Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson said Friday that antidepressants are too often prescribed to treat “normal human despair.”
“The twenties can be very hard. They’re not a mental illness,” Williamson told BuzzFeed News in an interview Friday. “Divorce can be very difficult, losing a loved one, someone that you know died, someone left in a relationship and you’re heartbroken — that’s very painful, but it’s not a mental illness.”
“You had a professional failure, you lost your job, you went bankrupt,” she continued. “Those things are very difficult, but they’re not a mental illness.”
Williamson, a self-help author, has previously weighed in on the topic of overprescribed antidepressants, tweeting in June 2018 that such medications are being prescribed “many times when people are simply SAD.”{mosads}
“The answer to depression is more scientific research only if you think of it simply in biomedical terms. The medicalization of depression is a creation of the medical industry,” she tweeted. “For millennia depression was seen as a spiritual disease, and for many of us it still is.”
Williamson also appeared to agree with a tweet claiming that antidepressants have played a role in some mass shootings, pointing to the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. The shooter in that case was prescribed anti-anxiety medication.
The long-shot presidential candidate told BuzzFeed News that it was fair for her to weigh in on the issue of antidepressants, saying, “I very much stay in my lane.”
“I would say when doctors are coming in to talk about situational despair, that they’re getting in my lane. I’ve never weighed in on issues like bipolar, schizophrenia, anything like that,” she said.
“That’s not my lane, I’ve never weighed in, and clearly there are medical conditions for which psychotherapeutic drugs have been and continue to be very helpful in people’s lives, and I think that’s true with clinical depression as well.”