The dirty secret is this: The pharmaceutical industry has turned depression and other psychiatric disorders (many only recently invented) into big business.

In fact, antidepressants are now the largest selling class of drugs in the world.

How did this happen? For one thing, the pharmaceutical industry promoted the idea that simply not feeling good all the time was a disease itself. That translates into tens of billions of dollars in profits.

It was a gold mine waiting to be excavated.

Using all of its resources — including advertising, sponsored psychiatric meetings, workshops, ghostwritten (fake) medical articles, and flooding doctors’ offices with pamphlets on the dangers of depression and newer “created mental illnesses” — pharmaceutical companies generated a demand for more psychotropic drugs.

Not surprisingly, the media played a major role with cover stories on the dangers of depression and anxiety, along with the good news that no one need be unhappy any longer.

In essence, they trivialized major depression, implying that anything less than constant elation was an illness.

But people were not told that all of these drugs have very serious complications, altering minds in dangerous ways.

For instance, some 90 percent of mass shooting perpetrators have been taking one or more of the psychotropic drugs. These events rarely occurred prior to the spread of these drugs.