Allow Faisal a moment for a special lecture on the history of SSRIs, which are in essence the largest population-wide experiment in mind control and manipulation in history. There are many threads to this story and I will do my best to weave them in such a way that you, dear reader, will find them a persuasive tapestry on the interconnected workings of government bureaucracy (and funding agencies) and the consequent blockbuster products foisted upon the populace by large companies. Interestingly, it starts with Donald O. Hebb, a brilliant theorist who came from rather modest beginnings before joining the Yerkes lab in Yale and producing a landmark text of computational neuroscience, the Organization of Behavior (1949).
From Donald Hebb’s seminal text on computational neuroscience
Donald Hebb investigated the neurophysiological and anatomical experiments of Lorente de No and with the input of luminaries like Karl Lashley and Edward Boring, formulated what has in a shorthand manner referred to as Hebb’s law, which is a neuronal phenomenon summarized thus: if two neurons fire 🔥 together, they wire together.
Meaning if one neuron is connected weakly to another neuron and they will connect if activated in succession. If you think of the brain metaphorically as a large bundle of wires with information flowing through the wires and having to overcome electrical and neurochemical thresholds to trigger or maintain information, the connections of those wires are specialized proteins called synapses. The chemicals, for example amino acids or hormones act as keys that bind to the lock or receptor to open specific electrical channels to allow positive or negative ions into (or out of) a cell. If the receptor is attached to a channel specific to negative or anions, such as chloride (Cl-), then that receptor is inhibitory. If the receptor is attached to a channel that allows positive ions such as sodium (Na+), then that receptor is excitatory. At the time of Hebb’s writing (1949) little was known about neurotransmitter content, and yet Hebb’s formulation is still relevant today.
Shortly after publishing The Organization of Behavior, Hebb began to investigate sensory deprivation, and received a grant from the Canadian Defense Research Board in part to test whether sensory deprivation would be a possible interrogation technique. In a symposium in 1958 Hebb himself admitted that:
The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing…. The chief impetus, of course, was the dismay at the kind of “confessions” being produced at the Russian Communist trials. “Brainwashing” was a term that came a little later, applied to Chinese procedures. We did not know what the Russian procedures were, but it seemed that they were producing some peculiar changes of attitude. How? One possible factor was perceptual isolation and we concentrated on that.
Here reader I must caution you by saying that there is not some grand conspiracy afoot here. In fact, quite the opposite, which is in a sense worse.Too much is made of CIA intervention in this or that country. But, MKUltra was an actual CIA program designed to investigate mind control drugs to elicit confessions from spies. In one instance pentobarbital was administered IV in one arm and amphetamines were administered in the other arm resulting in the subject babbling out of sleep. Hebb was never funded by the CIA but Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scottish American scientist, did continue sensory deprivation research in Montreal, as well as further experimentation with LSD, electroconvulsive shock therapy, and induced comas. Dr. Cameron’s original intent was to cure schizophrenics, and these rather extreme techniques were attempts to render a damaged subject emotionally labile, reducing the weights of the current wiring diagram so that he could literally reprogram them with his Psychic Driving techniques. These techniques consisted of hours of positive or negative statements (mantras) repeated on a tape loop.
Over time sensory deprivation evolved away from interrogation and onto “persuasion” (Hebb says brainwashing) and became a trendy practice to push on nouveau riche silicon valley tycoons and promoted heavily by the likes of Joe Rogan. Great recent example here.
On the history of Psychedelics and SSRIs
If we refer back to the wiring diagram analogy made earlier, I mentioned only positive and negative ions flowing into and out of neurons. Well with neuromodulators like serotonin (and dopamine and norepinephrine, all monoamines) you induce changes that affect machinery in the cell, producing long-term excitability or producing more or fewer types of synapses, depending on the machinery behind a receptor type.
LSD was 1st synthesized by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, but it wasn’t until 1943 when Hofmann accidently ingested it did he realize the consciousness shifting potential of the drug, later he intentionally dosed himself on “Bicycle Day”
The CIA and particularly Sidney Gottlieb was interested in using LSD as a potential method to extract confessions, and later simply manipulated behavior of potential targets. Notice the pattern here? Here is an excerpt from Gottlieb’s obituary in the New York Times:
Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. in 1951, although not before telling Mr. Gittinger, his interviewer, that he had been a socialist in his youth.
Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. As chief of the agency’s technical services division, he served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A.’s darkest secrets.
The first of these were the LSD experiments. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug, and, a family friend said, he took it hundreds of times.
One intriguing aspect of LSD is that it’s effects are long lasting, because it binds to serotonin receptors with very high affinity to the 5-HT receptor and the receptor envelops the molecule with a lid-like structure holding it for hours.
CIA agents would dose each other, it became a work hazard. In addition, sex workers and their johns would be dosed along with prisoners and heroin addicts who “could not fight back”. One of the voluntary subjects of MK Ultra was Ken Kesey.
The 5HT 2A receptors are located with very high concentration in the prefrontal and sensory cortex. Specifically, these receptors are located on the cell bodies of layer V pyramidal neurons, which are the output projections of cortical regions. The hallucinatory effects of LSD may be attributed the long & potent binding in somatosensory neurons causing a kind of “cross wiring” between senses. In a review of the literature in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, Berit Brogaard provides a wealth of evidence that hyperactivity of the serotonergic systems, resulting in an excess of serotonergic in the extracellular spaces throughout the brain. This produces either a transient or in some cases persistent synesthesia, the most common type being able to “hear colors”.
The delusional, and psychotic breaks seen in subjects dosed with LSD is likely attributed to the prefrontal distribution of the receptors. Eventually even the CIA backed off on dosing its agents particularly after a few high profile suicides by agents such as Frank Olson.
In parallel with the MKUltra project, three scientists in Eli Lilly were working on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Unlike LSD, Selective Serotonin Reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) block the reuptake of naturally occuring 5-HT or serotonin. First synthesized by Eli Lilly in 1972, Prozac (fluoxetine) was the first product of rational drug design, meaning that a specific receptor was targeted before applying to animal trials.
The Presidential push behind SSRIs
George HW Bush had been chairman of the Republican National Committee and a DC insider long before Gerald Ford asked him to be director of Central Intelligence in 1976. The MK Ultra files and documentation of the CIAs other illicit activities had been made public and the elder Bush had the task of improving morale within the agency. Once Jimmy Carter became president, Bush left the CIA, and immediately served on the board of directors of Eli Lilly from 1977–1979. In 1982, as Vice President, Bush attempted to block the revision of a tax rule that allowed drug companies to manufacture in Puerto Rico and avoid taxes. At the time he joined the Reagan administration, Bush had over $150k in Eli stocks and his lead counsel was a lobbyist for Eli Lilly.
With a business friendly administration, and close partner in the White House, Phase II and Phase III trials of serotonin reuptake inhibitors began in earnest and in 1987 Prozac was approved by the FDA for the treatment of depression and heralded as a wonder drug from the outset. With the election of the elder Bush another key link to government was the rapid ascendence of Dan Quayle to the Vice Presidency, whose father had a considerable amount of stock in Eli Lilly.
Thirty years after the approval of Prozac, the evidence is surprisingly mixed on it’s effectiveness. For example, a meta-analysis of clinical trials on four major SSRIs show that only the most severely depressed patients show any improvement over placebo. Yet at the same time Prozac alone is the sixth most prescribed drug in the US at 24.5 million annual prescriptions. A wonderful essay on the topic I recommend reading is from Scientific American entitled “Are anti-depressants just placebos with side effects?”
School shootings & spree killings, an Hypothesis
What is particularly intriguing is how Hebb’s rule changes with respect to neuromodulators such a as SSRIs. The excess serotonin produced by SSRIs binds to G-coupled protein receptors which produces phosphorylation events and protein synthesis to form new receptors. Thus, serotonin (5HT) facilitates the connections made between neurons, and because 5HT targets are rich in the prefrontal cortex, perceptions of self and beliefs are rendered labile, flexible. The warnings or teachings by your parents drilled into your head become malleable and readily reprogrammed by new stimuli and messages.
The SSRIs also have the key characteristic of reducing postsynaptic receptor sites for 5HT and interestingly this flood of 5HT can then be transported into dopamine neurons, where it is repackaged & co-released w dopamine. Consider then what drives Dopamine neurons. Dopamine neurons are particularly triggered by unconditioned stimuli , the aroma of a fine cooked meal, but also specifically by conditioned stimuli associated with and predict unconditioned stimuli. With enough conditioning acquiring loot crates will drive dopaminergic activity.
Serotonin is tied to circadian rhythms and is optimally produced under sunlight with a diet of wild game. Consider that now we have on a global scale designed brains that release 5HT with Dopamine during acquisition of conditioned and violent stimuli. This is a cocktail for reality bending brainwashing. And with the exception of Parkland, every mass shooter, often along with his manifesto, is highlighted in the news media, a kind of mass Psychic Driving. It is a testament to the flexibility of the human brain that mindless androids are not continually shooting up schools at this point.
The side effects of SSRIs have largely been minimized or nondisclosed,but a black box warning was issued for adolescents in 2004 after suicidal ideation in adolescents was shown to spike while on SSRIs. Another recent study again shows that SSRIs are essentially placebos with potentially harmful side effects. In fact, in some users of SSRIs may have erectile dysfunction and minimal sex drive as a result.
Finally for further reading look at SSRI Stories which organizes news stories by prescription and event. This is a chicken and egg problem, people with mental health issues are prescribed SSRIs as a first line of defense and as such we can’t exactly parse a cause. But a good epidemiologist might recommend curtailing the prescription of SSRIs and observing over the period of five years whether spree killings decrease on average. It would be a cool experiment.