ThinkingSkull.com

After hearing about my own family members suggesting that I’m depressed and in need of prescription drugs, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in the “pick a pill, pick your mood” being a real problem and something to avoid. This article makes mention of it, and the last line is my favorite.

He does acknowledge the need for medication in the hardest cases. Just like cancer, severe mood disorders can be life-threatening and should be treated as such, Barber says. But we need to distinguish between real depression and just being bummed out.

The vast majority of the 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2006, he notes, were for people in the second category. Barber lambastes the drug industry for its attempt to turn “the worried well” into customers; he also takes aim at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for according disorder status to conditions like social anxiety and adjusting to a cross-country move.

“Nonsense,” Barber writes, “anger, greed, laziness, impulsivity, as well as jealousy, lust, anguish, and so on, are simply part of the human predicament. They are not medical conditions.”