Slashdot Mirror
Mass Psychosis In the USA?
Hugh Pickens writes "James Ridgeway writes in Al Jazeera that with over $14 billion in sales in 2008, antipsychotics have become the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the U.S., surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux. While once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses, today it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. 'Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics,' writes Ridgeway. 'Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.' By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. According to Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are 'simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.'"
That's crazy!
That sounds a bit paranoid to me. Perhaps you should talk to your doctor. You could probably get drugs to help you with that.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Wasn't this a scene in the extended ultra mega remix ultimate edition Blue-ray disc of Fight Club?
I'm a victim! It's the environment! My mom was cruel to me! Hormones make me eat too much! Video games make me violent!
All I need is some understanding. And another pill.
Or I'll kill you.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It's exponentially annoying when people use it ad nauseum. It literally makes my blood boil!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."