I have been watching a lot of documentaries lately. I have recently discovered the joy of Netflix, and the ability to watch movie after movie after movie of your choice. No longer am I subject to what the television channels want to show me, I am in control. Although I have been watching documentaries for days, few of them have inspired a blog entry. Until I watched one called The War on Kids by Cevin Soling and Spectacle Films. This film investigates how schools which have always been called "institutions of learning" are increasingly becoming just mere institutions. Now, there could be any number of topics that I could address from this documentary, but one thing inspired me to write and this is the prevalence of psychiatric medications being prescribed to children and their long and short term effects. Did you know that in every school shooting that has occurred in the United States, the child(ren) involved were either on or withdrawing from some kind of mood adjusting psychiatric medication? Why aren't we putting this together? We blame the parents, we blame the media, we blame movies, music, and video games. We don't take one second to think about the medications that these kids are on because those medications are supposed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
In our society, drugs are big business on both ends of the spectrum. Millions of dollars are spent every year on ineffective programs which are designed to keep children away form street drugs. Millions more are spent getting kids on legal drugs that have equal or even greater risks of the same negative effects of those street drugs. And what are we setting these kids up for? A lifetime of drug addiction. Because once you are diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or things like ADD and ADHD it is a life sentence. It never goes away. These children will be on some sort of medication for the rest of their lives. What we see more often than not is that a child goes on medication A, and this medication causes side effects. So they are put on medication B to control these side effects. As side effects wax and wane medications are adjusted, added, or subtracted from the equation. Meanwhile there is little research on what the long term effects of these medications are. And no one questions it.
Doctors are compensated by drug companies for prescribing these medications, and down playing their possible side effects to parents. Parents look to the doctors as the reigning authorities on the subject, and so they give these children the medications without question. And the children, who have no real say in the matter, are subjected to this as a means of controlling undesirable behaviors.
Now, there are some cases where medications are necessary and perform their intended tasks. But our over-medicated society seems to think that there is a pill for everything, and every medical or psychiatric issue has it's treatment in the form of a pill. There is no tolerance for people who suffer from things like depression and anxiety, because there's a pill for that. If you suffer from it you take a pill, and if you choose not to then you should not expect others to accept you for who you are. I know this first hand. I suffer from depression. I have never had any kind of brain scan that displays chemical imbalances that cause this depression. I know I suffer from it, but I don't know the cause. It could be some kind of defective wiring in my brain, but it also could be caused by being raised by a single mother who was profoundly depressed. Here we can get into parenting styles, attachment styles and many other factors that could have lead me to this life of dealing with severe depression, but that is not the subject of this blog. When looking at the answer to depression in the frame of psychiatric medications, one must ask themselves "Do the ends justify the means?" In my experience, no.
I can remember suffering from depression in one form or another for my entire life. For me, it was not until I was a teenager when I was prescribed my first depression medication. Zoloft. I was put on it because my mother was on it, according to the doctor who prescribed it, if it worked for her it should work for me. I cannot recall if it ever worked for me because the side effects from it were so strong that they ruled my life. I slept constantly. It seemed that I could never stay awake. I slept at home, I slept at school, I even would fall asleep at work. I worked at a pizza shop at the time, and sometimes when there was a pizza in the oven and no new orders I would sit down. The next thing I knew I would awake to a burning pizza in the oven. Eating was another issue that I struggled with. I would feel so ravenously hungry that I imagined I could eat a 4 course meal straight away. I would prepare some food, eat a few bites, and feel full to the point of nausea. I suppose if taking my mind off my depression by giving me other problems to deal with was the goal, then it was effective. But I cannot recall ever feeling any relief from the root problem. Of course, this being medicated did not go along with any kind of counseling or psychotherapy. Just put me on a medication and shuffle me out to make room for the next paying customer. Within weeks I stopped taking the medication and resolved to deal with the issue on my own.
The second medication I took was Paxil. This time I was an adult, and going through probably the darkest time of my life thus far. I was running out of options and the depression was reaching a critical point. I reached out for help by seeing my primary care physician. I could not even get the words "I get a little depressed" (which was a gross understatement) out of my mouth before a prescription pad was out and a prescription for Paxil was scrawled across it. At that point in my life I was willing to try anything and felt as if I really had nothing to lose by going down the medication road once again. I began taking the medication. It did work, I remember that. I remember times when I felt so good that I was almost giddy. But what I did not notice were the neurological side effects that were taking hold. I was constantly fidgeting. Other people around me started to notice and I was asked more than once if I was okay. My reply was always "Yeah, I am doing great! Why do you ask?" To which I usually would get no further questions. It was not until one person mimicked for me the fidgeting that I was doing that I realized that this may be a problem. I returned to my doctor and explained to him what was going on. I was immediately removed from Paxil because these neurological side effects had a high instance of becoming permanent. Again, this medication was not prescribed with a regimen of counseling or psychiatric assistance. It was prescribed to me by a primary care physician at a 15 minute appointment, during which the doctor looked at his watch at least 3 times as if to say "Ok, tell me your problems and get the hell out."
I was put on medication with no kind of psychotherapy because at the time general practitioners went by the reduction model and treated only the brain in the control of emotions. Chemical processes in the brain are either overactive or lacking and a medication is needed to adjust them. There is no need to attend to the "mind" as a because the brain as an organ has the problem. Only in recent years have different models been accepted in the medical community. The interactionist model states that the mind and the brain contribute to emotions. The transactional model states that the mind and the brain contribute to emotions, but emotions also contribute to the mind and the brain, for good or for bad.
My better judgment has always told me that I can get through this without medication. And for the most part that is what I have done. When I go against this better judgment and try a medication, I always regret it. But the pressure is always on. I don't dare speak of depression in a physician/patient setting anymore. And when I express my negative feelings to others outside of the medical profession, I cannot count how many times I have been told "Wow, that is really not normal and you need to take a pill for that." So I don't bring it up at all anymore, really.
It seems as if those who fall outside the norm of what we think a human being should think or act like must be corrected with a pill. Some sort of medication which quells their undesirable behaviors and makes them easier for the rest of the world to deal with. So who is the medication really helping? Is the ADHD medication helping the student to succeed? Or is it making it easier for the teacher to deal with a student who may not learn in the same way that other students do? Is my being on some kind of antidepressant helping me to not be depressed, or is it helping the other people in my life to be able to handle my personality more easily? I cannot even count how many friends I have lost because of the way I am. But I would rather feel the great joys, and the great pains of life no matter how good or bad they are than to be pharmaceutically well adjusted.
The fact of the matter is, that we are all different. Some of us are hyperactive while others are not. Some (like myself) are empathetic to the point that they feel the weight of the world and who carry that weight into their daily lives and sometimes get lost in the negativity. Still others can go through life being able to say that they have never been depressed at all. Is the goal of psychiatric medications to make us all fall into what has been determined for us as "a normal range"? One of the markers for a psychiatric disorder is whether or not it interferes with your life. Depression interferes with my life. It makes me less productive. It makes me lazy. It makes me lost interest in things. But being happy interferes with my life too. It just does it in positive ways. What if someone is excessively happy? We don't give them a pill to bring them back down to "a normal range". Are we on a quest to eliminate the negative parts of our emotional being? If we take a pill every time we get a little depressed, how do we learn to overcome such things? I can say that I have learned exponential amounts by getting myself through my bouts of depression. This learning helps me not only get through future bouts of depression, but helps me advise others on how they can do the same. No medication involved.
Today, I accept my depression as part of who I am. I see it when it is happening, I know what to expect. I know ways in which I can get out of it, whether I choose to do those things or not. Depression is one of my "demons" much like everyone else has "demons" they must acknowledge and deal with in their lives. Would I be better off if it didn't exist? Possibly. But the fact of the matter is that it does exist, and no amount of medication is ever going to make it go away. Expecting a magic pill to take it away for me removes my ability to deal with it in my own way and to learn from it.
We need to understand that people are individuals, with different personalities, coping mechanisms, and tendencies to either be happy or unhappy depending on their life circumstances. Sometimes the answer does come in the form of a pill, but it doesn't always have to. And just because you may exhibit behaviors that fall out of the "normal" range, that doesn't mean that the answer comes in a bundle of chemicals that are swallowed with a glass of water.
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