Danny Jones

And that was where I first started to see the darkness of being a drug rep.

um i literally got call sheets that told me who the biggest prescribers were in a geographic region i knew every drug that doctor prescribed the week before the pharmaceutical companies have all of this and my manager would say you go find that person and you become their best friend and you find a way to grow the patient population we need to sell more antidepressants this is just how it worked

And as soon as I was in that job, I didn't even make it a year.

I started looking to get out.

I just couldn't do it.

And I'm sitting there, I remember the epiphany clear as day.

I was sitting in a training with a psychologist who was educating, or psychiatrist who was educating us on the prescription.

And we're going over placebo versus at the time it was Prozac.

And it was like a 3% difference in efficacy.

placebo was almost as efficacious as the antidepressant wow and i remember asking why is placebo so close so now jump forward 30 years later since antidepressants hit the market

Rates of depression are at an all-time high.

Rates of suicide are at an all-time high.

Deaths of despair at an all-time high.

Everything across the board, mental health-wise in America, is the worst it's ever been.

When we launched antidepressants 30 years ago, they said we are going to end depression.

We are going to stop depression.

Oh, a huge amount of Americans.

They've continued with the trajectory and it's an ecosystem that's built in.

And the dirty secret is, we were sold on that depression is a serotonin issue.

You don't have enough serotonin in the brain.