"Psych drugs are the opposite of what psychiatrists claim."
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: "Psych drugs are the opposite of what psychiatrists claim."
Date: Sep 2, 2009 8:15 AM
"Research indicates that people in bad dept or a bad relationship
stay where they are on the medication. The urgency of change
fades away."
Psych drugs are the opposite of what psychiatrists claim.
They don't help you deal with problems- they make you
less able to deal with problems.
The Average Folks get it, now: "If Americans are so tough,
why do they all need to be drugged up?"
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=================================
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/02
Published on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 by The Toronto Star
Pills and America's Pursuit of Happiness
by Mitch Potter
WASHINGTON – Of all the bitter pills Americans are swallowing
nowadays, from joblessness to home foreclosures to runaway national
debt, it might come as no surprise that a pill of another sort is
flying off the shelves at a recession-defying pace – the
antidepressant.
It's an easy jump to conclude that hard times are turning the country
comfortably numb, as the Washington Post suggested in a weekend report
on the sales of the drug Cymbalta, up 14 per cent since the summer of
2008 and now among America's most popular happy pills.
Drill deeper and you will find that the U.S., though far and away a
world leader with its $10-billion-a-year antidepressant habit, is not
alone.
Over the summer, British politicians fretted over the impact of
recession on mental health amid data showing a spike of 2.1 million
antidepressant prescriptions last year, when the downturn took its
first precipitous dive.
Same in India, where pharmaceutical firms reported a 20 per cent
expansion of the antidepressant market in the year ending December
2008. And in New Zealand, where the global plunge was linked to
reports of a near doubling in antidepressant prescriptions between
2002 and 2008.
But drill down deeper still and the story behind the flurry of cause-
and-effect headlines is far more nuanced.
While many researchers acknowledge there is likely an uptick in med
sales as a consequence of the poor economy, most say it is driven as
much or more by trends decades in the making.
There is no question America loves its happy pills, but consumption
was skyrocketing long before the Dow melted down.
The real story, in fact, may be that the link between recession and
mental health points in precisely the opposite direction – the
possibility that people in the most dire straits today are also the
most likely to be suffering depression but without access to any
medical help.
That is what Dr. Craig Pollack of the University of Pennsylvania
discovered during a study of 250 Philadelphia homeowners on the brink
of foreclosure. Pollack's findings, published last month, showed 37
per cent of the distressed homeowners suffered from major clinical
depression. But nearly half of his study group said they were too poor
to buy prescription drugs.
"Clearly for some, poor health leads to foreclosure. And for others,
foreclosure may be leading to poor health," Pollack said.
Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a Maryland anaesthesiologist and senior fellow at
the Hudson Institute, warns that to make too much of the recession's
role in prescription drug-taking is to wildly underplay the larger
story of how the country has swarmed toward the pill bottle every
since the 1970s, when Valium hit the scene.
"America is all about the gratification of pleasure. We are the kings
of pleasure and proud of it," said Dworkin, author of Artificial
Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class.
"But the other side of it is that we're not very good at preparing for
or dealing with unhappiness, which of course is an inevitable part of
life. And what we've done since the '70s is to transform into a
culture that treats unhappiness as a disease."
Dworkin says primary-care doctors wrote about 75 per cent of the more
than 164 million antidepressant prescriptions dispensed in 2008 in the
U.S., a fact he says gainsays the notion that psychiatrists and big
pharma are to blame.
But however one tracks the evolution, Dworkin contends the practice of
"stupefying ourselves to cure everyday unhappiness" treats the
symptom, not the cause.
And that is a bigger problem today than it used to be, given the
surfeit of unhappiness associated with recession.
"There is a paradox: taking antidepressants makes people feel better,
thereby reducing their interest in actually doing something about the
things in their life that cause the unhappiness," he said.
"Research indicates that people in bad dept or a bad relationship stay
where they are on the medication. The urgency of change fades away."
© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2008
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci