“Could this be true? Could drugs that are ingested by one in 10 Americans each year, drugs that have changed the way that mental illness is treated, really be a hoax, a mistake or a concept gone wrong?” – NYT – In Defense of Antidepressants, by Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac.
If indeed every 10th american is on psychiatric drugs (assume every 5th in the Jewish community) there are several possibilities:
- There is an epidemic comparable in size of the sample to the Black Death.
- Life suddenly sucks so much that almost everyone qualifies for a chronic mental illness despite our “progress”.
- There is a massive genetic mutation afoot (or surely a massive mutation is coming if everyone is on drugs).
- This country is run by the pharma industry in collusion with the insurers and the doctors.
Take your pick.
There is an art in reading those articles, read between the comments there. A lot of people swear how it changed their lives, etc. And this reminds me of a religion. You have an authority figure, a rabbi or a doctor. You come to him with a spiritual or emotional anguish. He tells you there is something fundamentally wrong with you but he has the recipe for a life long redemption. The trick is that it requires not only a life long commitment but the acceptance of this path as your identity. Now go ask an average religious person if religion changed his life. And it has nothing to do with effectiveness of the drugs or even the existence of God. It’s much more than that, it’s an identity.
P.S. Felix Salmon provides a complete reference point for the NYT article and asks “After reading Angell’s second essay [The Illusions of Psychiatry], you’ll certainly wonder why Peter Kramer doesn’t disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies”. Also the podcast I published recently is still the best introduction to the “trade” – Gary Greenberg on rebranding of Addictions and Depressions as Diseases and the Big Business around the Hippocampus.
Further reading: