Sad truth about our addiction to happy pills
Don’t tell me we’re twice as unhappy as we were a decade ago
Afew months ago I was sitting in my GP’S surgery in LA – where I still spend a third of the year – making the kind of stilted conversation that you do as a Velcro-fastened cuff slowly cuts off the circulation in your arm. I told the doctor about the novel I was working on and how arduous writing was; I think I mentioned something about the tiredness caused by a child with a chronic sleep aversion not really helping. These were little life whinges – the overall tone casual, jokey even – but, as I left, the doctor tore a sheet off his prescription pad and handed it to me.
“This’ll help,” he said. The prescription was for Wellbutrin – real name bupropion hydrochloride – a popular anti-depressant in the US.
“But I’m not depressed,” I pointed out. “It’s a low dosage,” he shrugged. “It’ll give your energy levels a boost and generally perk you up.”
If there’s a more tempting promise for any working or stay-at-home mum, dad, man, millennial or adult human alive today, I’d love to hear it. And I was so tempted that I tore that prescription up as soon as I got in the car. Because I couldn’t be less depressed. Because I get all the perking up I need from coffee, wine and good company. And because we’re all well aware that for many in genuine, medical need antidepressants aren’t about perking up your life, but saving it.
And yet, according to a new report by the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence, millions of Brits being prescribed magic sweeties aren’t being warned about the drugs’ side-effects – the nausea, anxiety, insomnia and loss of sex drive – or how difficult it may be to give them up.
In the survey of 319 British antidepressant users – all of whom were trying to quit the pills – 64per cent revealed that they were given zero information about the potential risks and side effects by their doctors, while 25per cent said no advice had been given on how to come off the medication. But perhaps the study’s most alarming finding was that many doctors were themselves completely unaware of the pills’ potential dangers either. It would be laughable if it weren’t so depressing – and proof of a shameful lack of both medical responsibility and accountability.
Just as well British doctors don’t prescribe them in the cavalier fashion of that LA doctor and Prozac Nation, right? Wrong.
The latest figures show that 13per cent of Americans are on antidepressants compared to 16per cent of Brits: that’s more than seven million people, more than almost every other country in the Western world and more than double the number being prescribed 10 years ago. And don’t tell me we’re twice as unhappy as we were a decade ago, that millions of us were simply undiagnosed or misdiagnosed (there may be a figure, but it won’t be that one) or that British medical professionals operate on a lofty plane, immune to fads and the appeal of the quick fix.
I am, however, prepared to believe that as a country we’re mired in a psychological funk: that as jeerworthy as people now find Christianity, it did at least provide a set of rules that kept people grounded and in place, in a way that all the meditation and juicing and PC righteousness is clearly failing to do.
Because, despite all the virtuous rituals we’re convinced will help us fill the secular void, ours is a flailing, rootless, fractured society in desperate search of a fix. And anti-depressants, we’re promised by professionals who seem to be flailing as much as their patients, will fix you in six to eight weeks. We’ll worry about the rest later – once you’re feeling better.
Well the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence’s survey will tell you what your GP might not: that the “mild” withdrawal symptoms health officials have been playing down for years can be severe enough to last more than 12 months.
Nearly half of those in the latest survey said they experienced withdrawal symptoms for more than a year, and 30 per cent had to give up work. Thirty per cent! They certainly won’t quote one patient in the study who said: “I exist as a shadow of the person I was.”
Which reminds me of the words of a close friend, who when trying to come off the drugs her doctor had put her on for post-natal depression more than 10 years ago, told me in a weirdly neutral tone “things are slowly getting easier. Now it just feels like my capacity for joy has been slightly dulled.”
Which might be one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. And something I’d definitely like to be warned about by any doctor assuring me they have The Solution.