Forbes Magazine’s Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide
The title of the Forbes article made me laugh: “Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?”
A truly depressed person would never ask such a question. Of course it would help! Whether it would be a cure-all is another question, of course, but it would HAVE TO HELP, by definition. It would not necessarily help in the way that chart-bound scientists would like, in a way that could be “proven” reductively — but rather it would help by 1) giving the depressed reliable vacations from introspective gloom, and 2) by giving the depressed something to look forward to, which would make their non-drug-using time more endurable, if not enjoyable. This is all just basic psychological common sense, but it is common sense that reductive science has lost track of when it asks such naive questions as, “Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant depression?”
But laughter gave way to groans when I read the closing line of the Forbes article on nitrous oxide, in which Dr. Glatter opines:
“Like other substances in it’s (sic) class, there is an abuse potential, so benefits would also have to outweigh the harm.”
In other words, I’ll have to live until I’m 128 years old for science to finally allow me to use a treatment that common sense tells me (and all other true depressives like me) would be a godsend here and now, both thanks to its immediate effects and to the positive feelings that anticipation of use would generate.
This despite the fact that the FDA greenlights the psychiatric pill mill to which 1 in 4 American women are addicted for life. This despite the fact that a constitutional amendment allows for the unhindered use of alcohol that kills almost 100,000 Americans a year. This despite the fact that Americans still puff away freely on a drug that kills half a million of them every year. This despite the fact that Big Pharma advertises drugs on prime-time whose rare side effects even include death.
But as for folks like myself, we’ll just have to bide our time while the clueless reductionist researchers at the FDA try to figure out if laughing gas can help the depressed. Yes, what a real head scratcher — for materialist imbeciles, that is!
The above was Brian’s feedback on the article by Robert Glatter MD entitled ‘Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People With Treatment-Resistant Depression?’ from Forbes magazine, June 9, 2021.