Grief is not a disorder. It is not an illness, and it does not need to be treated with pharmaceuticals. But modern medicine, obsessed with numbing every human experience that feels uncomfortable, has convinced people that deep sorrow must be fixed. So, they prescribe antidepressants to grieving people, sedating them, dulling their pain, and ultimately keeping them stuck in a cycle where they never fully process their loss.
Antidepressants do not heal grief. They mute it. They do not remove pain, they suppress it—temporarily. The problem? Suppressed emotions do not go away; they fester beneath the surface, waiting for the moment when they will explode back into consciousness. The grief that gets numbed today is the grief that will resurface later, often in a much more destructive way.
Antidepressants, particularly SSRIs, are known to cause “emotional blunting.” Studies have shown that people on these medications experience a significant reduction in their ability to feel both positive and negative emotions. This might sound like relief in the short term, but it’s actually a trap.
Grief must be processed. It cannot be bypassed, avoided, or chemically subdued without consequences. The brain needs to adjust to the reality of loss, and that adjustment comes through experiencing the pain, not suppressing it. Antidepressants interfere with this process, preventing the brain from making necessary emotional connections, ultimately prolonging the suffering.
One of the biggest problems with prescribing antidepressants for grief is the fact that grief is not depression. While they may share some surface similarities, they are fundamentally different.
Despite these clear differences, modern psychiatry has blurred the lines between normal human emotions and clinical disorders. The removal of the bereavement exclusion from the DSM-5 means that a grieving person can now be diagnosed with depression and prescribed medication simply for feeling the completely natural pain of loss (source).
It might seem like taking an antidepressant would make grief easier, but it actually does the opposite. Instead of allowing a person to fully process their emotions, it dulls them. This delays healing, leaving the person stuck in a state of unresolved sorrow that can stretch on for years (source).
Suppressing emotions does not make them disappear—it makes them accumulate. Eventually, those unprocessed feelings will demand attention, manifesting in anxiety, anger, physical illness, or a deeper, more prolonged depression (source).
Before diving into why antidepressants are counterproductive in grief, it’s important to understand where these drugs actually came from. The first antidepressants weren’t developed to treat depression at all—they were discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists were testing tuberculosis drugs. These drugs, known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), were found to cause some patients to become unusually energetic and euphoric. Seeing an opportunity, pharmaceutical companies repackaged them as treatments for “depressive disorders” despite limited understanding of how they actually worked.
Another class of early antidepressants, tricyclics, were derived from antihistamines. But the real game-changer was the rise of SSRIs like Prozac in the 1980s. Here’s where things get dark: modern antidepressants evolved from chemicals used in industrial applications—one early compound used to develop these drugs was originally tested as rocket fuel. That’s right—rocket fuel. Pharmaceutical companies took a chemical designed for combustion and, through some biochemical tweaking, repurposed it as a psychiatric drug. If that doesn’t make you question what you’re putting in your body, I don’t know what will.
The mental health industry operates on a simple but highly profitable premise: convince people they are broken, tell them there is no cure, and sell them a pill that they have to take for the rest of their lives. That’s how they keep customers hooked.
Instead, people are told that they have a “chronic mental illness” and that the only options are medication and therapy—both of which keep them dependent on the system. The idea that depression can be cured is treated like a conspiracy theory, while pharmaceutical companies rake in billions every year selling drugs that don’t actually fix the problem (source).
Grief is hard. It hurts. But it is not a mental disorder. It does not need to be numbed, avoided, or erased. It needs to be felt so that it can be released. Antidepressants don’t heal grief; they pause it, trapping people in emotional limbo.
Depression is not a chemical imbalance, serotonin is mostly made in the gut, and the mental health industry thrives on keeping people dependent. The truth is, there are ways to heal that don’t involve a lifetime prescription. The only way out of grief and depression is through them. No shortcuts. No pills. Just doing the work to process, heal, and rebuild.
