

“Chemical Imbalance” and “Major Depressive Disorder”: Pure Orwellian 1984 Newspeak
By Robert Carter/October 17, 2024
“…but if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, wrote those words in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Although his essay was a post-WWII warning about the manipulative use of language for political purposes, his analysis of the deterioration of a person’s ability to think clearly when using language that has been purposefully corrupted is pertinent to Big Pharma’s marketing of psychiatric medication.
Orwell argued that the deceitful use of language that is then placed into public use easily leads the public to accept ideas without examining them. If language has been corrupted by distorting the meaning of words, a new false vocabulary tends to prevent the public from thinking clearly enough to be able to reject the false terms in it.
Consequently, the purveyors of corrupted language can easily become the “authority.” The insider knowledge they claim through their distorted vocabulary — because it’s a false representation of reality — inhibits public access to actuality.
Corrupt and deceitful terms not only distort the language. They also distort the truth.
This insidious corruption of public thought is all the more dangerous because it is so subtle. In his novel 1984 Orwell called this technique of governmental brainwashing “Newspeak.”
It is the marketing tool used by Big Pharma and psychiatry today.
Take the term “chemical imbalance.” It has so fully entered the public consciousness – despite no laboratory test ever having given any proof that such a thing exists – that millions of Americans now freely ingest antidepressants based on this bogus theory that there’s a bodily chemical imbalance that can somehow be re-balanced by taking a psychotropic drug.
The American government doles out millions of dollars in funding for mental health initiatives based on the groundless idea of “chemical impbalance.” Last month alone, the Biden Administration gave grants of $68.5 million for behavioral health education, training and community programs, based on their acceptance of “chemical imbalance” as the cause of an already bogus psychiatric diagnosis for disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).
Major Depressive Disorder is one more corruption of language by psychiatry which bends its definition away from truth, and that term has now become a popularized psychiatric buzz word. By labeling someone with MDD, antidepressants can then be prescribed…antidepressants that are dangerous enough to warrant the most severe of FDA black box warnings.
Like many other “disorders,” MDD was adopted by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in their 1980 edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That “diagnosis” – which, when called that, is made to sound like a valid medical term, but it is not — is only based on individual’s own reported experiences, and their behavior as reported by relatives or friends, along with a list of manifested symptoms. There is no laboratory test for this “disorder.”
However, Big Pharma was able to reap $18.5 billion in antidepressant sales in 2023 because of this manipulation of language that has convinced people that antidepressants are unequivocally good for them…even though 54.7 percent of Xanax users have attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts.
Both of these terms – chemical imbalance and major mental disorder — have entered the public vocabulary courtesy of the $1 billion per month marketing expenditures of Big Pharma in America alone (2022 figure). These two misleading terms – as well as many others from the DSM – have corrupted the public’s ability to think clearly about mental illness. And therefore about the truth.
That’s a form of brainwashing.
This corruption of language has unfortunately prevented too many public from seeing that this Big Pharma emperor has no clothes on.