Most of us do experience such emotional trauma throughout our lives, and all of us have our own special solution to deal with it, for example, exercising, meditating and many more.
This new century promised us another method. Anti-Depressants or happiness packed in a pill. Below is an article I quoted from Economist.com which discusses this new medicine.
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URL to Article
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This article basically introduces both the negative and positive implications of the antidepressant drug, SSRIs.
One of the major points brought up by the article is the usage of the drug in suicidal persons. On one side, it is stated that the drug serves as a cheap way to save lives; while on the other hand, it provokes suicides.
The mechanism of the drug is such that it introduces a chemical substance into a person’s body in order to jumpstart the body’s production of serotonin, the chemical responsible for your good mood.
I myself think that this is too crude a way to solve the problem. Taking this drug makes you happy, but most of the time, you don’t see why do you get caught in this blind, uncontrollable and baseless euphoria. When the drug’s effect eventually wears off, you are left with what you started with - nothing. This could eventually lead to various negative effects.
The sudden change in your mood as the drug wears off could leave you confused and frustrated. It is comparable to a wealthy person suddenly stripped of every single penny and left on the streets. We have heard many cases of failed businessmen committing suicide due to a heavy blow to their financial security, and I think it would only be right to say that these patients’ suicidal conditions would worsen after taking the drugs. However, there is still a slight difference between these two cases.
A businessman who failed could only find two ways, to give up or to start anew. But for the depressed, the rich euphoria does not need much work to get; you just had to stretch out your hands and pop another pill down your throat. It is potentially addictive to the extent that the user would suffer an emotional cold turkey the moment he cuts of his dosage, aggravating the situation. Simply put, anti-depressant pills are just like Ecstasy, put in lower dosages, with an equally depressing list of side effects in situations of overdose.
But the surprising aspect is the total world dosage of SSRIs. According to the article, over 10 billion dosages were taken in 2004, up from an overshadowed 3 billion in 1995, and 2004 was 4 years ago. In 2004, there were 6.4 billion people, so it works out that on an average, each person took 1.7 doses of SSRIs. That is assuming that the whole world was sad.
With the enormous string of side effects, the article also questions the integrity of research conducted on the drug. The misleading information we were provided with were all in the purpose of promoting the drug, and concealed information revealed a much uglier side, including disproving the drug’s advertised effectiveness. In my opinion, these shabby test statistics, once published, would have left the commercializing of the anti-depressant drug in a depressing state.
The article ends with a comment that “[if all therapies fail,] maybe all you need is a minor or mediocre effect in order to reduce suicides overall.” However, I beg to differ. Throwing pills at anyone who show up in hopeless blues does not seem to be a responsible behavior.
One may argue that the person’s need was dire, and there were no conventional therapies to save the day. However, if there was so much effort spent in developing the drug, and even more effort spent on debating over its usage, why is there is no substantial effort made to develop newer therapies?
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