Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and as such I don’t want to be treated as one! Please consult a doctor you trust on any mental health advice you’re in need of. This blog post is meant to bring to light the overmedicalization of America, but I do realize and accept that medication is necessary to take for some patients.
It’s always more fun and interesting to start out with a story instead of statistics.
Once upon a year ago, I had a friend excitedly tell me that she was feeling ‘amazing results’ from an anti-anxiety medication she had recently been taking along with her boyfriend and dogs. A friend of hers convinced her to try them out because said friend was feeling ‘incredible’ results from them, too. My girlfriend said it was helping her a lot with the anxieties of her day to day stresses at work and home. She claimed it was significantly improving the anxiety of her boyfriend and dogs as well.
A few months later, I’m at my girlfriend’s house for a visit. She’s on the couch wrapped in a blanket, and when she looks up at me, her bright eyes are clouded and there are big black bags under her eyes. She looked like she was coming down with a cold.
“Hey dude,” she says weakly, “we’re weaning off of those anti-anxiety meds and I feel like shit.”
Sadly, I was not surprised by this. Having studied Psychology at Rutgers University, I know too well that psychiatrists of today are over-prescribing medication to patients (statistics for this coming later). Psychology books don’t say this of course, but just reading about all the things that they prescribe medications for today, it’s pretty damn alarming how doped up on drugs Americans really are!
“Wow girl, you look sick..!” I couldn’t help but say as I saw her in her current predicament.
“Yeah….” she agreed half-heartedly. “The side effects of those meds were killing me and my boyfriend, and when we did more research on it, we realized how bad they were. We knew the withdrawal symptoms would be difficult to handle, but we wanted to get off the meds sooner than later before it got too bad and we were too dependent on them.”
That was one of the wisest decisions she could have made for her and her family (dogs included!). Not only did the anxiolytics decline in effectiveness over the months they were using them, but my friends were also dealing with side effects and withdrawal symptoms when they decided to stop taking them! Does this sound familiar at all?
Everyone has their own personal story of them or friends and family members using medication to treat depression and anxiety, only to deal with the same outcome time and time again. At first they feel great using them. Then as the months roll by, they’re less effective. At this point the psychiatrists typically increase the dosage of antidepressants or anxiolytics. They may feel an improvement in symptoms after the increased dosage, but it’s never the same as the first month. A vicious never-ending cycle ensues, where the effects of the medication decline over time, and the dosage needs to be increased yet again. This goes on for as long as the patient can handle before he or she finally has to stop taking them due to the harsh side effects or just from them not working anymore.
The skeptics may say this is all ‘anecdotal evidence.’ They’ll say that these personal stories are just that — stories. While true, I always say that when enough people start complaining about the same thing, there must be some merit to their claims. In this case, zero out of five patients (three humans including the friend who recommended the medication to my girlfriend and her partner and dogs) were feeling little to no improvements in the long term using these medications. And I personally know of others who have not seen long-term effectiveness using these medications. I highlighted long-term here because initially symptoms for depression and anxiety go away when medication is used, but they always return later on, and usually with a mean vengeance.
So what’s the deal? Why are so many people using medication to deal with their mental disorders? The answer is of course very complicated, but it can be broken down into simple reasons. The biggest factor here that must be addressed first is your ‘friendly neighbor’ — the Pharmacy with a capital P! Let’s face it, the Pharmaceutical companies are just that — companies! A company is a business, and what do businesses do? They make you believe that their product or service is exactly what you need!
Feeling down? Depressed? Disappointed in your life and you can’t help feeling these feelings? This isn’t normal and you need to fix it right now! Just take a pill, it’s as simple as that!
Their message is simple: You have a problem that you have no control over, and the only solution out there are the products of the ‘genius’ scientists of the Pharmaceutical industry! They’re the ‘experts’, so you, young grasshopper, must heed their medical advice and start swallowing those pills to make you feel better! Brave New World, anyone?
Little do we know, we are not young grasshoppers here but rather guinea pigs for their drugs. That’s right, we’re mostly guinea pigs and we don’t even know it! I’ll tell it to you straight out. These ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ don’t even know the full mechanism for these pills’ effects on your brain and body! I first learned of this in my Neuropsychopharmacology class (try saying that 10 times fast). Pharmacy lab nerds will try out a new pill on some test subjects (usually mice) for a trial, see some sort of improvement in the behavior of interest (such as depression), scratch their heads trying to figure out how exactly it works in the body, and then say, “Well, we see this percentage of improvement in lab rats, so even if we don’t know exactly how it works, it still has some positive effect!” Then they’ll try it on some human subjects and do the same damn thing! “We see that it helps with some humans, so even though we don’t quite know exactly how it affects the entire body especially over the long haul, so what!” All they really see at the end of the road are dollar bills lining their fat, greedy pockets.
But how can that be safe you might ask? I hate to be messenger here if you didn’t realize it, but it’s really not that safe. You’re taking pills that not even the professionals know of how they fully work in the body. Where do you think all these side effects come from when taking these medications? Pharmacists not knowing the complete picture of how these drugs travel through and affect the many pathways of your brain and the rest of your body I suppose!
It should be obvious that there’s no such thing as a magic pill. But Big Pharma has done such an excellent job on marketing these products and making you feel like the ignoramus who doesn’t know what the solution is to personal struggles that they’ve convinced too many people to trust in their pills as the solution. They’ve convinced people who struggle mentally and emotionally to ditch any other effort to feel better other than doping up on their drugs. It’s as sad and disturbing as that.
“But wait!” You or others may protest. “I’m on so and so drug and I’ve been on it for years and it really works for me!”
To that I may counter, have you tried any other more natural solutions before going to medication? I’m not talking about water therapy or any other spiritual BS for healing. But what about joining a club of something that interests you to meet more people when you’re feeling down? Or taking on a hobby that you have always loved or wanted to try out? Or maybe even eating a healthier diet and practicing a healthier lifestyle, such as adding exercise to your routine a few times a week? You may not have known this, but exercise has been shown time and time again to be more effective than antidepressants at fighting depression. I will repeat this in bold in case you spaced out at this point of my essay:
Exercise has been shown time and time again to be more effective than antidepressants at fighting depression.
Don’t believe me? Just Google it and find numerous scholarly journal articles and blog posts with personal stories about it. And I’ll be sure to add my personal story later on on fighting depression, too.
Another perspective to this argument can be illustrated by the following social experiment I’d like you to do real quick. In the following italicized quotation, I’d like for you to replace the word ‘medication,’ a more socially accepted drug form for treatment, with the word ‘alcohol,’ (specifically, the recreational stuff you drink that makes you act silly) a not-so approved drug form of treatment:
“I’ve been feeling really down lately and it’s hard sometimes to even get out of bed. So I’ve decided to take some medication for it. The medication works great for my depression and anxiety! Ever since I’ve taken medication I haven’t felt so bad! Sometimes the medication dosage doesn’t work as well, so I just take more of it. And voila! I feel good as new, except for perhaps the next day when the symptoms come back, and sometimes even worse. But that’s what my medication is for, right?”
When you replace the word medication with the word alcohol in that statement above, how did it make you feel? What were you thinking?
I know there are rebuttals to every argument, and I trust there will be devil’s advocates laying out the numerous statistics that go against my argument here. No worries, I have my own set of statistics for the next part of this essay, too. But I think it’s more important to reflect on the wise words of Henry Hazlitt here. From his book Economics in One Lesson, he said it best: “… statistics become out-of-date and are superseded by later figures.” And that couldn’t be more true. Statistics may seem reliable and perhaps they are accurate at the time, but they always go out of style as the years go by, to be replaced by further statistics. Numbers say a lot, but they definitely don’t tell the whole story, not even close. Don’t forget that.
Rather than rely entirely on numbers for an argument, I choose to rely on the philosophy of life through observation of life over many years. And the philosophy I have learned from observing too many people taking medications for mental health issues is this:
Using a drug for mental health, any type of drug, is merely a band-aid for a deep wound. It may treat the problem on the surface, but the deeper issue lying beneath it all is still infecting you. As long as the underlying issue is not addressed, the wound will keep coming back. And if you keep the wound infesting underneath for too long, it can and will spread so large that it won’t be kept under control by any of your Band-Aids.
Thank you as always for taking the time to read. Please feel free to contact me to discuss this with me further via my Contact Me page.