Full interview: @marwilliamson joins #AM2DM to discuss Trump, her past tweets, her stance on vaccinating, being Laura Dern's old roommate, and more https://t.co/o1xSIYBlpc

Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson told BuzzFeed News’ AM to DM that she believes antidepressants are overprescribed by doctors and that they aren’t needed to treat situations she categorized as instances of “normal human despair” instead of a mental illness.



“The twenties can be very hard. They’re not a mental illness. Divorce can be very difficult, losing a loved one, someone that you know died, someone left in a relationship and you’re heartbroken — that’s very painful, but it’s not a mental illness,” Williamson said on AM to DM on Friday. “You had a professional failure, you lost your job, you went bankrupt. Those things are very difficult, but they’re not a mental illness.”

This isn’t the first time Williamson, a successful speaker and author, has expressed skepticism that drugs can play a role in treating depression. In 2018, Williamson tweeted, “how many public personalities on antidepressants have to hang themselves before the FDA does something, Big Pharma cops to what it knows, and the average person stops falling for this? The tragedies keep compounding. The awakening should begin.” That same day, Kate Spade was found dead in her apartment after reportedly killing herself.

Williamson went on to tweet that depression wasn’t stigmatized until the condition was “medicalized.”

“Most antidepressants are being prescribed by Dr.s who aren’t even mental health professionals, & many times when people are simply SAD,” Williamson tweeted. “The answer to depression is more scientific research only if you think of it simply in biomedical terms. The medicalization of depression is a creation of the medical industry. For millennia depression was seen as a spiritual disease, and for many of us it still is.”