The Quick-Fix Pathology

We must be mad. As a culture of quick-fix psychology. We medicate ourselves for little reason. We are so incurably suggestible that we choose to believe the claims of pharmaceutical corporations whose patented chemical cures for whatever we feel ails us has us enthralled to our complete detriment. We believe medical practitioners are capable of diagnosing our narratives when we explain what is so troubling to us, and eagerly accept prescriptions we are assured will cure everything.

Those in the healing professions do have the advantage of having attended and graduated from medical schools, but they too are little different than those of us in the general public who rely on their diagnostic abilities and eagerly await an immediate cure through the intervention of drugs. Life events disturb us, we are perturbed, we are disconsolate, we are miserable, and we are depressed. The solution is not to deal with these life-events, but to treat them chemically.

A wide range of antidepressants are 'guaranteed' to work their magic for us by re-balancing "chemical imbalances" in the brain. But according to Dr. Joel Paris, professor and past chair of the department of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, no consistent chemical abnormality has been discovered at any time to exist in the brains of patients with mental disorders. Back to the drawing board.

Still, that doesn't appear to upset the drug apple-cart. Antidepressants remain popular because they appear to us to solve our problems, so much so that 11% of the American adult population consumes them, according to Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, in his book Saving Normal. According to 2002 figures, 6% of the Canadian population used antidepressants. And not just one drug, but a number of them, inclusive of those meant to stabilize the side-effects of the other drugs.

"Pharma did the math", wrote Dr. Frances. "There are only 40,000 psychiatrists in the United States (about 4,100 in Canada), but about ten times as many primary care physicians. Why not recruit primary care physicians to write prescriptions for psychiatric drugs"? To that end, pharmaceutical companies promote the use of their wonderful drug solutions to commonly complained of psychiatric disorders. "Who needs a psychiatrist when the medicine is so safe and easy to use?"

In Dr. Dina Panagiotopoulos's experience, (pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children's Hospital), "second-generation" (improved) anti-psychotics are being prescribed to two- and three-year-old children for aggression. Side effects in children include sudden and massive weight gain and diabetes. Over 74 million prescriptions with a value of $2.6-billion to the industry were filled for psychiatric drugs in Canada. Over 203,000 prescriptions daily.

Those second-generation anti-psychotics are being prescribed increasingly to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, "conduct" disorders, "frustration intolerance", and those with poor sleep habits. Side effects include elevated blood fats and abnormal blood-sugar levels. Canada was in receipt of 17 fatality reports in children, linked to those SGAs, but the situation remains unmonitored.

One only of the drugs has been approved for use for children; for schizophrenia in teens, 15 to 17.

Use of those second-generation anti-psychotics has exposed children to three times the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, double the risk of obesity, 30 times the risk of metabolic syndrome, (a number of health problems increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke striking later in life). As for the long-term effects on a child's developing brain, no one knows what that might result in.

Yet the drugs are being increasingly prescribed for children and youth to the extent that 12% of all such prescriptions are for children 8 and younger.

Those drugs can cause irreversible movement disorders such as uncontrollable spasms and tremors, involuntary movements of the jaw and tongue, puckering of the face and frowning. The drugs have been linked with increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest in older adults. Neuroleptic malignant syndrome is yet another life-threatening, albeit rare, side-effect; fatal in roughly 20% of cases.

"Drugs used well become a godsend for the patients helped...it's a ridiculous marketing ploy that every problem in life is a chemical imbalance. Of course everything is mediated through the brain. But that doesn't mean the treatment for it is a pill", wrote Dr. Frances in his Saving Normal book.

We're too busy, too distracted, too concerned about the normal trajectory of life, unwilling to accept the downsides and patiently school ourselves to recognize that there is nothing really wrong that time and attention cannot solve; we do manage for the most part to heal ourselves, psychically and physically, but for incidents of real health declines or disease onset.

And we haven't the patience in our busy lives to recognize that some children's personalities need a little space, not a lot of drugs.