The answer is complicated. For one, mental
health is not a priority in the United States,
a person is pretty much on his own...
We have a very free society here, a
person is certainly able to take his
condition and run with it.
I do not see the drug companies manufacturing
a problem--at least not to a terribly significant
degree. The myriad other engines that drive mental
illness overpower what I see as a tertiary problem.
Find a hundred mentally ill people, or research
a hundred suicides. If a person looks at the facts
of each case and sees the truth in front of him,
he is not going to find pharmaceuticals as the
root of evil. All he will find is mental illness,
untreated and incorrectly treated. That is my
guess, not that my opinion means anything to anybody.
The grand experiment is launched, live with it.
Or a person can always move to a third world
country--suicide rates are lower there, too busy
surviving to take your own life. I see from the
WHO website that suicide rates in China and
Russia are very high. I'd guess the pressure of
the crush of humanity and bitterly cold winters
have something to do with that.
Complicated? Nobody is going to tell me that
pharma is manufacturing mental illness. All
the evidence I have seen firsthand, in an
admittedly small sample, is that drugs are
one of the best ways to snap a person out of
a deep rut and maintain an acceptable quality
of life. My observations are with OCD, and let
me tell you, OCD is a bitch, one of the biggies
right under Schizophrenia. Don't even get me
started about drugs and Schizophrenia--pharma good. |
