Why Have Feelings When You Can Take A Drug For it

I really don’t know why so many people are attached to pot, give it enough time, Pfizer will find a legal way to give you the same feeling, and they will even make up a mental illness to justify giving it to you. Over and over the human experience is being whittled down to a mental illness that the drug company wants to get rich making you not feel. There is of course real mental illness, something we as society ironically do a horrible job recognizing, accepting and understanding. And yet at the same time we need a drug for every sort of bad feeling. It’s a sad statement not just on the state of our health care system but the pathetic place we are in as a society. Moody Is the New Bipolar On September 4, 2007, the New York Times reported, "The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003 ... Drug makers and company-sponsored psychiatrists have been encouraging doctors to look for the disorder." Not too long ago, a child who was irritable, moody, and distractible and who at times sounded grandiose or acted without regard for consequences was considered a "handful." In the U.S. by the 1980s, that child was labeled with a "behavioral disorder" and today that child is being diagnosed as "bipolar" and "psychotic" -- and prescribed expensive antipsychotic drugs. Bloomberg News, also on September 4, 2007, reported, "The expanded use of bipolar as a pediatric diagnosis has made children the fastest-growing part of the $11.5 billion U.S. market for antipsychotic drugs." There is no question that making Americans think that they can take a drug to feel better about the life we are creating is big business. But what is important is to link the FALSE claim that low serotonin-levels equals depressed. Study after study shows that all men have low serotonin and many people with low serotonin are just fine. The linkage is crap, but making it is good for business as Prozac found. With the advent of Eli Lilly's serotonin-enhancer Prozac at the end of 1987, the general public and doctors began receiving a multi-billion dollar marketing blitz proclaiming that depression is caused by a deficiency of serotonin, and that this deficiency could be corrected by Prozac (and, later, other serotonin-enhancer antidepressants such as Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and Luvox). In 1985 the total annual sales for all antidepressants in the U.S. was approximately $240 million, while today it is approximately $12 billion. $12 billion prescribing something that has proven to have very minimal effect… The serotonin-deficiency theory of depression was so successfully marketed that it was news to many Americans when Newsweek's February 26, 2007 cover story, "Men and Depression," mentioned that scientists now reject the theory that depression is caused by low levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, told Newsweek that "a depressed brain is not necessarily underproducing something." The demise of the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression should not be considered news in 2007 because in 1998 The American Medical Association Essential Guide to Depression was already stating: "The link between low levels of serotonin and depressive illness is unclear, as some depressed people have too much serotonin." So if this is out there why do we still believe so certainly their effectiveness? Well its not just doctors that are getting the millions of dollars worth of advertising, journalists get many of the same treatment with PR firms calling them as well. In 2002 the New York Times reported: "Researchers knew that antidepressants seemed to raise the brain's levels of messenger chemicals called neurotransmitters, so they theorized that depression must result from a deficiency of these chemicals. Yet a multitude of studies failed to prove this precept." Unfortunately, that fact was buried under more than fifty preceding paragraphs. And here is the point the reason people like them is they take the edge off, they act like illegal drugs only they are legally sanctioned. Or as Chris Rock said, “It’s all right if it’s ALL WHITE.” The reality is that when patients report Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft as "working," it is not because these drugs are correcting any kind of chemical imbalance. These drugs can temporarily "take the edge off" -- as is the case with many psychotropic drugs, legal or illegal. So, overall, the difference in effectiveness between antidepressants and a sugar-pill placebo is "clinically negligible." This was the conclusion of University of Connecticut professor of psychology Irving Kirsch, who used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to 47 antidepressant studies sponsored by drug companies on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone that had been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (but many of which had not been published). Kirsch discovered that in the majority of the trials, the antidepressant failed to outperform a sugar-pill placebo. Truth is we don’t know why people are depressed and that is why talking with someone is still the best medicine. Can drugs work, sure, legal or illegal they are a means of coping in a life that sometimes feels unbearable. But that is not “treating” depression it is simply masking it. That is why so many people on Prozac end up committing suicide. How do you deal with feeling ok, when your soul, your deeper self; the part that actually FEELS depressed. People who are only passingly sad Prozac works because taking the edge off is often all they need to get by. For those with real depression it is a mask without a fix. And for young people unable or not yet used to dealing with that reality it can lead to the ultimate despair. RSS Feed