When I went through medical school and residency in the 1990s, I was taught that people with depression, anxiety, attention deficit, cognitive distortions, sleep problems, and so on have brains that don’t work the way they’re supposed to, just like people with diabetes have a pancreas that doesn’t secrete enough insulin. My job, according to the th

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The paradigm shift around pain has translated into massive prescribing of feel-good pills. Today, more than one in four American adults—and more than one in twenty American children—takes a psychiatric drug on a daily basis. The use of antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, and Celexa is rising in countries all over the world, with the United States t

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On a more personal level, this creeping reactionary tendency against psychological intervention is starting to get to me. Good therapy and SSRIs have saved my life on two occasions now, and I am unable to function without them due to the severe bouts of OCD which arise when I am unmedicated. Of course, it’s none of my business if this is the specif... See more

In medicating ourselves to adapt to the world, what kind of world are we settling for? Under the guise of treating pain and mental illness, are we rendering large segments of the population biochemically indifferent to intolerable circumstance? Worse yet, have psychotropic medications become a means of social control, especially of the poor, unempl

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