I agree with you Renee, at least in some cases. I'm not so sure that it applies across the board to mental illness. It's not my specialty, but I am under the impression that many people with more severe forms of mental illness absolutely require medication to function.
I thought it was enlightening to read this response to the article from a reader who comes from a "non-Western" culture:
I agree with you. I’m frequently shocked to hear my well-educated, liberal friends rant about how mental health disorders are a creation of big pharma, and sneer at people who want to wipe out “sadness,” when I know from personal experience and that of some other friends that we’ve only sought help after overcoming a lot of shame and stigma about being “ill” and have resisted medication only to suffer unnecessarily. I can’t believe Barber is a professor at Yale - he “sells” his case just as disingenuously as drug companies, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his case studies are heavily biased toward the proportion of the population for which, yes, of course life events and poverty have been key in getting them depressed, but that’s not a representative sample.
There’s a strong suspicion on the left, particularly the European left, I think, that antidepressants are consumerist, self-indulgent, capitalist tools to turn us all into Stepford Wives - read this ridiculous article in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/11/health.health
It’s obnoxious, poorly informed and offensive, equating antidepressants with “uppers.” Unfortunately a lot of people go around with that impression.
The other part of the anti-antidepressants argument that’s infuriating is the pious insistence on the part of the anti-medication crowd that depression is a Western disease. I grew up in the non-West, and various people around me suffered from it and other mental illnesses, though it was only spoken of in hushed terms and only among adults, and good counselling and psychiatric help did not exist, people responded to it with a pull-your-socks-up message or consigned those with long term issues to asylums and essentially threw them out of the family. Children with emotional problems were similarly dealt with harshly, and patterns of child-rearing and school discipline and pressure seemed almost designed to throw kids off the deep end. And there were suicides among schoolchildren taking exams every year, but heaven forbid these problems should be spoken of openly and without stigma or shame. In this sense the West is much better, and I’d invite all those who romanticise the harmonious, village-upbringing of their idealised ‘traditional society’ to go swap places with someone there.
— Posted by SP
I think the journo and the reader above make a valid point about scapegoating and cultural cringe.
I think it is just as destructive and distracting to simply blame drug companies, governments, western medicine, etc. for our problems. People do it, of course, for the same reason that doctors prescribe unnecessary medication: it is a lot easier than finding positive and constructive solutions to such difficult problems!
