Watch any psychiatric drug TV commercial and try to follow the rapid-fire list of alarming side effects. It’s impossible. Yet psychiatrists continue to rely on false and misleading claims to promote these drugs.

One example is the once-heralded “chemical imbalance theory,” a 1965 masterpiece of psychiatric pseudoscience that claimed people with mental disorders were suffering from an “imbalance of chemicals” in the brain that psychiatric drugs could correct.

Nearly six decades later, this “theory” was exposed as an invention promoted by psychiatrists and drug companies. Instead of denying the fraud, psychiatrists admitted they knew the theory was false all along. For years they used this charade to put and keep patients on dangerous psychiatric drugs.

The truth is that no one actually knows how psychiatric drugs act upon the body. Psychiatric drug package inserts regularly state that their “mechanism of action” is unknown. To make matters worse, large published and unpublished studies on psychiatric drugs have found that these drugs don’t even work. But that doesn’t stop psychiatrists from prescribing them in over four out of five office visits.