Why All the Depression Drugs? Big Pharma, Obsolete Thinking

A magazine interviewer asked me why there are so many prescription medications for depression? Without hesitating, I answered “profit.” Drug companies make drugs to fight depression to make billions for their shareholders, and medical physicians often get a cut of the money from drugs they prescribe.

More to the point, though, is why do people take them? The easy answer is that more people are more depressed more often, and the reason for that is the increased stress of modern life. Yet we need to look deeper.

Society has been programmed to believe that, if something is wrong with your health, you can fix the symptoms with drugs and surgeries, and then the underlying cause will go away. Not only that, but aggressive pharmaceutical marketing has caused many to believe that if something isn’t quite right it may be a “syndrome” needing to be addressed by drugs, some of them with horrendous side-effects.

The drug disclaimers often list depression as one of those side-effects. People are taking pills to offset the side-effects of other pills that they didn’t need in the first place. I don’t intend to demean those who need medication to stave off suicide or cutting themselves with razor blades. But our society has become overly drug dependent. Something is wrong with our collective thinking.

The real answer is that the public has bought into the medical philosophy of scientific determinism. As applied to health care, scientific determinism is the notion that everything operates in a kind of mechanical cause and effect. So if a person gets sick, something has gone wrong chemically and can be fixed chemically. If you’re depressed, a chemical can make you un-depressed.

Scientific determinism, of course, can be traced to the world view arising from Newtonian physics. However, more contemporary scientific paradigms like quantum physics, with its new insights into the nature of matter and energy, challenge that earlier materialistic cause-and-effect view. Within this latter paradigm, how the human being sees the world around him plays a role in what he becomes. How he thinks and how he behaves often determines his health.

Why do people take so many anti-depressants? All too often it’s because they don’t think right about themselves, about their values, about their relationships and about the totality of their lives. And they don’t think right, in part, because they’ve been sold a bill of goods. That’s truly depressing!

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