Evan Thomas
New member
My whole point was that there is no single cause. We like single causes because they require no thought, and they're emotionally comforting.tyme said:
Are psychoactive drugs overprescribed? Of course, for the same reason. A "magic pill" is a comforting thing to believe in (hence the across-the-board approximate 30% success rate of placebos for treating almost anything), and it requires no analysis of underlying causation.
Moreover, in a for-profit health care system, resources go to what's profitable, not necessarily what works best. (Compare the funding of neonatal intensive care units, which make money for hospitals, with that of the preventive prenatal care that would decrease the need for that level of medical intervention. There's little or no money to be made by providing preventive care -- it's labor-intensive and requires minimal technology -- so it's relatively unavailable even though it's a much cheaper solution to the problem.)
And as I said, we're a consumer society. If we can buy our way to happiness, or to increased productivity, what's not to like? So these drugs are huge money-makers, and one reason they're overprescribed is that they're so very heavily marketed. (Who, fergodsake, thought it was a good idea to allow TV ads for prescription meds???)
All that said, I doubt that these drugs, in and of themselves, cause basically healthy people to become murderers... The question of suicide, which seems to be a more prevalent side effect, is a harder one to answer. But it's also worth remembering that untreated depression can be terminal -- it's not something to dismiss as not worthy of treatment.
Oh, c'mon -- it's nothing like that simple. Just for starters, there's treatment, and there's effective treatment. Just as prenatal care is an effective way of preventing much of the perinatal disease that lands newborns in intensive care units, so other forms of therapy, which are not profitable for Big Medicine, are effective in treating mental illness -- alone or in combination with drugs. But insurers won't pay for them, which not only makes them unavailable to many people, but drives many practitioners out of business, which drives up the cost. Vicious cycle.
The problem is that we're a society that looks only at short-term, direct costs -- drugs are a cheap (and profitable) way of getting patients to go away. If their overuse (or, more accurately, misuse) leads to adverse consequences down the road, those represent a delayed social cost that's hard to measure, or indeed for most people to get their minds around. We're not set up, certainly as a society, possibly as a species, to look at the long-term social costs of the choices we make.
Examples of the real costs of this short-term thinking are too numerous to mention...
