a) We're a highly medicalized society with very weak institutions for providing informal psychosocial care and support.
b) Saturation marketing of psychiatric medication has caused the general public to grossly over-estimate their efficacy, even in countries where direct-to-consumer marketing is banned.
c) The wholesale price of a generic sertraline pill is about 4ยข, so it's cheap enough to dole out like candy.
d) Medicalizing unhappiness is politically convenient.
If you're depressed, you go to your doctor. That's the message you've been told for decades, it's how our society is set up. In another culture, you might speak to your priest or a village elder. It's undoubtedly a net positive that we've got access to some kind of evidence-based psychiatric care, but a lot of the other structures that people used to rely on for psychosocial care have crumbled. We're less likely to know our neighbours. We have fewer close friends. Our employment is more impersonal and precarious. We're less likely to go to church. If we do go to church, it may well be a megachurch with a congregation of hundreds rather than a close-knit community church.
Doling out pills is the absolute cheapest treatment option, even if some proportion of those pills are expensive proprietary drugs. It's orders of magnitude cheaper than psychotherapy and immeasurably cheaper than building a more humane society. Your doctor can't prescribe a good friend, a sympathetic partner or a better job.
It suits your employer if you conceptualize your misery as the symptom of a "neurotransmitter deficiency" rather than a symptom of your crappy job. You probably won't be as productive, but at least you won't go on strike or burn down your office. It suits the government equally well if you see misery as a personal rather than societal problem.
Some people are just depressed for no discernible reason. Lots of people are being diagnosed with depression when they're just struggling with a shit set of circumstances that would make anyone miserable. The medical model helps some number of people in both camps. Society needs to do a better job of helping people live healthy and fulfilled lives.
b) Saturation marketing of psychiatric medication has caused the general public to grossly over-estimate their efficacy, even in countries where direct-to-consumer marketing is banned.
c) The wholesale price of a generic sertraline pill is about 4ยข, so it's cheap enough to dole out like candy.
d) Medicalizing unhappiness is politically convenient.
If you're depressed, you go to your doctor. That's the message you've been told for decades, it's how our society is set up. In another culture, you might speak to your priest or a village elder. It's undoubtedly a net positive that we've got access to some kind of evidence-based psychiatric care, but a lot of the other structures that people used to rely on for psychosocial care have crumbled. We're less likely to know our neighbours. We have fewer close friends. Our employment is more impersonal and precarious. We're less likely to go to church. If we do go to church, it may well be a megachurch with a congregation of hundreds rather than a close-knit community church.
Doling out pills is the absolute cheapest treatment option, even if some proportion of those pills are expensive proprietary drugs. It's orders of magnitude cheaper than psychotherapy and immeasurably cheaper than building a more humane society. Your doctor can't prescribe a good friend, a sympathetic partner or a better job.
It suits your employer if you conceptualize your misery as the symptom of a "neurotransmitter deficiency" rather than a symptom of your crappy job. You probably won't be as productive, but at least you won't go on strike or burn down your office. It suits the government equally well if you see misery as a personal rather than societal problem.
Some people are just depressed for no discernible reason. Lots of people are being diagnosed with depression when they're just struggling with a shit set of circumstances that would make anyone miserable. The medical model helps some number of people in both camps. Society needs to do a better job of helping people live healthy and fulfilled lives.