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Medication nation

It seems nowadays everyone has a disorder or dysfunction. It doesn’t take much to get ready access to all kinds of drugs from your local pusher, the GP. Sophie Taylor explores the medication nation.

December 2006

A family member dies in a car crash and you feel miserable five months later. Is this misery a "disease"? Do you need medicine to cure it?

A friend has three young children, an unhappy marriage, a top executive job, poor diet, poor sleep and no time for exercise. This person feels tired, worried, unhappy, lethargic and overwhelmed. Are these symptoms of a disease or symptoms of life? Does this person need to take a pill or to make a change in their lifestyle?

Nowadays depression is being labelled a disease, a disease at epidemic proportions. But what happened before this? Were people happier before or did we just not have a name for "depression"? What did people do before antidepressant medications? Is a pill going to cure everyone? When do we deal with the reasons behind our unhappiness? Can a pill overcome some of these deeper problems without us ever having to face them?

Being shy is now called Social Anxiety Disorder, PMT is now Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, impotence is Erectile Dysfunction and being a total bastard is having a Personality Disorder.

“There is a lot of money to be made [by drug companies] and people are increasingly labelling and [looking for a] quick identification of what is wrong… snappy one liners,” explains Gail Bell, a drug educator, author and former pharmacist, in her essay The Worried Well: The depression epidemic and the medicalisation of our sorrows.

“Once you’ve stuck a label on it somehow you’re not responsible for what happens.”

Bell saysdrug companies made depression a “disease” so it could be easily recognised and easily treated by doctors in order to sell more prescriptions.

The use of antidepressant medication or SSRI's (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) is on the increase. In Australia in 2004, twelve million prescriptions for antidepressants were given out through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). 250,000 of those scripts went to patients under twenty years old.

Imagine your brain is a house. When you’re having fun and everything’s jammin’ at your house party all the little serotonin people dance around in your living room and then at the end of the night they all go home and you don’t feel so good anymore. SSRIs lock all the doors shut in your living room to stop your serotonin party people from leaving so you feel better for longer. ‘Sounds bloody good, sign me up!’ you say. However, there are often side effects.

Some of the side effects for the antidepressant Zoloft include headache, dizziness, shakiness, muscle stiffness or weakness, decrease or loss of touch or other senses, dry mouth, increased sweating, diarrhoea, indigestion, vomiting, tiredness - you wanna hear more? - hot flushes, fever, weight increase or loss, sleeping difficulties, sleepiness, sexual problems, agitation, nervousness, anxiety - you still here? - frightening dreams, yawning, abnormal thinking, teeth grinding, loss of appetite, impaired concentration, vision disturbance, menstrual irregularities and difficulty in passing urine. So you start off sad and you end up not being able to piss right.

Keeping in mind that Zoloft is used to treat depression it would seem that one could end up having more side effects than symptoms in the first place. And don’t forget the increased possibility of suicide- just another minor side effect of antidepressants.

Post-grads Brendan Foster and fellow student Bart McGann stopped taking their antidepressants very soon after they started.

“It felt like I had a whole body fever, I ground my teeth, I was twitching all the time,” says Brendan. “I felt a sense of knowing something was happening to my body that I couldn’t control. I felt unhinged. It was really disconcerting.”

Bart had a similar experience. “It was the worst three days of my life. I’d rather deal with depression than take antidepressants,” he says. “I couldn’t get out of bed, I had no energy for three days, I ate a lot, my sense of touch felt dull, I was paranoid beyond belief. It was like walking through treacle…I felt like an amoeba.”

Bart had no trouble getting the drugs from his GP either, “I told him I didn’t feel well and that I’d been under a lot of stress lately and couldn’t cope with it anymore. Then he asked me a couple of questions, pulled open a drawer in his desk and chucked me a trial pack of antidepressants.”

After three days of excessive discomfort Bart stopped taking the pills and found an easier solution to his unhappiness, “I found something to do and I was too busy to be depressed.”

According to Beyond Blue's online do-it-yourself diagnoses, some of the symptoms of depression include tiredness, headaches, churning gut, trouble sleeping, irritability, feeling overwhelmed, frustration, feeling guilty, indecisiveness, thoughts of “It’s all my fault” or “Nothing good ever happens to me”, not getting things done at work and not going out any more. These symptoms need to have persisted over two weeks. Just two weeks? So it would appear that every man and his dog could do with a large diagnosis of depression and a tasty side dish of Prozac… or Lexapro or Zoloft or any other drug the pharmaceutical companies are pushing at the time. 

It has been known for a long time that often a sugar pill given as a placebo can have the same effects as an SSRI. Bell quotes these telling statistics in her essay: “In a 2002 study of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants, based on forty-two drug company-audited clinical trials, placebos were found to be 80 per cent as effective as SSRIs and their variants.”

In Mental Health in Australia: A Snapshot, the Australian Bureau of Statistics states: "Mental or behavioural problems were most prevalent among those who were separated or divorced." Furthermore, "Those people who lived in the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas... experienced a higher prevalence of mental or behavioural problems compared with people who lived in the least socioeconomically disadvantaged areas."

These statistics are not surprising but they show that mental health is directly related to environmental and external factors in people's life. One would expect to feel stressed and upset after a marriage breakdown or if one's financial status was unstable. Does this mean, however, that this person has an "illness" or a "disease"?

In her essay Bell elaborates, “It has been argued that a prescription for a mood-altering drug reduces the necessity for the patient to come to terms with past behaviour. What happened in the time leading up to taking a seat in the doctor’s office becomes redundant. The future becomes the target. Time starts now, from when the first tablet is swallowed. By choosing to claim a depressive identity, we turn away from the past and, in our own meek way, contribute to the new collective avoidance of taking responsibility for own lives.”

When you read Matthew Johnstone's book I Had a Black Dog there's no doubt that this man has battled with depression for over 20 years. A person who's had this "black dog" for so long could certainly benefit from taking antidepressant medication. It’s the quick fixes that Bell worries about, “there is a definite need for people with severe clinical depression and even for mild to moderate clinical depression to be helped but I think they scooped everyone into the one basket and began medicating across the board- that’s my biggest concern.”

In the future will drug companies have a name for everything? Will all our negative emotions be syndromes, diseases, illnesses and disorders? Will we see a Married an Asshole Disorder (MAD)? Baggage Syndrome (BS)? Shoulda Used Contraception Syndrome (SUCS)? An anti-jealousy pill? An anti-heartache pill?? …Now that’s depressing.

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