Americans Are Being Overmedicated: The Consequences

One notion currently embraced and perpetuated by both the medical and psychiatric fields is that American adults are little more than helpless infants who cannot possibly tolerate the slightest discomfort or inconvenience without intervention and some form of "help." When this line of thought is subscribed to by the masses, the result is a growing population who are far below a normal functioning level.

"One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance," authored by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, was reviewed in Time Out magazine: "Therapism is what the authors call this movement, and they say its widespread practice is robbing Americans not only of the very essence of what it means to be human but of our self-reliance, ultimately rendering us ill-equipped to deal with stress, sadness, criticism, loss, and a host of other emotions that are life's givens. Worse yet, they claim that therapeutic intrusion when none is warranted can actually trigger debilitating conditions." (*)

This is a very accurate assessment of this trend-- both the medical and psychiatric professions convincing people that they cannot make it in life, cannot face life, without "help," "support," and medication. In many parts of the United States, it is popular for any minor ache or pain to be met with the need to "take something" for it-- resulting in individuals relying on medical relief for even the slightest discomfort. In areas with a large population of drug addicts, this is even more prominent, as even those who are "in recovery" from their drugs-of-choice are so accustomed to not having to feel any pain that to "drug down" even the most minor is considered natural.

When this type of attitude extends into the psychiatric field, it causes even more devastating consequences-- people are becoming incapacitated, losing the ability to function as full human beings, for they are being told they cannot deal with themselves nor with anything in their lives. This is not to say that those who have serious problems should not seek help; however, the widespread belief that anything which is less than perfect signals some type of "problem" which must be met with intervention and/or medication does nothing but erode a person's normal coping skills. Similar to what Time Out magazine stated, too many people are becoming unable to live their lives because they're being told they are not capable of doing so. And, in hearing that they must "take something," they generally do not realize that alleviating pain or other negativity in this manner results at the least in dulling the system and at the worst deadening it.

These days there's one "disorder" after another becoming popular reasons for medicating. Normal rambunctious children are labeled "ADD" and set on prescriptions; people whose everyday lives are temporarily out-of-kilter from various circumstances are handed anti-depressants and similar medications which take the focus off the need and the ability to deal with the situations-at-hand; in short, normal challenges of everyday life are rarely seen as normal challenges, but instead "problems" which no one could possibly manage on his or her own. As Helen Gurley Brown said in "Having It All," we're quickly becoming a nation of babies who meet every challenge with tossing one's hands in the air and exclaiming: "I can't be expected to deal with this!"

Life contains good and bad. Taking away people's coping skills, and diminishing their ability to function at a normal level, not only reduces a person's status as a full human being but also reduces the quality of life itself.

(*)