Mass psychosis

This is a horrifying but interesting article on the use of anti-psychotic medications in the US.  It begins:

Has America become a nation of psychotics?

Apparently, in 2008, anti-psychotics surpassed every other category of drug -- even cholesterol-lowering statin drugs -- to become the number one most prescribed type of medication in the US.

Some other shocking statistics from the article:

• In a recent study, 1 in 5 children who saw a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an anti-psychotic drug.
• Because bipolar disorder can be treated with the newer (still patented) anti-psychotics, diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children rose by 40 times between 1994 and 2003.
• 18 of the 20 psychiatrists who wrote the current clinical treatment guidelines for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia had ties to drug companies.
• The number of Americans now classified as disabled by mental illness, enough to qualify for Social Security benefits, has more than doubled between 1987 and 2007, from 1 in 184 to 1 in 76.  This casts doubt on the efficacy of all new (expensive, patented) psychiatric drugs in general.

Anti-psychotics are inadequately studied in children, and may cause obesity and diabetes.  As with many psychiatric drugs there is also a risk that in a small minority of people they may cause violence and/or suicide.

Yep, there's a mass psychosis going on here, but it's not the sort the shrinks are seeing in their patients.

Comments

[Ethan]

I think that capitalism simply can't deal with drugs. Cocaine was used in its natural form for thousands of years with no known problems -- then chemists concentrated it, psychiatrists recommended it, and companies marketed it, until its use became so destructive that it is now synonymous with hardcore crime and fuels war in Columbia and Mexico. Similar with tobacco... Maybe drugs shouldn't be treated as commodities? Nowadays, of course, the system has the brainpower to craft its own brand-new drugs and create drug epidemics out of whole cloth.

[Kris]

@Ethan: Right. And there's so much profit for Big Pharma in creating new diseases, making diagnoses of diseases that call for drugs, etc. Capitalism treats EVERYthing as a commodity, including people.