Mental Health Parity Act will make it easier for those people to bill their insurance for mental health help, but it will also significantly increase the flow of dollars into Big Pharma’s antidepressant manufacturers.

     Biden announced this Big Pharma windfall by stating that it ensures that “mental health coverage will be covered at the same level as other health care for Americans. There is no reason that breaking your arm should be treated differently than having a mental health condition.”

     His parroting of the Big Pharma myth of the “chemical imbalance” theory of biological causes for mental disorders shows the extent to which Big Pharma’s mental health propaganda has penetrated American culture.

     That’s not surprising. Last year alone, 2023, Big Pharma spent almost $400 million lobbying congress to support pharmaceuticals and other health products.

     In fact, Biden himself is listed on opensectrets.org as the top benefactor ever of Big Pharma’s extravagant donations to congressmen. Biden has received over $9 million in donations from Big Pharma.

     In fact, one of the initial sponsors for the original Mental Health Parity Act in 1996, Senator Domenici, himself received over $150,000 in Big Pharma donations during his congressional career.

     It is true that mental health issues and substance abuse seem to be on the rise in America, and the passage of this bill will offer more help to those needing it in today’s stressful world. But is pharmaceutical “help” truly a benefit to those suffering if it is based on a debunked “chemical imbalance theory?

     Even the former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health is dubious of the value of this kind of mental health treatment.

     In 2017 he stated, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs — I think $20 billion — I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

     Joanna Moncrieff, a consulting psychiatrist at the North London National Health Service and Professor of Psychiatry at University College London, has said, “It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin. The popularity of the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants. Many people take antidepressants because they have been led to believe their depression has a biochemical cause, but this new research suggests this belief is not grounded in evidence.”

     “This belief,” however, is grounded in huge profits for Big Pharma, which has spent untold billions convincing the public and politicians of the validity of this bogus theory.