medications A–Z

37 medications — each page carries the FDA approval journey with label quotes, safety signals with the caveats above the numbers, and who pays for prescriptions (Medicare, Medicaid, and the commercial absence).

supplements & unapproved substances

17 substances people buy without a prescription. Each page leads with the verbatim regulatory paragraph (sold under DSHEA, never reviewed for effectiveness, dose in the capsule unverified, approved for nothing), then the studies, then the risks, then what the research does not cover. Where the honest finding is futility rather than danger, the page says so.

5-HTP — What the trials show, and the serotonergic interactions that make it a pharmacist question
Ashwagandha — The anxiety and stress trials, and the liver-injury reports
Cannabidiol (CBD) — The anxiety evidence, the dose gap, and the liver signal
Cannabis and THC — What the controlled evidence shows, separated from the policy argument
Creatine — The depression syntheses, and why a raised creatinine reading is not kidney damage
Kratom — Opioid pharmacology, dependence, and what the human evidence actually is
L-Theanine — Nine small trials, none in a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and one null pooled estimate
Magnesium — What the trials measured, and what deficiency correction does and does not tell you
Melatonin — The sleep evidence, and how much melatonin is actually in the bottle
Methylene Blue — An MAO-A inhibitor sold as a nootropic, and the serotonin-syndrome record
Microdosing — Where placebo control is enforced, most of the benefit disappears
N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) — The psychiatric trials, by condition, and where the pooled estimates land
Omega-3 — The depression meta-analyses, the EPA/DHA split, and the heterogeneity problem
Phenibut — Dependence and withdrawal, from the case record
SAMe — The depression trials, and the mania and interaction signals
St John’s Wort — The depression trials, and the interaction list that makes it dangerous with other drugs
Valerian — A good safety record and an unconvincing efficacy record

Compared, side by side

33 head-to-head pages for the pairs people actually search — comparing the public record only (usage, payers, warnings, litigation), never ranking.

legal & safety records

The litigation and recall record per drug, stated precisely: settled is never adjudicated, verdicts carry their reductions, and verified negatives state their coverage window.

the system, counted

How the headline numbers of mental health are actually produced — prevalence, trial durations, diagnosis counts — with every method break annotated.

What medical errors add up to — The cardiology-conference study (17.5% vs 24.8% mortality for the sickest heart-failure patients), the 44,000-to-98,000 and 251,454 death counts with the critique that called the latter very likely wrong, 23.6% of admissions with an adverse event, 1.5 million preventable adverse drug events, and what to ask
How many adults take psychiatric medication? — Every federal number with its definition attached
More treatment, same suicide rate — The CDC suicide rate from 1900 to 2023 beside treatment use, each on its own axis, and what the journals say
Private equity in mental health care — Acquisitions from 32 facilities in 2010 to 1,330 in 2021; fewer nurses and fuller beds in PE psychiatric hospitals, shorter treatment in acquired addiction clinics, wider insurance acceptance; the Senate youth residential report and the $117M admissions settlement
Lithium and the promoted brands — The cheap salt with the best hospital record, its fall from 30.4% to 17.6% of bipolar visits, Medicare’s $91 vs $9,662 per person, $0 in industry payments vs $19.7M for one brand, the dinners study, and the kidney and suicide-trial evidence the other way
Antipsychotics in nursing homes — The 2005 warning, 88% of 2007 claims for dementia, three dementia-promotion settlements, the CMS measure that cut use to 14.1%, and the schizophrenia diagnoses that hid residents from it
How psychiatric drug marketing feeds itself — The loop from short trial to speaker fee to prescription, what the best-paid psychiatrists prescribe, and what nobody measures long term
Does psychiatric medication keep you out of hospital, or put you there? — Readmission rates, the register studies, the dose reduction trial, the measured risks of starting an antidepressant, and what nobody has studied
What the best-paid psychiatrists publish about the drugs that pay them — 129 papers matched to four years of federal payment records and read one by one: 93 favorable, none concluding the drug does not work. Every paper listed.
Drug company payments to psychiatrists near you — enter a ZIP code and read the 2024 federal payment records for the psychiatrists in that area: who paid, how much, and for which products
Do genetic tests for psychiatric medication work? — GeneSight, Genomind and the rest: five randomised trials by their primary outcome, what the guideline bodies and the FDA say, and the one genetic test in psychiatry that everyone backs
Staying on your antidepressant: what the column got right, and what it left out — A Men’s Health column checked claim by claim: the trial that backs staying on, the two withdrawal reviews that disagree, the guideline, and the author’s payment record
How the drug was found — The discovery story behind every medication on the site, graded documented, legend or no source: the accidents that started each class, and the designed drugs that followed
The book series — Sixteen widely read mental-health books, from Mania and Unshrunk to Dopamine Nation and Bad Therapy, each central claim checked against the record in both directions, with the author’s own incentives
How many Americans have a mental illness? — SAMHSA’s survey count by age, 2021 to 2025, beside AHRQ’s hospital stays, cost and length of stay
How autism got counted — Every method break annotated in CDC’s own words
How childhood ADHD got counted
How long psychiatric drugs were tested — Every study horizon in the library, counted
The longest trial behind each approval — Trial weeks beside patient counts, drug by drug
LGBTQ+ mental health in the data
How homosexuality left the DSM — Westphal 1869 to the 1973 vote and the 1974 referendum: Kinsey’s 37 and 4 percent, Hooker’s 30 men, the replacement diagnoses that lasted until 1987, and the sampling problems and politics left in
How transgender left the mental-disorders chapter — Hirschfeld 1910, the 1949 magazine article that coined “transsexual,” DSM-III to DSM-5, and the WHO’s 2019 move of gender incongruence into the sexual-health chapter, beside the Swedish registry findings that cut the other way
Who was Thomas Szasz? — What he actually argued, from the scans: the 1960 sentence nobody quotes (“they are real enough”), “myth” in 1960 and “metaphor” only from 1973, abolition of commitment and the insanity plea, the private practice he ran for decades, the 1969 Scientology collaboration stated plainly, his own admission that the claim is not falsifiable, and what O’Connor, Addington and 50 state hold laws actually require
The DSM: the book, the money, the count
What the DSM is for
Did psychiatry work backwards from its drugs? — The dopamine and serotonin theories were fitted to drug effects; five decades of antipsychotics share one mechanism; the imaging and genetic findings that cut the other way
The mental health lexicon — Twenty terms where usage outran evidence
Two numbers nobody measured — Two statistics about psychiatric medication and violence, traced to their sources
Psychiatric drugs for children on Medicaid — The three measures every state reports about children and psychiatric medication — first-line psychosocial care, the metabolic blood tests, the 30-day ADHD follow-up — with Minnesota’s own rows, why hydroxyzine is not a benzodiazepine, where FDA approval for young children exists, and four questions to take to an appointment

follow the money

Who funds the research, the education, the advocacy, and the coverage — from federal filings and the organizations’ own disclosures. Payments are facts, not verdicts; the framing travels with every number.

What the fraud settlements add up to — Ten DOJ resolutions that named a psychiatric drug, about $12.6 billion, eight guilty pleas, on one table
How your doctor gets paid — Look up any US physician’s industry payments
Who funds psychiatric drug research
Who funds doctors’ education
Who funds mental health advocacy
Who funds the nonprofits
Pharma and the news
How pharma makes and spends money — Revenue, R&D, SG&A and psychiatric drug sales, from the 10-Ks
Who pays for the FDA? — Appropriations vs user fees, the 73%-fee-funded drug center, and the drug industry’s third of the agency, from the FY2026 operating plan
Who funds the APA, the AMA, SAMHSA and NIMH? — The psychiatric APA’s IRS return, the psychological APA’s audit, the AMA’s CPT royalties and the HIPAA rule behind them, Open Payments, and the 2026 SAMHSA and NIMH appropriations
What is a PBM? — The middlemen between your prescription and its price
Who profits from US health care — Six sectors, ten years, 28 named SEC filers — margins and growth against CPI
Where the money goes — US health spending, prices and named-basket profits as time series, 1960 to today
What changed — A dated record of FDA label revisions to the medications we cover, checked daily
Who funds veisund — The question we ask of everyone else, answered about ourselves

health questions, answered from primaries

The questions people actually search, answered from trials, labels, and regulators — including the ones where the honest answer is “the evidence is thin.”

Antidepressants in pregnancy: what the brain scans show — Six imaging studies 2016 to 2026 on one table, the 2026 fetal-MRI finding with its own caveats, and the meta-analysis where fathers’ prescriptions predicted the same outcomes
How to find the right therapist — The therapist is about 5% of outcome but recovery rates ran 23.5% to 95.6% across 119 therapists; degree and experience barely predict it; the one randomized matching trial used therapists’ measured track records, which no consumer quiz has; six steps and a switch rule
How long should therapy take? — 4 to 26 sessions in routine care, 95% of responders by session 14, frequency beats length, the contested long-term case, and six sourced questions to ask before session one
Does ERP work for OCD? — Exposure and response prevention cut Y-BOCS by 14.5 points vs placebo against 4.7 for clomipramine and 3.5 for SSRIs in a 54-trial network; 62% vs 42% vs 70% vs 8% in the head-to-head; 80% of therapy trials allowed antidepressants; a quarter of adults have had obsessions, 2.3% have had OCD
When an antidepressant stops working — Tachyphylaxis in 9 to 57% across trials and 25% of 171 maintenance periods in a 20-year cohort; each prior course cut the odds of responding to the next by a fifth; the seven candidate causes, the four strategies with limited evidence, and what to ask a prescriber
Antidepressants and emotional blunting — 46% of 669 treated patients reported blunting, no difference by drug, tracks depression score (r 0.52) yet exceeds recovered controls; escitalopram lowered reinforcement sensitivity in 66 healthy volunteers; 38% called the numbness positive
What works that costs nothing — Eight formulas from the Lancet, BMJ and JAMA Psychiatry anyone can start this week: the dose, the trial, the size, the catch
Does changing what you eat treat depression? — SMILES, AMMEND and HELFIMED beside the 16-trial meta-analysis (g 0.16), PREDIMED’s not-significant primary result and the 1,025-person MooDFOOD null
The 1991 hearing and the thirteen-year warning — What the FDA committee had in hand in 1991, why the 2004 box came from trials that did not exist yet, the 2007 age gradient, and the four claims from the post checked against the record
Who warned about antidepressants in pregnancy — FDA and MHRA notices in order, the numbers inside them, and the 2011 walk-back; unread agencies listed as unverified
The overdose the prescription was part of — Benzodiazepine plus opioid death records, the 2016 boxed warning, polypharmacy risk, and the two findings that cut the other way
Do any supplements actually work?
Does ashwagandha work for anxiety?
Does trazodone work for sleep? — Approved for depression, prescribed for sleep: the trials, the Cochrane review and the sleep guideline
Does hydroxyzine work for anxiety? — The Cochrane review, the two largest trials, and the heart-rhythm warning with its dose limits
Does CBD help anxiety?
St John’s wort: the interaction list
Is kratom dangerous?
SSRI sexual side effects — 25.8% to 80.3% when someone asks, the Cochrane options, the 2019 EMA warning, and post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) by name
Ketamine vs esketamine: FDA status
Psychedelic therapy: the FDA status table
AI mental health tools: FDA status
What each medication is approved FOR
Postpartum depression: the evidence
Depression & anxiety in pregnancy
Depression and trauma after miscarriage
Does infertility cause depression?
Sex, fertility, and mental health
Male loneliness: what actually moves it
AI vs human support

glossary

34 plain-English definitions — the vocabulary needed to read medication evidence and litigation coverage precisely, each with a worked example from this site’s own record.

tools

Interactive, free, and no email required.

How your doctor gets paid — Open Payments lookup with company pivots
How long were they tested before approval? — The pivotal trials behind all 37 medications — weeks, people, comparator, NDA
Side-effect rates, drug vs placebo — The label’s own adverse-reaction table for all 37 medications
Therapy cost calculator — Per month and per year — in-person, online, insurance, sliding scale
Sliding-scale checker — Household size and income against the 2026 federal poverty guidelines
What do you actually need? — Six questions, no email
Minnesota, city by city — Crisis links, the state health department’s own numbers, ZIP-area prescribing and the payment lookup pre-filled, for 42 Minnesota cities
Children on Medicaid, state by state — All 51 states ranked on the three measures every state reports about children and psychiatric medication — psychosocial care before a new antipsychotic, the two metabolic blood tests, the 30-day ADHD follow-up — with a page per state carrying its own rates, denominators, rank and four questions written from them

the evidence library

Every study behind the pages above, individually summarized and scored for trust — design, funding, venue, sample size, preregistration.

Browse the scored evidence library → — or start from the blog and our experts.

The library