21st Century Snake Oil: Psychotropic Drugs- The Real Epidemic

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The mainstream media and government have both been devoting a lot of attention to the opioid crisis- either real or imaginary- I smell hyperbole. I have to take them but do so responsibly, so naturally I have to pay for the irresponsibility of others- I also suffer little or no adverse effects. It's also difficult for me to believe that doctors are prescribing lethal doses, causing people to "drop like files," asd the MSM proclaims. I believe they could go a long way toward solving the problem by removing Fentanyl (50X stronger than heroin) and Carfentanil (1000X heroin) from the market except for use in hospitals and hospices. However, there's another equally troubling epidemic- this one treating maladys that are largely imaginary- "mental illness." I'm not saying that there's no such thing as depression (one of the most widely treated)- but much of it, I believe, is situational rather than clinical.

I'm also not going to argue the legitimacy of psychiatry, except to say that the focus has shifted away from psychotherapy to treating "chemical imbalances." As there are no tests for these imbalances- as there are for say, cancer or diabetes- how can they discern exactly which chemicals they need to replace? Moreover, these "imbalances" are treated with chemicals that do not exist in nature- so how is it that these imbalances are being corrected? The real imbalances being corrected, I believe, are in the profit margins of large pharmaceutical companies, as we shall see.

Most of my Steemit friends know that I take care of my former boss who suffers from "depression" and "bi-polar disorder." I use quotations because he actually suffers from neither in a clinical sense. A brief historical overview will show the real problem- over medication. After living a life of privilege, never accomplishing anything, other than inheriting money and real estate, he developed Graves disease, a thyroid condition. After radiation treatment he lost a lot of weight and, being an egocentric individual (he studied film in college in hopes of acting or directing) he was unhappy with his appearance. Instead of dealing with the weight loss, he got "depressed."

Now, 15 years later, he's on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs that includes Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Xanax, Valium, Gabapentin, Latuda and four or five others. Basically, the guy's a zombie- and I seriously doubt that his is an isolated case... if he was, Big Pharma wouldn't be making money hand over fist. Having known him for around 20 years and lived in his house for 3 has given me a unique opportunity to observe his decline.

Having said that he's led a privileged life and is overly concerned with his appearance is not to say that he's without any redeeming qualities. He was a very intelligent man and able to converse on a wide variety of topics... was. Now, he's incontinent, he shakes constantly, he can barely walk and even worse- he makes one terrible decision after another, particularly when it comes to driving. He wrecked four cars in one month, totaling two. He understands that something's wrong, but he doesn't know what... he's lost inside of himself. I keep trying to tell him it's the drugs but he resists that because they make him "feel good."

That's what the whole snake oil scam is built around... feeling good. If you look at the amount of money spent in America a year on feeling good, the amount is staggering. The entertainment industry is built on feeling good... pro sports, movies, porn, and now the pharmaceutical industry, along with psychiatrists, have joined the team. Psychiatry alone grosses $12 billion a year... it's all a part of the same game and the name isn't medicine, it's marketing.

Big Pharma markets mental illness- if you listen to the advertising, there's simply no excuse for feeling bad... there's a pill for that! Every human emotion is a symptom of a disorder. This "feeling good," however, comes with a very heavy price tag- one much more costly than just the medicine. Which is not at all to say that the medicine itself isn't expensive- Latuda, for example- one of the more regularly prescribed "treatments" for bi-polar disorder- goes for around $1200-$1500 a month... all to treat an imaginary illness. Everything is a syndrome or disorder. The DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) has jumped from 135 pages in 1952 to almost 900. These disease mongers- the new snake oil salesmen- spend all day long creating disorders- so Big Pharma can come up with a medication to treat them... and it's all marketing, based on bogus science backed by phony studies. It's propaganda at its best... Edward Bernays would be so proud.

The problem is that my friend and millions like him a paying a very heavy price for the massive profits enjoyed by the snake oil salesman and manufacturers. Bi-polar disorder is the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder and, according to the "experts" we ALL suffer from it... after all, who doesn't feel up sometimes and down at others? I wonder if the fact that the treatment is one of the most expensive on the market has any relationship to the frequency with which it's diagnosed... I'm probably just paranoid- hey, I'll bet there's a pill for that!

They manufacture symptoms for maladies that don't even exist and if sales of one product goes down- they just change the name and color and prescribe it for something else. This is a crime against humanity. It's almost more humane to shoot people outright than to package hope in a pill and turn otherwise healthy people into vegetables- sentencing them to a living hell.

This video does a lot better job than I can in addressing the problem. What got me in a huff in the first place is that my friend just spent another night in jail for a DUI for trying to drive- 5 days after getting his license back from the last one... Or maybe it's just my PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) acting up again... But don't worry- they have a pill for that too!