4 ms·
How prevalent are anti-depressants? I get the impression that a large percentage of the american youth are on Prozac or others, and/or even medication for ADD.
by jvdh 17y ago
How prevalent are anti-depressants?
I get the impression that a large percentage of the american youth are on Prozac or others, and/or even medication for ADD. And also that the normal response for depression is medication.
In the Netherlands this is quite the reverse. Anti-depressants (AFAIK) are only used as a last resort, or as a kick-start for the healing process when it is a very deep depression.
Kids in highschool taking drugs against psychological disorders is almost unheard of, except in clear cases of ADD.
- pyre 17y agoI suspect that reports of this are highly exaggerated by the people that think that every problem is solvable through 'putting your nose to the grindstone' and that everything else is just 'weakness.'
- gruseom 17y agoI disagree. The idea that our society hyper-medicalizes and therefore overmedicates human problems is, to my mind, very sensible. It by no means follows that all emotional problems are "just weakness" and that the solution is to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. Indeed, given that the latter is the ultimate in crude ideas of how to approach the psyche, it actually goes hand-in-hand with the hypermedical approach: if that's the only alternative, it's no wonder that people resort to drugs.
- bilch 17y agoThis seems rather untrue. "In Nederland worden steeds vaker antidepressiva voorgeschreven. In 2007 kregen 937.000 mensen in totaal 6,7 miljoen recepten tegen depressie voorgeschreven. Het aantal mensen dat antidepressiva gebruikt is sinds 1999 elk jaar met 6 procent gegroeid." (Wikipedia) 937.000 people out of 16 million (5.8%) isn't quite the "11% of women and 5% of men in the non-institutionalized population" Wikipedia has for the US, but it's certainly not "quite the reverse", either.