"Doctors are now medicating unhappiness," said Dworkin. "Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives."
The most sensible thing I've read all morning.
Read the rest.
The most sensible thing I've read all morning.
Read the rest.
4 comments:
Amen! I was so pleased to see this article on CNN too. The only thing missing was the number of Americans currently on anti-depressants.
Shannon
"She added that 25 percent of adults will have a major depressive episode sometime in their life, as will 8 percent of adolescents. "Those are remarkably high numbers," Posner said."
Those seem like surprisingly low numbers, in my uneducated opinion.
Stephanie - the reason the numbers are cited as "high" is because a "major" depressive episode is defined as one that could land someone in a hospital or cause them to attempt suicide. If you think about one in every four people having that happen, that really is a huge number. And for 1 in 12 high schoolers to feel that way is ridiculous - kids aren't supposed to feel the sort of burdens that would make them want to die. It just goes to show that people are focusing on the wrong things...treatment of symptoms, rather than a solution to the actual problem.
Randy - I've been saying this for YEARS. As someone who's been clinically depressed almost her whole life, I've recognized that, most times, my attitude defines how I deal with things way more than any pill ever could. People just don't want to accept responsibility. They want an easy out.
Squeaky Wheel, that makes a lot of sense. Perhaps the article should have given the definition of a major depressive episode (Still, when you consider “over the course of their lifetime”, 25% and 8% don’t seem surprisingly large. But, again, I know nothing of psychology or statistics, so I’m just babbling).
Furthermore, it seems that just by putting the sidebar in the article, they are perpetuating the acceptance of medicating normal everyday life. It seems like, save actual suicide attempts, the description in the sidebar would fit more people than not more often than not (which is exactly what many say the pharmaceutical companies want).
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