"It doesn't guarantee salvation or it's not sufficient and it's not necessary to salvation but if it can be collaborated with and used in an intelligent way it can be an immense help to people. This sense that in spite of everything ... in spite of pain, in spite of death, in spite of horror, the universe in some mysterious sense is all right, capital A, capital R."
-Aldous Huxley, describing the therapeutic effects of an LSD experience.
When I read Brave New World by Huxley, I was pretty blown away by how on-the-money he predicted psychiatric drug use. In the book everyone is always taking pills. Everyone takes them daily just to 'feel good' and even death is managed entirely through pharmaceuticals- everyone takes the same pills to induce a quick, painless decline and death. Pretty astute, right?
Predictably, the books plot centers around a guy who stops taking the feel-good pills and sees the horror of society, or some such nonsense. A swing and a miss.
What Huxley couldn't have predicted(or didn't, anyway) is that the world 2.0, the information age, is a wild mess. While it's true that the pharmaceutical industry produces tons of feel-good pills, and that the United States is the most prescribed-to nation on earth(followed up by every other developed country), the government still isn't issuing us pills yet.
I'm tempted to say something like 'Well with big pharma and all the advertisement and lobbying, it's not too far off...' but that's not true. Psychiatric drugs are a product just like cigarettes- you can get a lot of people to start with enough billboards, and people will get hooked, but there was never a time when everyone smoked. There will never be a time when everyone is on Antidepressants and Anti-anxiety meds. But goddamn, a lot of people are on them.
I've never had the nerve to think I was depressed. Even after tragedy and crisis I can only own up to feeling 'really bummed out'. Every thinking person - I should think- has these periods of being really bummed out. That is a distinct phenomenon from major depression. Since the beginning of western thought, certain individuals have been noticed as being extremely bummed out. The kind of bummed out that starves itself to death. The distinction is made in modern psychiatry between those 2, but medication is suggested for both. Even if you have 'low mood, but it's not that bad,' you might have one of many atypical depressions. And still there's medication for it.
If someone believes they're depressed, seeks help, a doctor suggests medication, they take it, and a pharmaceutical rep gets a huge kickback, I really can't fault anyone. They're entitled to try medication, and no one made them.
People are only as good as what they know. Many people don't know pet ownership lowers lifetime depression rates, exercise shows about as good efficacy as medication, tons of weird drugs have antidepressant effects and no effect on serotonin receptors (like Scopolamine and Ketamine), and happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway. The link between depression and suicide is shaky- Only 60% of suicides in the U.S. were confirmed depressed people, and currently popular medication has a negligible or negative effect on suicide risk.
I have the sneaking suspicion that there will never be a universal happy pill. Not only is the working theory of depression wrong; it could never be right, and there could never be one that's right. The diversity of neurobiological condition, psychiatric condition, and the wide range of effects of all drugs in humans makes 'the pill that fixes everything' impossible, forever. The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry isn't making medicine. They just have a monopoly on available drugs.
The anti-psychiatry movement in the 1970's famously campaigned that 'there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance'. They were wrong. Everyone is chemically imbalanced. Just try to get along with yourself. Getting drunk or high might help.
>The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry isn't making medicine. They just have a monopoly on available drugs.
ReplyDeleteI disagree, to an extent. Psychiatry has come a long way from the 60's, it's an evidence-based practice, now. Before I sought psychiatric care, I self-medicated a little, with alcohol and caffeine; having a trained professional proscribing medication for me has made a big difference. I think it's bad, though, that big pharma has the benefit of government restrictions on all other kinds of drugs.
>Every thinking person - I should think- has these periods of being really bummed out. That is a distinct phenomenon from major depression. Since the beginning of western thought, certain individuals have been noticed as being extremely bummed out. The kind of bummed out that starves itself to death. The distinction is made in modern psychiatry between those 2, but medication is suggested for both. Even if you have 'low mood, but it's not that bad,' you might have one of many atypical depressions. And still there's medication for it.
When I told friends of my diagnosis, of having bipolar disorder (type II), a lot of them were surprised: I didn't seem pathologically ill to them, necessarily. I wasn't at risk for, say, suicide, but my quality of life was greatly diminished by my illness. I think that it's more helpful to think of maybe three categories: ordinary bummed-outness, which everyone experiences, disease that can lead to physical harm of one's self or others, and the sort of disease which nips at the patient for years. And, I think that anyone, in any of these three categories, should have access to drugs (prescription or otherwise) that they can use to adjust how they feel.
I resent Huxley's idea that happy pills isolate humans from the horrors of the world. They can, but they don't have to. I like this quote that Graham shared with me, this Freud catchphrase, "transforming [...] hysterical misery into common unhappiness." For me, psych treatment helped me be less distressed by the chemical imbalances that everyone has to some extent, and so I was able to be more concerned with things that matter.
My family's cat died, I think it was in the spring of last year. I remember feeling sad as a result; we'd gotten Ingrid when I was twelve. This was a few months after I'd started getting psych treatment. I suppose that, before I had gotten treatment, I would have had trouble feeling sad over Ingrid's death because I was so saturated with sadness to start with.
A thoughtful reply.
ReplyDeleteI've become a bit less radical about this. I used to think it was all a scam; that no one really needed any of these prescription psych drugs and they were more or less addictive. I referenced that briefly by comparing them to cigarettes.
The thing I do realize now and your experiences help underline is that there is real science behind (some) of these psych meds and some of them help certain people immensely. I also have a lot of faith(so to speak) in scientists and researchers, if not pharmaceutical companies and doctors.
This leads us to the illegality of certain drugs previously useful in psychiatry(LSD, speak of the devil), and the scheduling system, but I'll let that be for another rambling...