The most dangerous thing any adult can do today
is walk into a psychiatrist’s office —Dr Peter Breggin,
American psychiatrist
Altho someone should have, what with the explosion of prescriptions for anti-d's starting in the early nineties, and like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering adherents and momentum as it careened recklessly along.
Antidepressants are the most prescribed psych med, followed closely by anti-anxiety medications like Xanax and Ativan or any other benzo that can be justified, legally speaking, followed by mood stabilizers. Anti-psychotics bring up the rear, altho with impressive numbers.
I often wondered when the naturally occurring human responses to catastrophe, calamity, extended pain and illness, isolation, and the many and various slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, like depression, suddenly became a mental illness. As tho any other response to those circumstances wouldn’t have been bizarre, and in truth, truly insane.
Now I know.
Howard Kroplick convinced the company to invest in the pricey research required to develop the now-ubiquitous questionnaire. The rise of questionnaires like the PHQ-9 has led to more anti-depressant prescriptions than any BigPharma company could possibly have dreamed of prior to its creation.
Whether for better or for worse, well ….. that’s an open question …
- Little interest or pleasure in doing things
- Feeling down depressed and hopeless
- Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much
- Feeling tired or having little energy
- Poor appetite or overeating
- Feeling bad about yourself or that you’re a failure or have let your family down
- Trouble concentrating on things like reading a newspaper or watching TV ....
- Moving or speaking so slowly that other people have noticed. Or the opposite, being so fidgety or restless that you’ve been moving around a lot more than usual...
- Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself.