The Butterfly Effect

Or, How Antidepressants Are Making Heaven Empty

You are not enjoying life as a caterpillar. Something, some still small voice inside you, keeps pestering you. It tells you life is not complete, you are missing out on something glorious. It urges you to do something really, well, weird: for some reason, it wants you to hang upside down, roll yourself up into a kind of ball, and see what develops. The word ‘chrysalis’ floats through your mind, though you don’t know what it means. All you know is there’s something amiss, something wrong.

Thankfully, you have a great support system. You go to your school counselor, confide your fears. He sets up a meeting with your parents, who take his advice and send you to the doctor. The doctor, his office covered in diplomas from all the most renowned insect ivy league medical schools, nods sympathetically as you tell your woeful tale. An easy fix, he informs you, nothing to worry about. I see it all the time. Here, start taking one of these pills every day, and your problem will go away.

Within a matter of weeks, the truth is clear: you’ve been cured! The pills work, they really do. You no longer feel like anything is missing; you’re happy with your life as a caterpillar. Ok, perhaps you’re not happy – no, not quite. But at least that still small voice is finally gone…

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, the co-director of Duke’s Center for the Philosophy of Biology, and winner of countless awards for his contributions to the study of the philosophy of science. He is also the author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. In that book, he explains, in all seriousness, and with the authoritative weight of all his philosophical honors, that there is no such thing as meaning, morality, truth, free will, or even thought itself. We are, each of us, nothing but clumps of matter in the universe, nothing we think or feel is real, and nothing, absolutely nothing, matters at all.

This might not strike you as the most cheerful way to approach your day. How, then, can one live in such a world? This is the esteemed Professor Rosenberg’s advice, and, to borrow a line from Dave Barry, I swear I’m not making this up:

So, what should we scientistic folks do when overcome by Weltschmerz (world-weariness)? Take two of whatever neuro-pharmacology prescribes. If you don’t feel better in the morning … or three weeks from now, switch to another one. Three weeks is often how long it takes serotonin reuptake suppression drugs like Prozac, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, or Luvox to kick in. And if one doesn’t work, another one probably will.

I’m not here to pile on Professor Rosenberg – sounds like he’s got enough problems, poor guy. And I do appreciate his honesty – he harbors no illusions about the inescapable meaninglessness of life without God. But I would like to ask you to think, and think deeply (no offense, Professor!), about the implications of his solution.

To cope with the spiritual emptiness of life, the lack of truth and meaning and love and faith, he explains, simply take some SSRIs. No God? No worries! Here, have some Prozac.

Using antidepressants to take the edge off of bleak materialist nothingness may work well for the professor and his atheist audience, but, and here’s my crucial point, there’s no reason to believe the logic of SSRIs only works in one direction.

Let us take it as written that Prozac and co. numb your soul to the point you don’t care about living a life without truth, love, or meaning. For atheists, you see why this comes as a miracle cure (miracles have nothing to do with it! you can hear them object already). But what about those of us who are not committed unbelievers? Most people come to faith after a profound crisis of meaning, after hearing the still small voice of the Lord, after noticing that yes, they do care about truth and love, about the deeper things of life. Well, per the professor’s brutally honest assessment, if such people are on antidepressants, life remains blissfully superficial. Kiss goodbye to the dark night of the soul – thanks to SSRIs, you’ll have a good night’s sleep and feel better in the morning! Instead of recognizing your Weltschmerz, your world-weariness, as an all-important clue that you were indeed made for something beyond this world… you will, thanks to the miracle of modern psychopharmacology, experience no world-weariness at all. In short, Prozac is the pill that makes atheists of us all.

“Lord,” wrote Augustine, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Well, what happens when there’s a pill to numb the symptoms of cardiac restlessness? If such a medical ‘advance’ were possible, we’d see awful things – a retreat of faith from the public square, a growing secularization of our culture, even something unheard of in American public life – open hostility to God from the major power centers of our culture, even from one of the dominant political parties of our time. To borrow a phrase, we’d see a marked transition, when it comes to faith, from positive world to Negative World. In other words, we’d see, well, everything we’ve been seeing the past few decades since SSRI use became widespread. Yes, I know, correlation does not equal causation, but can you blame me for wondering, considering that we have something like a quarter of our population on psychiatric meds, and when the literal majority of young liberal women are mentally ill?

Many of us, myself included, are accustomed to viewing the mass drugging of teens and young adults as a symptom of our society’s loss of faith. Absent God, teens have nowhere to go to numb those restless hearts, so they follow Professor Rosenberg’s example and cycle through SSRIs until they find the right fit. But what if Prozac is not the symptom: what if it is the cause? What if we have been growing increasingly faithless because my medical colleagues hand out SSRIs like candy on Halloween?

Dr. McFillin has been doing the Lord’s work alerting America to the many dangers of SSRIs. Please don’t miss his latest expose on the American medical establishment’s deliberate cover-up of European warnings about the lifelong developmental dangers posed to children placed on Prozac:

Prozac Has Been Known to Cause Permanent Developmental Damage in Children (Suppressed Documents)

Yet, as awful as these side effects are, I believe Dr. McFillin would agree with me that the greatest danger posed by such factory-produced neurochemicals is not the harms they cause, but the joys they prevent. That is to say, even when SSRIs “succeed” – when they do exactly what they’re advertised to do, and not a single unwanted ‘side effect’ pops up – they guarantee only the atheist’s paradise of life lived on the surface, without deep sorrow and without deep joy.

Imagine, in short, spending your whole life as a caterpillar – and not even realizing that you ought to be soaring in the heavens.

Parents, beware. SSRIs might be the cure for the atheist’s blues, but if you want your child to believe in love, in truth, in meaning, in thought itself – if you want her to have any chance of escaping the bleak world-weariness of this life – don’t let her follow in Professor Rosenberg’s pharmacological footsteps. Don’t let your children fall prey to Prozac’s false hopes – let their hearts remain restless, as they should be, until they are found by the One whose sacred heart bled to save us all.