My last few posts regarding anticholinergic/antipyschotic/antidepressant drugs have been really eye opening, particularly the reaction to them. It’s been pretty baffling to me that people would so vociferously defend a psychiatric/medical system that so clearly has failed to achieve it’s own stated objectives. Why would someone accept 5 diagnoses as gospel while simultaneously acknowledging none actually describe them in any meaningful way? Why would someone accept trial and error treatment, and all the potential hazards that go with it?
It occurs to me that ultimately, it’s about the drugs. For the same reason millions of people use and vociferously defend “street” drugs (or former street drugs like marijuana), they depend on these drugs to remain functional in a society in which their brains simply are not designed to deal with. Psychiatric drugs provide the promise of that direct hijack of our brains processes, the promise of happiness that they just couldn’t get from society, without the negative social risk. Psychiatry appears to be a sanctioned compromise between the biological/evolutionary imperative to maximize collective social output and the limits of human functional diversity.
I’m struck by how similar the arguments are between a daily addict of an “illegal” or sanctioned drug like meth or alcohol, and the “cured” chronic psychiatric drug user. It’s even more bizarre that many of these drugs have direct psychiatric equivalents, with a completely different perception around their use.
Most evidence clearly supports the idea that losing homeostatic balance in the brain is longitudinally a really bad idea. It is causal in many neurodegenerative conditions, and the evidence of this stunningly coherent and consilient.
This weird dance between the concept of “addicition” and “mental health”, is a little terrifying. I generally hate making literary correlations to modern times as it’s almost always just a projection (and so likely is this), but this really feels so completely Brave New World to me. This obsession with this nebulous perfect “normal” archetype of function, and the absolute ruthlessness which societies will grind it’s individuals to achieve it are partially obscured into a compliant haze by our modern pharmaceutical industry. It’s scary.
I think I need to put more time into enabling a future outside of the opium den haze of all this.