Guardian UK: Richer but less happy, we are now a pill-popping people

Richer but less happy, we are now a pill-popping people
It will take more than a change in prescription rules to break Britain's growing dependence on antidepressants

Jackie Ashley The Guardian, Monday February 11 2008


We are hooked. We are pill-popping people, gobbling down antidepressants, painkillers and antibiotics as if they were sweets. As with gun crime or obesity, we are following where the Americans have led. Last week Heath Ledger, the actor dead at 28, became the symbol of a new culture of pharmaceutical recreation. He accidentally poisoned himself with "anti-anxiety medication". You could indeed hardly make it up.

But the real problem is not one of the affluent or the famous. It is the routine use of legal drugs that should really alarm us - cases like the one reported recently of a woman from Lancashire who was taking up to 64 Nurofen Plus tablets a day, a habit that killed her. The problem is just as serious with prescription drugs. A commons committee has attacked GPs for overprescribing, ignoring advice about how long the strongest tranquillisers should be used for. Apparently the Home Office blames these drugs, benzodiazepines, for up to 17,000 deaths since they were introduced in the 60s.

In one way, this is all just another affliction of prosperity. Gorging seems to be deep in our makeup. Today's westerners, surrounded by almost limitless amounts of cheap, attractively presented, sugary sustenance, find it hard to know when to stop. Similarly, if pills to take the pain away are easy to get, carry no stigma, and give you a little buzz, why hold back? Adults in the modern pharmacy are children in an unmanaged sweet shop.

At first glance, the answer is easy: tighten the rules on prescribing. Take some of the stronger painkillers off open shelves. Insist on clearer warnings. Commission some public education. Then the pill-popping will reduce. But of course it's not that simple. Why not? Partly because of the problem identified by the painter David Hockney, in his letters to the Guardian, who as a strong cigarette enthusiast argued that when you remove one oral fix with the smoking ban, you just encourage people to move on to the next - in this case, pills. Perhaps we all need our favourite poison, booze or drugs or fags, and it is both arrogant and foolish of government to try to close down the consolations one by one. And indeed, you could argue that pills are relatively benign. They don't kill that many people - those Home Office figures, remember, cover nearly half a century. They aren't a source of street rowdiness, like beer. And you don't get cancer from passive pill-popping. Some psychologists argue that if pills can beat the blues by raising your serotonin levels, it would be perverse not to take them.

Yet the real problem is that we are mixing up cause and effect, or illness and symptom. The biggest reason for the sharp rise in pill-popping is not recreational kicks, but a general increase in depression. The number of people claiming benefits because of mental illness rises remorselessly, every year. The pill-popping mania is not about having fun. It is about feeling sad. There is a fashion for "me and my depression" memoirs, to follow the fashion for "my horrible childhood" memoirs but they describe something real. And here is where the politics kicks in. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/11/health.health

Finally people are getting treatment for depression as a serious medical disease. Whatever the complaints about how we are becoming pill-poppers, no way would I go back to the days before society had pills to combat these illnesses.

Other societies have just as much depression; the difference is, they are not treating it.