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.'"
No surprise here!
''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.'"
Glad to see evidence supports the world's opinion.
Aldous Huxley was spot on ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Maybe those drugs are just super expensive. A total number of consumers would be more useful.
yeah, because the US FedGov wants everyone too doped up to care about how badly they are getting fucked by the system...
infowars.com
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
And politics in general. Now there's a reason for me to keep myself thoroughly medicated.
Can't we block foreign IPs from this website? Or at least foreign IPs posting as AC?
Can we block redneck bigots from this site? Or at least start Americans with karma -1 by default?
Well, as is obvious from our ever expanding waistlines, Americans are getting less and less exercise?and probably sunlight too). I wonder if this is, at least in part, contributing to our increased depression. Several studies have shown pretty clearly that exercise is a great, if not the best, treatment for mild to moderate depression. So instead if sucking down big pharma and big agra's endless supply of shit, maybe we should try getting off our ass and going out for a run or bike ride.
Monstar L
" I feel powerless because of the following:
My Privacy invaded day by day
My Government and the US government is massively corrupt, doesn't tax companies
The unjust succeed while the moral wither
Everyone thinks they are right so nothing gets done"
This is all external, and nothing is an internal. Your privacy? Who cares...the problem is that you think someone does care. Stop worrying about how others judge you, and it doesn't matter about your privacy. The gov't is corrupt? The gov't has always been corrupt. The world has always had more corruption than it has righteousness. It is far easier to be corrupt than it is to be righteous. What does this matter towards your powerlessness? You have the choice to be corrupt or righteous. This seems as though it proves you have power. Same with the very next argument...the unjust succeed. How are you defining success? Money? Power over others? These shouldn't determine your success. You are allowing it to determine your success and you have defined success in a way that allows the unjust to get the upper hand in your world.
As for everyone thinking they are right...maybe you need to stop trying to be right as well. I'm probably wrong about all of this...I'm right in my world, but my success in life doesn't depend on you agreeing...if you do, that's cool...but I'm not going to base my concept of success on this. If someone else wants to be right, let them...if you want to be right, don't make your success based on others believing it. Believe that you can be right and someone else can hold an opposing view and still be right too. In most complex situations, there can be multiple paths to the right solution...
Again, who knows if I'm right...I do know I'm happy more often than most people I know...
Fuck me, I hate reading this shit. Going to post anonymously for this one.
Depression on the whole, is not induced by something like "Unchecked capitalism". While there is a subset of them which may have depression due to social circumstances, last I read, this was a very small subset, and it was argued that this might not be actual depression, or might be much lower on the scale.
Depression is mainly a physical problem you have. It can be induced by drugs, but for many, it's just your unlucky biochemistry. For these people, everything could be awesome. Just won the lottery, got a promotion at work, etc, everything could be better than they could have ever imagined it, but they feel like shit, they have a warped perspective, maybe suicide ideation, and so forth.
It has nothing to do with some "objective" measure of the quality of their life.
Please don't talk about shit you know nothing about.
Also, just so you know, many psychological studies have shown that everything you said about advertising and consumerism, is actually the opposite. Though, there are studies which do come to your conclusion also.
Also this idea is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A child who is abused and manipulated is far more likely to abuse and manipulate others as an adult. If you stick a kid in a classroom and humiliate and punish him for any deviance from "the plan", they will try to punish and humiliate those they find who have deviated because they have integrated a fear of deviation into their personalty in order to survive the humiliation and punishment of their teachers..
This is exactly why the wealthy send their kids to private school. Public school is for the sheep, private school the wolves.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
* Not that meaningless sex means anything to Slashdotters
If it meant something, it wouldn't be meaningless wouldn't it?
Believe it or not, I'm someone who engages in a lot of "meaningless" sex. The problem is not that the entire process doesn't have anything more "deep" then sexual gratification but rather that some people try to attach something else then simple gratification to it.
Just as the parent pointed out in his post, people use it as an escape and this is actually a good thing(TM) but the distinction the GP did not make is the difference between "an escape" and "living in a fantasy world". Having a vice does not automatically make one an addict, for example, a person who drinks is not automatically an alcoholic because they can be capable of stopping and exercise it at will, the ability to keep under the legal limit or to say "no thanks, I've had enough".
By the same token, there are people who can have "meaningless" sex without trying to attach anything to it. The same with all the other vices the GP listed, one can enjoy gambling, smoking, drinking or clubbing in moderation without actually becoming a victim to that action.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
...when the American electorate decided to go with the pleasant movie fantasies of a has-been B actor in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease instead of the unpleasant energy and economic realities explained quite plainly by an engineer who happened to be president at the time. Yes, America broke with reality 30 years ago, which is more or less the definition of psychosis.
Any hope we had of energy independence and a stable economy died then. Arab oil and economic decay through debt spending were in. Whoopee! And hasn't that worked out well?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.