The overmedication of America. Is it ethical to be handing out anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and ADHD medication like candy? Is it ethical to keep putting bandaids on big problems without addressing the deeper issues of long term mental health and societal issues? Who is responsible for the rising issues of depression, anxiety, and ADHD? Is overmedication detrimental to society? These are the questions that I will be addressing with this paper. In 1621, Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy and it was a huge hit. Published just before the Industrial Revolution in England, this book served many as the age of anxiety began to gain momentum. Burton’s main point was that melancholy is a part of life, part of what it means to be human, …show more content…
but as time progressed, depression transformed. Today we are faced with a new set of stressors due to industrialization, population growth, technology, and more. The fact that Donald Trump may actually become president, that we are rapidly depleting our planet’s resources and no one cares, we’re fat, lazy, obsessed with self image, consumerism, and our population is growing so quickly that we won’t be able to sustain it for much longer.
It is easy to view the world as doomed, and we don’t want to face it so we put our headphones in, keep our heads down, eyes on our phones so that we don’t have to look at what is happening to the world. According to my psychology teacher Ron Stout, 75% of Americans are on medications that they wouldn’t need if they would just slightly change their lifestyle. We can blame our quick fix, right here right now, no work attitude for the ridiculous amount of medications that we consume.Pharmaceutical companies have recognized this huge opportunity for profit. Today, depression has been professionalized, commodified, and industrialized. The advertisements for Cymbalta or Abilify are just like ones for whitening strips or fast food. They use psychological techniques to make these things look appealing instead of suggesting that we can just eat less processed foods for whiter teeth or that it would actually benefit us more than we know to cook our own meals instead of buying a taco that
takes thirty seconds to make and provide us with no nutrition. Americans are obsessed with fast and easy, and mental health is no exception. We’re already stressed because we’re working so long and hard at our meaningless jobs to pay for our new house, expensive clothes, that adding a few hundred dollars a month to the tab to see a psychiatrist and get a pretty little prescription to make it all ok doesn’t seem too crazy. All of our friends are doing it. I’m sad, or stressed out, or I can’t pay attention, so why not fix it fast with a pill you take just once a day! Ativan and Xanax are sold to help you fight panic, but no one suggests that maybe the cause of your anxiety may not lie within you, but within the things expected of you in this society. Small children go to school and are told to sit in one spot for long hours listening to often uninteresting things, and when they don’t do well with that unrealistic structure their parents are told that their children have a problem, that they need drugs. Kids and teenagers are constantly told to exercise, eat right, and wash their hands, but important lessons that address keeping the mind healthy are never mentioned. We grow up in a competitive, me against you society that teaches us to compare ourselves to Victorias Secret models and Kim Kardashian, and we feel bad about ourselves when we don’t look like all of that fakeness. Instagram and Facebook further encourage the mind to compare. There are several measures that can be taken to teach kids how to think positively and maintain their brains. We can teach them the truth early on that each individual creates their own reality by choosing to think a certain way, and I believe this could prevent many cases of depression and anxiety in adolescents. The public school system in America was originally designed to create a citizen that would be fit for the work force, and many of the jobs today require little thinking and little enthusiasm. Depression, anxiety, and ADHD medications seek to remold everyone into the same shape so we can continue functioning in society, to continue to work uncomplainingly and unreflectively. The mental effect of these drugs is very subtle: if you were feeling the depth of emotion before, it flattens things out. There are some people that truly need medication, but for others looking for a quick fix, their getting cut short. How can one discover truth, learn to love, or feel loss if their emotions are being dulled? Famous writers and artists such as Edgar Allan Poe and Pablo Picasso would be nobodies without their sadness. These things are part of the human condition. When on antidepressants or antianxiety medications we don’t feel as bad when we hurt someone’s feelings and we don’t feel as happy when we reach a goal. Antidepressants don’t do anything to solve the problem. They are just a patch job: they smooth off the rough edges where life is. We are treating the symptoms, not the problem, and that itself is a huge problem! Doctors come into some tricky situations regarding ethics, but psychiatry in particular is a very important field to be ethically sound. Is medicating a nation right? Is it good for us? It most certainly shuts a lot of people up, but is it right to so quickly prescribe medication that alters mental chemistry without a thorough examination? To me, 30 minutes is generally not enough time for a psychiatrist to learn enough about a patient and their situation to prescribe a drug. Though it may take slightly longer, and require more work, maybe doctors should prescribe a regimen of exercise, healthy foods, and counseling to a patient with a mild case of depression or anxiety. If this method was tried before testing out medications the patient would have no side effects, and establish good habits for the rest of their life that would prevent future mental health issues. Working hard at training the brain to think in a different way is known to many doctors as a successful technique, but it takes time, it doesn’t make psychiatrist any money, and their patients want happy now. Is it the fault of the doctor or the patient? How can one know for sure that a doctor is ethically sound?
Prescription and pharmaceutical drug abuse is beginning to expand as a social issue within the United States because of the variety of drugs, their growing availability, and the social acceptance and peer pressure to uses them. Many in the workforce are suffering and failing at getting better due to the desperation driving their addiction.
The government of the United States of America is very unique. While many Americans complain about high taxes and Big Brother keeping too close an eye, the truth is that American government, compared to most foreign democracies, is very limited in power and scope. One area American government differs greatly from others is its scope of public policy. Americans desire limited public policy, a result of several components of American ideology, the most important being our desire for individuality and equal opportunity for all citizens. There are many possible explanations for the reason Americans think this way, including the personality of the immigrants who fled here, our physical isolation from other countries, and the diversity of the American population.
During 1776, the United States was at war to gain its own independence from the hands of the tyrant King George III and his kingdom. As the fightt continued, the spirits of the U.S. soldiers began to die out as the nightmares of winter crawled across the land. Thomas Paine, a journalist, hoped to encourage the soldiers back into the fight through one of his sixteen pamphlets, “The American Crisis (No.1)”. In order to rebuild the hopes of the downhearted soldiers, Thomas Paine establishes himself as a reliable figure, enrages them with the crimes of the British crown, and, most importantly evokes a sense of culpability.
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
Psychology is a social science that aims to study the mind and the behaviors of humans. It aims to understand what drives humans to act the way they do. It differs from sociology and anthropology in that it takes accounts the individual rather than society as a whole.
There has been an increase in the Misuse and Abuse of prescription drugs to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). the number of children on medication for ADHD has grown from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2013 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But although there is an over-medication of ADHD drugs, there is actually and under-medication since not all the right people are getting medicated. Many individuals lack insurance or are insured with health plans that do not cover the outpatient prescription drugs they need and cannot afford.10 Therefore, Individuals covered by various health plans and programs, and those who have no prescription drug coverage, pay significantly different prices for the same medications. As the demand for ADHD drugs grows, higher prescribing rates and increasing drug prices result, which creates problems for these number of Americans who cannot afford the treatment they require.
Cropper, Carol Marie. “A Cloud Over Antidepressants” Businessweek 3880 (2004): 112-113 Business Source Premeir. Web. 28 Jan. 2014
The poem “America” by Tony Hoagland reflects on how peoples’ minds are clouded by small-scale items, money, and the unimportance of those items. Metaphors and imagery are utilized to emphasize the unimportance of materialistic items in America. How America is being flooded with unnecessary goods. The poem uses examples of people to create an example and connection to the overall meaning.
Stolzer, PhD, J. M. (2007). The ADHD Epidemic in America. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 9, 109-116.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a psychiatric disorder that causes children to have problems with paying attention, trouble with following instructions, have impulsive behaviors and become easily distracted. Medications, such as Adderall and Ritalin, are used to treat the symptoms of this disorder by helping the patient to focus and pay attention while also curbing their impulsive behavior and hyperactivity. Side effects of these medications are, but not limited to, anxiety, addiction and in some cases psychosis. Proponents of giving ADHD medication to children argue that ADHD is a real disorder in children and the medication does improve the symptoms of the disorder by a large margin as well as being cost effective. Also, not only are the parents happy with the outcome of their children taking the prescribed medication but so are the children themselves. Proponents also argue that by not letting parents of the children, young adults and adults choose to take these prescriptions when diagnosed with ADHD that the medical and psychiatric communities would be in violation of the principle of autonomy. Justice as well would be violated since most of the burden of dealing with all the symptoms caused by this disorder would fall onto those with ADHD and partly on their families. Opponents of giving ADHD medication to children point out that it is not only going to children with ADHD but also being prescribed to those not diagnosed with the disorder as well as the pills being given or sold to other children and young adults. They also claim that the full side effects of ADHD medication are still not known and could have harmful long- lasting side effects on the children taking the medications. In this case, the princip...
The point that Alan Brinkley makes in his essay, “The Idea of an American Century”, was that the American people intended to use their nation’s great power following WWII in order to spread the American Model to other nations. The American people sought to use the United States new superpower status to push their way of life to the entire world even if that meant by force. The Vietnam War was the best example of this. The American people wanted not only to stop Communism, but also to install their own form of government upon the Vietnamese people. After coming out victorious in both World Wars, Americans felt that they would use their newfound power to spread their way of life onto others.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the first woman director of planning policy at the State Department and the president and CEO of the New America Foundation. She has taught at two of the most prestige schools in the country Princeton and Harvard Law. She is also the author and editor of several books, but the most recent one is called “The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World which was published in the year 2007. Slaughters essay is about trying to balance home life and work life, and it first appeared in the Atlantic in July/August 2012 issue and was also on the Huffington Post. This essay argues that women in high power jobs and government positions can have both a work life and also keep their home life. She started her essay with a little information on background about her job.
For the purpose of this essay, I have chosen to write about the theme revolving around alienation, anxiety, and panic. I would like to extend the theme of alienation and anxiety to include depression as that is a theme commonly found among some of these works. While discussing these themes, I will reference to two texts from the course text book. The first text is “Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid. The second text used for reference will be “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” written by Ernest Hemingway.
Every person has felt melancholy and dejected at one point in their lives as sorrow does not discriminate on race, age, nor gender. Even in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne, the protagonist, faces desolation in her life, which elicits an emotional response in myself where I am able to relate to the despondency she faces.
The topic that was chosen for this project is one that has been studied and looked into before. Many articles and even a few books have been written concerning the conflict of interest, the DSM, and the pharmaceutical industry, and literature also exists that deals with other aspects of the issue. Both sides of this issue contained relevant information for this project. In the literature that was anti-DSM, there was a clear bias. Using both sides, brought more neutrality to our perspective, which led to a less biased viewpoint. This project has taken a different path than others because it combines economics, political science, and sociology. Also, other authors gave their opinion on how this conflict of interest should be stopped,