Is
there a connection? Or perhaps the better question is: How could there not be?
Just
as national leaders stumble around in Washington in a vain attempt to appear
rational, individuals doubt their own sanity and doctors around the country, often
wrongly, prescribe tons of medication to mask every symptom of unease.
Government
is more art than science and so is psychiatry. Both require at minimum the
ability to grasp reality and deal with it in a humanly imperfect way, to face
painful tradeoffs in life, accept responsibility and get on with it.
Yet
on both levels, Americans live in denial. Congress and the White House parry
and posture to avoid rational decisions that would keep the economy from falling
out of bed while equally bumbling doctors prescribe pills for patients, nearly
two-thirds of whom do “not meet the criteria for major depressive episode as
described by the psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders,” according to a new Johns Hopkins study.
“It’s
not only that physicians are prescribing more, the population is demanding
more,” the lead researcher explains. “Feelings of sadness, the stresses of daily
life and relationship problems can all cause feelings of upset or sadness that
may be passing and not last long. But Americans have become more and more
willing to use medication to address them.”
As
fights over health care and government shutdown go on in Washington, the
President and Congress would do well to stop talking about panaceas and help
Americans who are being hurt by economic depression stop masking their
reactions with pills that numb them into bearing up under the resulting reality—-or
at least in the case of the Tea Party, take some of them themselves.
Right
now, the only ones feeling no pain in this American Double Depression are the
pharmaceutical companies.
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