Because Everybody Always Gets Very Passionate About My Depression Posts

When I was in Denver last week (flying out there again tomorrow night), I tore an article out of my complimentary hotel USA Today – you know you’re a freakshow blogger when you do something like this.

Apparently:

Lives were threatened and Americans treated like “guinea pigs” because Eli Lilly & Co. officials lied 15 years ago in denying there was any evidence the anti-depressant Prozac could cause suicidal behavior, a Harvard psychiatrist has charged…

Teicher, who considers Prozac valuable, said many of the problems with suicidal behavior were in patients given high doses, and that’s how the drug was used for the first few years in the USA. “American people were guinea pigs for a few years. If we had known the truth, we would have used it more wisely from the start,” Teicher said.



Isn’t that just the shit?

What I worry about with the huge rush for more and better happy drugs is shit like this happening: the same sort of “oops, actually, it’s worse for you to be on the drug than off it” thing that happens with a lot of weight loss drugs.

I’ve got buddies on Zoloft and family members on Prozac, and you know, though I’m all for drugs as a last resort (and for diagnosed conditions, though the “diagnoses” list is starting to look about as long as the “hysterical symptoms” list at the beginning of the last century), I freak at the idea that popping a pill is the first thing we’re being taught to reach for. Somebody’s getting really fucking rich while we search for “normalcy.”

So. Pause a minute and decompress before going for the bottle, OK?

Same goes for pretty much all solutions found in a bottle.

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