Are Psychiatric Medications Hurting More Patients Than They Help? (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American's Cross-Check blog: Two new posts on this website have me contemplating, once again, the terrible possibility that psychiatry is hurting more people than it helps. Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in "1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug" that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study. "Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey, with 12 percent of adults reporting that they filled prescriptions for these drugs..."

This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."

Comments

Good question

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's ask APK...

Re:Good question

[arglebargle_xiv]

The headline, as is far too comon for /., is incorrect/misleading/clickbait. If it was corrected to read:

Is overprescription of psychiatric medication as is done in the US harmful?

then the answer is a pretty obvious "yes". Many (most?) other countries use therapy first and medication only as a last resort. In the US its medication, medication, money, medication, money... sorry, got the two a bit mixed up there.

Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[Alsn]

In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.

Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[bmo]

Maybe it's because in Denmark, you can go to school and get a stipend on top of it. Also, there isn't a race-to-the-bottom with wages. Also, there is a social and medical safety net.

And bars don't close at 1am like they do here.

--
BMO

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

More serious studies are definitely needed.

No more studies are necessary. The answer is perfectly clear: Bacon. Those Danes produce lots of it! Even the venerable "The Economist" takes note of that:

"Denmark is a tiny country, with 5.6m people and wallet-draining labour costs. But it is an agricultural giant, home to 30m pigs and a quiverful of global brands. In 2011 farm products made up 20% of its goods exports. The value of food exports grew from €4 billion ($5.5 billion) in 2001 to €16.1 billion in 2011. The government expects it to rise by a further €6.7 billion by 2020." http://www.economist.com/news/...

All that happiness-bringing bacon cancels out all those depressing, but brilliant, Lars Von Trier films.

Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health

Not saying Denmark is some shining bacon of mental health

FTFY

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[ShanghaiBill]

Why not fix what makes people unhappy instead?

The people being treated with antidepressants are mostly suffering from clinical depression, which is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. It has little to do with external factors. Likewise with antipsychotics. Long ago it was believed that schizophrenia was caused by "bad parenting" (cold domineering mothers and psychologically detached fathers). That has been utterly debunked. The cause is mostly determined by genetics and prenatal nutrition. If one of an identical twin has schizophrenia, the other is not guaranteed to have it, but is fifty times more likely than chance. If only one suffers, or one suffers more severely, it is very likely to be the one with a lower birth weight. Whether the twins are raised together or separated at birth makes no difference at all.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[Princeofcups]

Maybe it's because in Denmark, you can go to school and get a stipend on top of it. Also, there isn't a race-to-the-bottom with wages. Also, there is a social and medical safety net.

And bars don't close at 1am like they do here.

--
BMO

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

This shows again a COMPLETE lack of understanding mental health. Sure there is a social component. But the drugs are not meant to deal with that. That's what therapy is for. Drugs are used to mitigate a lack of certain neurochemicals in the brain, a PHYSICAL condition. Without a proper balance of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc., normal everyday functioning can become impossible. The main issue is when MD's without psychiatric training started prescribing these drugs. "Try this and come back in two weeks" can work with a rash, but not with mental health. Finding the right drugs titrated at the right dosages requires direct interaction between patient and doctor, and probably therapy to understand the social and mental effects of the underlying physical issues.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[BarbaraHudson]

YOU are the one showing a complete lack of understanding of mental health.

When society isnt a shit heap, people actually do tend to be happier. Cause you know.... there's less to get depressed about?

And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?

Two people can be in identical circumstances, one gets depressed, the other doesn't. Same with PTSD and other anxiety disorders - some people are more susceptible than others. It's not as simple as you seem to think it is. And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[ColdWetDog]

Sorry to burst your bubble but neurochemistry is really at the 'try this for two weeks and come back to see me'. Even if you are a Board Certified (TM) psychiatrist. We really are at the very beginning of understanding what the brain is doing and how to modify it.

The situation is much more complex than TFAs suggest - 'psychiatric health' is a pretty vague and shifting target. Depends on your culture, your role in society, your age, your financial situation, your sex, the sex of the idiot sitting next to you, who is president and much more - including your genetic and epigentic makeup. If you are a creative type, you might want to feel a wider breadth of emotions than if you are flying 747's. This doesn't even begin to approach the questions of what goal does 'psychiatric health' have for the society. The powers that be might want everyone on an emotional zombie program. The hoi polloi not so much.

G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate anyone?

Any mental health professional will tell you that the meds don't work all that well. But they do work. People who really did need to be institutionalized before the advent of antipsychotics are out in the community. It's not entirely clear that this helps them or the community but the drugs are arguably doing something useful.

Using broad brush numbers like the amount of antidepressant prescriptions and trying to correlate them with other broad brushed studies using vague and varied methodologies and trying to say anything intelligent is a fool's errand.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[bmo]

And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?

Oh hay, it's a false dichotomy /and/ a straw-man argument all in one!

You can improve society so that when things like you posted don't harm people /as much/ as they do today. It's a spectrum, not a binary state.

Improve availability of education
Relax or eliminate victimless-crime statutes
Social safety net - losing a job should not be life or family-threatening.
Medical safety net - Universal healthcare, like the rest of the developed nations have.
Decent infrastructure so companies can thrive instead of their trucks being dumped in a river because a bridge collapsed, for example.
Mandatory vacation time > 1.5 weeks USians
Enforce labor laws.

All of these things contribute to societal and mental health. But we can't have that /here/ because that's SOCIALIZUM!#@$!@#$@#$!

Come back when you get a clue.

--
BMO

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[gtall]

I have the Harvard Guide to Psychiatry DSM IV (I need to get V). I had to get it for some sort of bearing on peculiar grad students I kept running into. For awhile, I thought I was a strange attractor. Then I came to the conclusion that academia is simply more accommodating to oddness than business world, so it accumulates a wider variety of "clientele".

Anyhow, it quickly becomes clear that one person with symptoms doesn't have entirely this condition or that condition. Rather, they pick from a smorgasbord of conditions. So each case is different. Add a bit of time for them to water and feed their conditions (and they do), then they get rather full-blown oddness. Some have learned to do bank shots off the reactions they generate in other people. These are difficult cases to handle because they are working you but you still feel sorry for them.

The best psychiatry can do with drugs is try this or that combination in the hopes of hitting the magic one for the oddball in their office. And then the oddball's physiology is changing over time due to age, diet, or just general physical drift. So what works one year might not work the next. The easiest to deal with are those with an identifiable condition like hyper or hypo thyroid. Few are ever this simple.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[BlackPignouf]

'try this for two weeks and come back to see me'

100% true. My wife has been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis 5 years ago.
She spent 2.5 years in a clinic, trying new medication every 3 weeks or so. I've seen dozens of symptom you don't want to see, especially not on a young woman who happens to be the mother of your child.
Somehow, her 4th psychiatrist managed to find the right combination, very possibly thanks to sheer luck. My wife's now perfectly healthy and we're a happy family.
I still cannot believe it, even though it's been 3 years now. I had lost any hope after 1 year of different treatments. Almost every doctor told me "Time for plan B". What the **** is a plan B when you're alone with your child at home, and your loved one in the clinic, looking like a zombie?

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[Kjella]

How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying? (...) And if you tell someone to "just pull yourself out of it", you deserve it when they punch you in the face.

At the danger of sounding like a cheap self-help book, only you can change how you feel. I'm not saying it's the solution to those with really grave problems, but most everybody else just need perspective. Whenever I'm feeling miserable and want to wallow in self-pity I take a look at BBC News for someone who's really in a shithole and had fate really kick them in the nuts like in Aleppo right now. And then my problems don't quite seem like the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody anymore, in fact I often end up feeling almost like I've cried wolf for no reason.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[currently_awake]

If you want a job, go into the trades. Carpenter/framer, plumber, electrician, welder. You can't offshore a job that must be done here, and you can't automate a job where the work environment changes dramatically day by day.

Re:Or people are just under/wrongly medicated.

[david_thornley]

A universal health care system can be cheaper than what the US has now (the most expensive one is a little over two-thirds what we pay overall), and doesn't have to be paid for by employers. Not having to pay medical coverage for employees would generally give businesses a boost.

What else should we expect . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

“From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien.” Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

What will it take

[John Allsup]

The truth the medical fraternity face is that many have had their lives ruined by the drugs they religiously believe in. The 'evidence' rests on a mire of untested and flawed assumptions (in particular the premises of the statistical methods used to relate data to conclusions: many of which cannot be justified unless the possibility of and influence of complex brain behaviour can be safely ignored). The clinical psychology fraternity, and a number of 'maverick' psychiatrists are, more and more, putting across why mainstream 'medical psychiatry' has much wrong. But this is all too easily swamped by billion dollar marketing machines, lobbying and selective sponsored trials which have a habit, like 'proven by science' infomercials, of showing the sponsoring company's products as better than others.

It's a trap!

[Areyoukiddingme]

This story only made it to Slashdot's front page in order to out the members of Scientology on the board! They're coming to get you!

Ok maybe not.

For the first time in ages, the related links beneath the summary are actually... related.

The ones at the bottom of the comments still aren't though...

The evidence cited seems pretty thin.

[hey!]

(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership. There is no evidence that I know of that indicates that the increased level of gun ownership presents an increased risk to others -- in fact the rate of firearm homicide has gone down (along with most other violent crimes). But suicidal impulses -- which are very common -- plus a handgun in your pocket... that is a very dangerous combination.

(2) Rate of DoD PTSD rising -- likely to have to do with the influx of veterans from three wars (Gulf 1 & 2 + Afghanistan), plus a higher survival rate from severe physical trauma.

(3) Rise of opiate abuse -- coincides with the appearance of new prescription drugs and more aggressive prescribing of pain medication.

(4) Rise in disability awards -- conflated with a drive to recognize mental disabilities as on a par with physical ones.

At my age I've lived through many a moral panic, and this feels like the beginnings of one. Which is not to say mental illness doesn't cause real suffering, or that we shouldn't make it more of a priority. But what we need are more evidence-based approaches. Unfortunately we seem to be headed in the opposite direction.

Re:The evidence cited seems pretty thin.

[Solandri]

(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership.

Suicide rates are up in many OECD countries over the last 10 years, many of whom have strict restrictions on firearm ownership. Several countries which ban or restrict guns have higher suicide rates than the U.S.. Also, it's predominantly males in the U.S. who opt for suicide by gun; females usually try to overdose or slit their wrists. Yet the ratio of male to female suicide rate is practically the same for the U.S. (3.73), UK (3.77), Germany (3.54), France (3.22), Spain (3.73), and Italy (4.0). Suggesting that guns are merely a tool of choice among male U.S. suicides, not an enabler of higher suicide success rates.

The U.S. is more diligent about collecting this sort of data and making it available to the public. So global trends tend to show up sooner in U.S. data sets. Not because the U.S. is special or atypical. Most of the OECD suicide stats I was able to find still date from 2011. It took quite a bit of searching to find that chart of suicide rates in non-U.S. countries up to 2013.

Re:The evidence cited seems pretty thin.

[jeff4747]

In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership

The number of households with at least one gun is down. The number of guns in the average gun-owning-household is way up.

So in terms of causing suicide, access to firearms is down because there are fewer households with a gun. However, the suicidal person with access to a firearm has more to choose from.

Re:No, no no! Your doc needs his swimming pool!

[diesalesmandie]

Think of two solutions to mental illness:

1. One that works - quick, fast, cheap, done.

2. One that requires multiple visits to a doctor, every two weeks for 10 years. Oh, and lots of expensive drugs.

Guess which one is incentivizes doctors and drug companies to pursue it?

You are oversimplifying mental illness; the human brain isn't a piece of machinery where you can just replace a non functioning component with one that does and everything goes back to normal. The problem is people are being prescribed drugs that they don't need where a few sessions of therapy or a change in life circumstance would suffice. However the line between needing medication and not needing it is very blurred, and it differs from person to person.

I think the medication rate is constant

[Anonymous Coward]

Whereas once upon a time it was quite normal in society for everybody to drink alcohol regularly, nowadays it is unfashionable to be an alcoholic so psychiatric medications have taken over.

A hundred years ago, if I had anxiety I would just drink booze to get over it. Now I take Paxil. Not only am I spending a lot less money (because a single pill costs less than a bottle of wine or 6-pack of beer), but I can safely drive a car, and I'm not an asshole to my family.

You may also notice that it seems every other kid is on some medication for ADD/ADHD. Why? My guess is that it's because we can't beat them anymore. Now that it's no longer socially acceptable to hit children who act out we have to medicate them instead.

dom

Don't be fooled by the words "Scientific American"

[bluegutang]

This piece is written by a kook who frequently writes on various "spiritual" and pseudoscientific topics. Among his recent posts:

Seeing the Miracle of Existence in the Darkest of Times
Does Evolution Have a "Higher Purpose"?
Astrophysicist Says Experiments Might Soon Reveal Dark Matter's "True Nature"
What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?
My Doubts about Deepak Chopra and the Monetization of Meditation
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and "Woo"
Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More

True to form, this article's point is a passive-agressive claim based on absence of evidence:
"Like most psychiatrists, Higgins does not consider the possibility that medications might be contributing to the decline of mental health."

Actually, I'm sure most psychiatrists HAVE considered this possibility, and they follow the peer-reviewed evidence which concludes the opposite.

If anyone wants to argue with this scientific consensus, they are welcome to do their own peer-reviewed studies. But this article and its sources haven't.

Pimping drugs for profit

[geekmux]

"Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey..."

Last two times I've visited my general practitioner I was given a "new" form to fill out that essentially tried to convince me I was depressed; I was visiting for a cough and my yearly physical, neither of which had fuck-all to do with depression, but they sure as shit were trying like hell to get me on medication for it.

We have the same industry to thank for the opiate/heroin epidemic as well. How fucking ironic the drug pimps addicting America are marketed to "help" us. Perhaps it's time we actually start putting health over profits.

Don't forget about the War on Drugs.

[Shane_Optima]

The single biggest influence on the state of psychiatry today is moral conservativism and other assorted panderings to popular culture and the law. Their desire to stay profitable and respectable in mainstream society long ago destroyed any real credibility they had as a serious hard science.

Pretty much every highly effective anti-depressant ever made (including but certainly not limited to opioids and dopaminergics) is a scheduled substance and almost never prescribed for depression, because apparently every single human being alive is just a helpless addict just waiting for the chance to swallow twenty pills at a time chasing a high. SSRIs have abysmal efficacies, but that didn't stop them from pushing the placebo revolutionary drug Prozac to being one of the most prescribed drugs in the country. A lot of people are still under this weird impression that antidepressants work by re-establishing some natural balance of neurotransmitters present in "normal" people, when there's every indication that this is not the case. (FDA is partially at fault here allowed pharma companies to put out some ads that strongly implied this was how SSRIs worked.)

And it's not as if modern antidepressants aren't addictive; like many psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and SNRIs induce physical dependency with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms if abruptly terminated.

No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous. Drugs that are highly effective in enabling human happiness work better at higher dosages (which is how dosage increase works among most drugs that are actually effective, if you think about)... which of course leads to massive problems among the subpopulations of people who have poor impulse control or are overly euphoria-craving.

And all of this plays directly into the hands of religious and social conservatives who have for millenia made careers out of claiming that anything that people like too much must be bad. You'd think that more people would be suspicious of a profession claiming to be a science that was, just a couple generations ago, trying to chemically castrate people against their will to cure them of their homosexuality... ah well.

Re:Don't forget about the War on Drugs.

[Shane_Optima]

One other thing interesting to note about modern psychiatric medicines: they generally insist that you take it daily, instead of taking it only when one's symptoms are especially severe. This aversion to symptom management and emphasis on sustained chemical dependency as the best approach to managing even psychiatric illnesses that have infrequent, transient symptoms is... interesting to behold.

The main exception here is probably for panic attacks among those suffering from anxiety disorders, and these medicines are of course (since they are actually rather effective) scheduled substances doled out in relatively small amounts, particularly to patients of the lower and middle classes.

Re:Really?

[hackwrench]

Really? How were the questions phrased. They ask me about depression, but they are hardly phrased in a way that would make be believe they are trying to convince me I am depressed.

Series of tubes

[sjukfan]

You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.

First off, of course it's wrong if you take meds so you can handle the stress of two full time jobs or assume you can just take a couple of pills and your depression will be gone.

But for most people out there with a psychiatric condition meds and therapy (and some more therapy) is a life saver. The meds will remove some of the symptoms so you can live an almost normal life while therapy helps with the cause for them. A depression is nothing like feeling a bit under the weather, a panic disorder does not go away with a gluten free diet, and grave OCD is as easy to just hold in as Ipecac

Re:Of course not.

[Bite The Pillow]

Oh, good, pseudo intellectual cynicism has dismissed the whole topic. No need to discuss this, ilsaloving has seen through all of the smoke bombs and has clearly articulated the fundamental explanation.

Enjoy the karma boost you get from people who only want to reward opinions matching their own.

Re:Don't be fooled by the words "Scientific Americ

[Phics]

Psychiatric medicine seems to rely on a lot of trial and error, to see what works and what doesn't. The problem compounds as soon as multiple medications are used. Differences in physiology and the nature of the disorder, including factors such as incorrect or incomplete diagnosis seem to lead some unfortunates down the wrong paths, where the presumed illness is incorrectly treated. For example, some personality disorders, such as BPD, can't be effectively treated with medication at all, and must be tackled therapeutically instead, but are often misdiagnosed as something else, or, are sometimes only recognized as anxiety or depression, and while some SSRIs can help with that component, the bigger underlying diagnosis isn't recognized.

In short, treating mental illness can really only be done on an individual basis, and not every psychologist or psychiatrist is going to get it right, and more often than not, many mental illnesses are not treated correctly from day one. To some degree this is to be expected, but it also results in many people seeing nothing but confusion when looking at treatments which are in place. It takes time to get to know someone's mind, so it's no wonder that years can pass before even skilled doctors are able to make a positive impact on many mentally ill patients. It's also no wonder that many of these patients fall through the cracks in the mean-time. Not everyone can afford the kind of treatment required by some diereses, and the waiting game can be frustrating to even well adjusted people.

All I'm saying is that there are many problems which lead to GPs continuously prescribing a regimen of ineffectual drugs, without even thinking about issues such as poor education or practices, or the various evils, (imagined or otherwise), of pharmaceutical companies. To be clear, it's not the drugs that are the problem. The drugs actually do help in many cases. It's getting to that point where they do help that is the trick.

Re: Duh.

[BarbaraHudson]

But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.

Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems. Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything. The brain is plastic. Every time a person goes through a bout of depression, it increases the odds of another bout irrespective of the cause.

Re:Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is damn complicated, which an overwhelming number of variables. Looking at only two variables: a rise in depression and a rise in antidepressant drug use, is criminally unscientific.

I see a lot of in-recent-decades cultural shifts that can easily explain a rise in depression. For example, once upon a time one could get married and have a reasonable expectation of remaining married until death. These days, the divorce revolution has left enormous numbers of adults alone and lonely, and kids being raised in broken homes. The dating world is characterized by selfishness and manipulation rather than long-term mate seeking.

Revelations about how the government has been betraying our trust is leaving everyone without faith in their leaders.

The ongoing elimination of the middle class is pushing ever greater numbers of people down into the lower classes, with no realistic hope of climbing up.

Why would anyone expect depression rates to go down in an environment like this?

Re:One giant leap...

[Billly Gates]

I have numerous issues created by just 3 months on Celexia. I am changed, asexual, and developed drinking and financial problems that were not present before medication. Also I have been off the meds for 4 months I may add and will never know if I will return to my normal self again.

There is a whole site called survingantideppressents.com

Re:Of course not.

[Ol Olsoc]

Oh, good, pseudo intellectual cynicism has dismissed the whole topic. No need to discuss this, ilsaloving has seen through all of the smoke bombs and has clearly articulated the fundamental explanation.

Enjoy the karma boost you get from people who only want to reward opinions matching their own.

Dood! It was a joke! Jeesh - you forget to take your meds or something?

Re: Of course not.

[wierd_w]

I wouldnt say it is complicated, only that it is the result of unpleasant truths.

There major form of psychoactives used in the US is that of anti-depressant medications, used for various kinds of depression and anxiety disorders.

Take that, along with some scary findings ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... ) that the US's "PRODUCE MORE NOW! WITH LESS THAN YOU DID LAST QUARTER, OBEY OR BE FIRED! DO NOT DARE ASK FOR MORE THAN THE 1-WEEK OF VACATION ALLOTED TO YOU! CORPORATE HAS SPOKEN!" culture produces unbearable levels of stress, which increases risk for depression. ( http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal... )

The obvious low hanging fruit to investigate is workplace related stress causing anxiety disorders and other mental disorders, such as dementia. (https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=1744 )

But somehow, this is "Damn complicated", because damnit, without slavedriving people, how will americans be cost effective compared to foreign labor and developing economies!? How will C-level assfucks get to feel good about themselve without driving the company lexus or taking rides in the corporate jet!?

The problem is that the world values money and wealth more than health and happiness, just not in the way that the GGP suggested with the quip about balance reports-- but it was pretty close to the mark, even if he did not know it.

Yes, "damn complicated", because "Damnit, I want my gold-encrusted jet to rival Donald Trumps!" and not "complicated" because "There isnt a glaringly obvious common factor massively contributing to poor american mental health."

Re:Of course not.

[AthanasiusKircher]

I see a lot of in-recent-decades cultural shifts that can easily explain a rise in depression.

I wouldn't exactly dispute the gist of your claims, but I think the relevant psychological factor has little to do with your trends.

People in the past may not have divorced as much, but how much has infidelity actually risen? How much has "kids being raised in broken homes" risen compared to, say, rate of child abuse if you go back more than a couple generations? People used to whip their kids. You had pre-adolescents working in coal mines. Everybody (including kids) used to be basically slightly inebriated most of the time, back when water was frequently unsafe and the carrier of disease... so drunken beatings were pretty much normal.

Family situations were undeniably a lot worse back in the "good ole days." Even in the 1950s or whatever "golden age" of the American middle class family you might imagine from Leave it to Beaver, a significant number of people were taking some sort of crap for a "pick me up" that we'd conflate with drug use today.

Main difference: we didn't TALK about this stuff as much, outside of town gossip. We lamented the stories of the folks "on the other side of the tracks," and those people lamented the stories of the REALLY poor folks they knew. Today, we all lament our own situations.

Or, you talk about leaders as if corruption in politics were new. 'Twas always thus, but perhaps we didn't TALK about it as much.

Or, you talk about the decline of middle class numbers. Yeah, it's a bad trend. But, if we're going to talk about history, even most "poor" people in a place like the U.S. today are living with conditions leagues ahead of the "middle class" a couple centuries back.

I'd bet if you took a bunch of middle-class American folk and took them back to the 17th century and let them even lead a reasonably "upper-class" life then, a significant number would just commit suicide within a year... whereas the 17th-century folks were perfectly happy with what they had.

Why would anyone expect depression rates to go down in an environment like this?

I wouldn't exactly expect depression rates to go down, but I do think they're rather unpredictable based on objective living conditions of a population. There have been quite a few studies looking at "happiness" in more "primitive" cultures around the world and realizing that satisfaction and happiness have relatively little to do with anything objective, and a lot to do with your own perception of your life and the world around you.

Your post is a good example of the way narratives of cynicism and outright pessimism have taken over the way many people perceive themselves and their lives today. They turn on the news and they don't hear "Murder rate continues 1000+-year trend downward!" or even that murder rates or child abduction rates or whatever have fallen a lot in the past couple generations. Instead, they hear about bad stuff happening today or this week or this year. CONSTANTLY.

I am NOT arguing that we just bury our heads in the sand and ignore the news, but there is a lot of truth in the statement "Ignorance is Bliss."

If you thought about your examples a little more, you'd realize this is even encoded in your own "data." Why do people get divorced so often today, for example? Generally, it's because they claim to be "unhappy," and they think doing something else will make things better. Except the data shows they are MOSTLY WRONG. Divorce rates for second marriages are something like 66%; divorce rates for third marriages are close to 75%.

If people actually knew what "made them happy" and were capable of seeking it out rationally, the divorce rate should go down with more experience in marriages. Instead it goes up.

The issue is that people are not objective about their own experiences. They are mostly incapable of making objective assessments of how their sit

Re:Don't be fooled by the words "Scientific Americ

[mcswell]

FWIW, I'm a linguist (more in computational linguistics these days, but reasonably well based in several theories of linguistics). So I read his two articles about Chomsky. I can't speak to the other articles, but his articles on Chomsky make a lot of sense, and seem accurate enough.

I'm not qualified to pass judgment on most of his other articles (and I've only read a handful), but his article about the consciousness problem seems reasonable: https://blogs.scientificameric...

So I'm not sure it's justifiable to call him a kook.

Re:Of course not.

[Ol Olsoc]

Was it? Because people really think like this, and you're not the person I replied to. How certain are you?

Oh, goodness, let's dissect this for a minute. He wrote:

The balance sheets for the various drug companies clearly state that everything is just fine.

Okay. So we have a discussion about psychiatric drugs possibly doing more harm than good. So he took the contrary statement that the group who profits the most from them says that isn't the case. Then note that instead of citing research, he cites balance sheets. That's an example of incongruous sentece writing. And th ekicker is that as humor, it is cynical yet funny.

But as cynical belief? The boys down at the shop call that damn dumb, and I call it a non sequitur. I pretty much agree that especially children are drugged to keep them in line. And I completely believe that the cynical humor OP wrote lines up with my believe, not because of confirmation bias, but because it makes more sense than a person stating that a measurement of profit or loss is the determining factor.

But hey - if you want to start frothing at the mouth, be my guess.

And ps's We can all see the posts people make, so if you want to have a totally private conversation, you two will need to take it to private email. People can post on other people's comments, it's kind the basic premise of Slashdot.

Re: Of course not.

[west]

> Take that, along with some scary findings that the US's "PRODUCE MORE NOW! WITH LESS THAN YOU DID LAST QUARTER, OBEY OR BE FIRED! DO NOT DARE ASK FOR MORE THAN THE 1-WEEK OF VACATION ALLOTED TO YOU! CORPORATE HAS SPOKEN!" culture produces unbearable levels of stress, which increases risk for depression.

Well, there's the small problem that the US (and the rest of the industrialized world) has a standard of living many times the rest of the world. To sustain that, we need to be many times more productive than the rest of the world. And that is becoming harder and harder.

We're going crazy trying to stave off the Great Reckoning, when the developed world median income falls into place with the rest of the world. So, yeah, we're a little stressed. Who wouldn't be? But personally, I don't blame anybody but myself. Once we accept we can't stop water from flowing downhill, and accept a 75% drop in income, (and survive the stress from *that*), the pressure to produce 4x what everyone else in the world produces will be off.

And yet... somehow, I keep fighting that day, pushing it off for just one more year, mental health be damned.

Re: Of course not.

[Z00L00K]

And what's added to the water used?

Re:These are all modern "problems."

[Opportunist]

Nah, they just jumped off the cliff. That does cure depression, actually. Side effects include death, though.

Re:Strong relationship bonds for good mental healt

[bluefoxlucid]

I've found encounters with emotional intimacy quickly deteriorates my mental health. When I'm emotionally-hurt and insecure, I get away from people; rather than healing, I get worse if people start crowding around with their sympathy. The entire notion of an emotional support structure as a critical component in treating depression, ADHD, or other psychiatric conditions works completely-backwards in my case, to the point of eventually driving me to violent antisocial behavior.

I guess violence is the correct answer to what is perceived as a constant, unending, harmful assault. The perception might be a bit off, but the outcome makes sense. I cope well: I simply don't have any friends, because there's essentially nothing good about having friends, in the same way there's nothing good about using a razor blade to cut yourself repeatedly.

Psychiatric medications are awesome

[scourfish]

I suffer from anxiety and depression that runs in my family. I used to be afraid to enter a building if there were other people in it, this invisible wall kept me from doing things I enjoyed, and I would often feel worthless, despite having a decent lifestyle with what could only be described as first world problems. Anxiety attacks that felt like either a heart attack or this sense of impending death occured almost every day. These do not occur due to some sort of emotional trigger. I tried exercise, eating healthy, and relaxing. There was some benefit, but nothing that stopped the anxiety attacks. Sertraline has been life changing for me. I'm able to go outside, I'm less nervous in large groups or around strangers, and I'm more accepting of both my gifts and my shortcoming. I haven't had an anxiety attack for years. I don't miss having one. The only major side effect is that I have to pee a lot, and I get nauseous if I miss a dose, but I'm willing to make that trade off. I wish I could go back in time and reclaim 10 more years prior to starting zoloft. I recommend that critics of psychiatric medication watch Stephen Fry's "The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive" or listen to the experiences of people who rely on those medications before making blanket statements of "useless" or some conspiratorial claim.