Have we lost our minds?

The myth of the medical cure?

Brenda walked into her local GP Surgery distraught. She had, two weeks ago, lost her father and was feeling very weepy and low. After a short chat with the GP she left with a prescription for 10 mg of citalopram.

Annie, 21 years old, was the proud mum of a 3-month-old baby boy, except she wasn’t so proud, she attended her local GP Surgery and burst into tears, saying she had never felt this was before, she was completely worn out. She left with a prescription for 20 mg of sertraline.

Both of these are actual events but the names have been changed.

Since the latter part of the 20th century drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin have become household names. In tandem with this, the consumption of antidepressant drugs has increased by 56% between 1988 and 2001[i] and in addition, there has been an 108.5% increase on the 31million antidepressants which pharmacies dispensed in 2006 to 2016.[ii] The steepest rise has been in the use of prescription drugs by children and young people [iii]

But are they effective and do they work?

In a stunning new study Johann Hari[iv] has complied a wide range of psychiatric opinion and research that strongly backs up the case that the positive impact of many antidepressants is no greater than a mere placebo effect-if we believe a thing will make us better, it will. Hari also agrees with other studies that show that although antidepressants are “not addictive” there are huge so-called discontinuation problems, i.e. once you are on, you are unlikely to want to come off the drugs. In addition, because the body develops a tolerance to drug, there often needs to be an increase in dosage.

Moncrieff also writes about the well-known side effects that antidepressants can cause, and quotes a patient who reports “my mind was extremely foggy and I could not gather my thoughts or organisational skills to do daily household duties” [v]

We know that the side effects of many antidepressants include

• Drowsiness
• Headaches
• Nausea
• Diarrhoea
• Dizziness
• Restlessness
• Insomnia
• Low sex drive

And Moncrieff is very clear about other risks: “there is a very high risk of someone committing suicide in the month after they have been prescribed an antidepressant of any sort” (p169)[vi]

Placebos tend not to produce these side effects.

What’s happening here? What’s happening to us as a nation? How are we to think and function well and in a healthy way, how are we to make the right choices if, as a nation, we’re so chemically infused-and who does this really benefit?

Are we losing our minds? Is there another way?

Losing our bodies?

James Joyce said it well; “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”[vii]-this is generally the Western malaise of the last 100 years, and as Ken Wilber[viii] points out we have not really lost our minds, we are actually too much in are heads and have in truth lost our bodies, that place where we can stay present and grounded. Practitioners in bodywork such as Reginald Ray[ix] and Bessel van der Kolk[x] tell us that our somatic sense of self has much to offer us that our cognitive or intellectual self misses.

What has this to do with the chemical cure around antidepressants and medicating the nation?

Hari contends that our tendency towards anxiety and depression is bound up with disconnection-from meaning, purpose, community, work, values and more importantly from ourselves, and in return we have bought into a chemical cure that this is all the result of our bad brains, and not, as Hari writes, the context we find ourselves in.

In other words change the context, change the response.

So, all those seemingly trivial bits of advice we might have been given around anxiety and depression: take a bath, a walk in nature, go the beach, exercise?

Turns out that as these practices help us to integrate both mind and body, that in return something profound, not trivial might happen: our anxiety lowers, our mood and depression lifts and we come back to life.

Without a single antidepressant, and hardly any negative side effects.

Isn’t it time we found our bodies?

[i] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[ii] Office National Statistics

[iii] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[iv] J. Hari Lost Connections

[v] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[vi] Ibid

[vii] James Joyce Dubliners

[viii] Ken Wilber No Boundary

[ix] R. Ray The Awakening Body

[x] B. van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score