Everybody knows that opiates such as heroin are evil, life-ruining drugs, while anti-depressants such as Prozac are good drugs, gateway only to mental health and reasonable happiness for many millions.
An article in the professional journal “Psychotherapy Networker” ( Mary Sykes Wylie, “Falling in Love Again,” July/aug 2014) provides an illuminating historical perspective, pointing out that all the bad drugs—the likes of morphine, heroin and cocaine— were at one point championed by such highly credentialed culture heroes as Freud and Huxley as the key to mental health and wellbeing.
Barbiturates, amphetamines, tranquilizers (Miltown), Librium, Valium—all these drugs were in their time celebrated “for the management of everyday mental and emotional distress”–as a brochure for Dexamyl extolled the virtues of that combo of dexadrine and amytal, a barbiturate. Then one by one each drug came to be seen as having dangerous side effects and each in turn made illegal or at least warned against and severely controlled; and we moved on to the next one.
Prozac-style anti-depressants have for over two decades been the culture’s fair-haired drug, the main way, other than alcohol, that on a massive scale we bring ourselves up to a level of happiness we consider our due, without serious side effects (although this disputed). According to the article, by 2013 “more than 40 percent of Americans had used an antidepressant at least once, and 270 million prescriptions were being written annually.”
We don’t as a culture seem inclined to draw parallels between contemporary society and the soma-saturated “Brave New World” of Huxley’s famous 1932 novel. Have we become so accepting of Prozac and its siblings that we can no longer understand that novel’s implicit satire of the widepsread use of that drug?
Does this acceptance have anything to do with the anti-depressants such a large percentage of us are dosed with?
I see no attempts to gauge whether there is any tendency for anti-depressants to be having a Brave New World effect on national politics. Sure, other addictions such as opiates keep us politically passive, but how about the effect of the drug-induced satisfaction of anti-depressants?
The one side effect all drugs necessarily have in common is the loss of the belief that you have the power to live well enough, to solve life’s problems, without drugs. Thus home run or bicycle endurance records just are not as meaningful when known to have been achieved on steroids.
Will SSRI anti-depressants come to be seen as another in the long tradition of feel-better drugs whose downside, individually and society-wide, becomes apparent only with the passage of time?
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