[PAA-Discuss] Fwd: Alternet - 400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use: Americans Are Disempowered -- Can the OWS Uprising Shake Us Out of Our Depression?

Sat Dec 17 02:01:22 EST 2011

-----Original Message-----
From: Vince Boehm <vince_19805 at yahoo.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Sent: Mon, Oct 31, 2011 9:26 pm
Subject: Levine - 400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use: Americans Are 
Disempowered -- Can the OWS Uprising Shake Us Out of Our Depression?

**** note:   This is a private list.  I send out alerts, useful news 
items, and comment to a group of mental health professionals, decision 
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Bruce Levine, PhD  is a clinical psychologist and a friend.  He has 
been in private practice in Cincinnati, Ohio for more than two decades.

Levine's most recent book, Get Up, Stand Up, describes how Americans 
have lost confidence that genuine democracy is possible, and how major 
US institutions have created this fatalism. When such fatalism and 
defeatism sets in, truths about economic injustices and lost liberties 
are not enough to set people free—something else is required. For 
democratic movements to get off the ground, individuals must recover 
self-respect, and a people must regain collective confidence that they 
can succeed at eliminating top-down controls. Many Americans are deeply 
demoralized by decades of oppressive elitism. Drawing on phenomena such 
as learned helplessness, the abuse syndrome, and other psychological 
principles and techniques for pacifying a population, Levine explains 
how major US institutions have created fatalism. When such fatalism and 
defeatism set in, truths about social and economic injustices are not 
enough to set people free.

However, the situation is not truly hopeless. History tells us that for 
democratic movements to get off the ground, individuals must recover 
self-respect, and a people must regain collective confidence that they 
can succeed at eliminating top-down controls. Get Up, Stand Up 
describes how we can recover dignity, confidence, and the energy to do 
battle. That achievement fills in the missing piece that, until now, 
has undermined so many efforts to energize genuine democracy.

In Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, 
and Community in a World Gone Crazy (2007), he argues that by not 
seriously confronting societal sources of depression, American mental 
health institutions have become part of the problem rather than the 
solution. The book provides an alternate approach that encompasses the 
whole of our humanity, society, and culture, and which redefines 
depression (as a problematic strategy to shut down pain) in a way that 
makes enduring transformation more likely.

Levine is also the author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your 
Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations and a World Gone Crazy (2003), a 
protest book. The 26 alphabetically ordered chapters of Commonsense 
Rebellion detail Levine's contention that the high national rates of 
mental illness in the United States are really just natural reactions 
(e.g., discontent and disconnectedness) to the oppression of what he 
terms an "institutional society," which he argues causes many to break 
down psychologically. An earlier edition was released in 2001 with the 
subtitle Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society — An A to Z Guide to 
Rehumanizing Our Lives.

Levine is a regular contributor to Z Magazine and The Huffington Post 
and his articles have appeared in Adbusters, The Ecologist and many 
other publications.

I met Bruce in 2003 when I participated in MindFreedom's now-famous 21 
day hunger strike (no solid food), the Fast For Freedom.   His Web site 
is www.brucelevine.net

Vince

http://www.alternet.org/story/152873/400_rise_in_anti-depressant_pill_use%3A_americans_are_disempowered_--_can_the_ows_uprising_shake_us_out_of_our_depression

400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use: Americans Are Disempowered -- 
Can the OWS Uprising Shake Us Out of Our Depression?
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 31, 2011

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently 
reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased 
nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the 
most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44. 
Among Americans 12 years and older, 11 percent were taking 
antidepressants by 2005-2008 (the most recently reported study period), 
and 23 percent of women ages 40–59 years were taking them.
Why has U.S. antidepressant use skyrocketed? Are the symptoms of what 
is commonly called depression—helplessness, hopelessness, and 
immobilization—always evidence of a medical condition? Or is it time to 
repoliticize a great deal of our despair, and reconsider the 
old-fashioned antidepressant of political activism?
Common Explanations for Soaring Antidepressant Use
Nowhere in the CDC report is there any explanation for the 400 percent 
increase of antidepressant use from 1988 to 2008, however, there are 
several common explanations offered by mental health professionals and 
journalists.  
Money is a large factor. It has become more lucrative for psychiatrists 
and other physicians to prescribe medication than to provide talk 
therapy. This was detailed in the New York TimesMarch 2011 
investigative report “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to 
Drug Therapy” which reported, “A 2005 government survey found that just 
11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients.” 
Actually, most antidepressant prescriptions are written by physicians 
other than psychiatrists and, according to the recent CDC report, among 
Americans taking one antidepressant, less than one-third of them  have 
seen a mental health professional in the past year.  
Antidepressant use has also skyrocketed because of the increased 
practice of prescribing antidepressants for many conditions other than 
severe depression, and prescribing them for longer periods of time. 
Among the 2005-2008 antidepressant user group (no data offered on 
earlier study periods), only 33.9 percent had severe symptoms of 
depression; 28.4 percent of antidepressant users had moderate symptoms; 
and 19.2 percent had mild symptoms; while 7.6 percent had no depression 
symptoms. And, according to the CDC report, more than 60 percent of 
Americans who are taking antidepressants have taken them for 2 years or 
longer, with 14 percent having taken them for 10 years or more. 
According to antidepressant manufacturers, the increase in 
antidepressant use has been caused by their creation of more effective 
antidepressants, including the so-called selective serotonin reuptake 
inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft which came on the 
market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, by the late 1990s, 
psychiatry textbooks had already rejected the idea of increased 
effectiveness of SSRIs (for example, Robert Julien’s A Primer of Drug 
Action (1998) states, “The newer antidepressants [SSRIs] are not 
necessarily more effective than the older TCAs [tricyclics] ).”  
Rather than SSRIs’ greater effectiveness, it was their greater 
publicity that stimulated public acceptance. One publicity coup 
commenced in 1997 when U.S. government agencies changed the rules for 
broadcast advertising, no longer requiring full information about side 
effects (which had previously made it problematic for drug companies to 
run a thirty-second spot). TV advertising dramatically increased 
patient requests for antidepressants from their physicians. A study 
reported in 2005 by the Journal of the American Medical Association, 
“Influence of Patients’ Requests for Direct-to-Consumer Advertised 
Antidepressants,” concluded, “Patients’ requests have a profound effect 
on physician prescribing.” 
A Neglected Explanation: The Depoliticizing of Despair
A largely neglected explanation for the huge growth of antidepressant 
use is that Americans have increasingly been socialized to equate all 
states of demoralization and immobilizing despair with a medical 
condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political 
remedies. 
Depression is highly associated with a variety of overwhelming pains, 
including physical pain, relationship pain (such as a dissatisfying 
marriage and social isolation), trauma—and financial pains.  
Financial pains include unemployment, poverty, and debt. In 2007 
the U.S. Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services 
Administration reported depression in 12.7 percent of unemployed people 
compared to 7 percent of employed people. And the Urban Institute in 
1996 reported that Americans on public assistance have at least three 
times higher rate of depression than those not on public assistance. A 
person who has suffered mental illness is three times more likely to be 
in debt than someone who is not in debt, according to Richard Wakerall, 
director of the U.K. mental health organization Mind in Plymouth. 
Recently, I had a chance encounter at Cincinnati’s Findlay Market with 
five young adults who reported large student-loan debt and who appeared 
mildly depressed about it. I happened to be in a charged-up mood, 
having just participated in an Occupy Cincy march, and I told them that 
the entire U.S. $1 trillion student-loan debt could be forgiven if the 
U.S. government paid it off rather than funding the damn 
military-industrial complex, which costs us over $1 trillion a year if 
you include everything. They started to smile and look more energized, 
and three of them seemed interested in the Occupy Cincy movement. If 
America’s millions of depressed student-loan debtors could politicize 
their despair and take it to the mall in Washington D.C., we could 
dwarf the crowds in Tahrir Square. 
Can Activism Be an Antidepressant?
Almost as soon as I entered Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C. on October 
6, I experienced a wave of pleasant feelings and energy. My wife, Bon, 
and I showed up about 10am on the first day of “October 2011” (“Occupy 
Freedom Plaza”) in Washington D.C. after driving there from Cincinnati. 
In sharp contrast to the blank and depressed faces that I had just seen 
on the D.C. Metro and on the D.C. streets, we were now surrounded by a 
thousand or so people who were smiling, laughing, engaged in political 
discussions, and eagerly awaiting the day’s events. I chatted with two 
of the organizers, David Swanson and Margaret Flowers, and found their 
hope and energy a supreme antidote to cynicism. The opposite of 
depression is vitality, and so by just stepping into Freedom Plaza, I 
had received a strong antidepressant.  
Then came the day’s major march. Depression is much about feeling 
hopeless, alienated, isolated, and powerless, and this march was an 
antidote to all those feelings. For a couple of hours, we felt some 
real power. We marched on the streets— not the sidewalks—and traffic 
was blocked by police, who for those moments in time actually were the 
People’s servants. We marched past the White House and the Treasury, 
paused at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to “drop off some job resumes” 
and for some short speeches, then up and over to K Street, with many 
cars honking approval and some non-marchers on the sidewalks raising 
their fists and shouting encouragement. Then back to the Plaza, and a 
couple of hours later a General Assembly. 
The General Assembly was attended by about 500 people who experienced, 
some for the first time, a non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, 
respectful democracy where the issues of the day were discussed. No one 
was rude  and all seemed jovially patient. We hadn’t planned to stay 
more than that day, but leaving the Plaza late that evening, we had an 
urge to return. 
The next morning, I found my pace quicken as I headed from the Metro 
station back to Freedom Plaza, as I was excited to return to this piece 
of “federal property” that had begun to feel like a “People’s Oasis.” 
We had succeeded, at least for the time being, in taking back a small 
piece of the United States and restoring it to some kind of sanity and 
humanity. A section of the Plaza was filled with sleeping bags, 
backpacks and cardboard shelters, and our food, media, and first-aid 
tents still stood.  
We decided to prolong our visit and stay for the afternoon march to the 
Martin Luther King Memorial. At this march, there were the chants that 
are common to all Occupy marches: “We are the 99 percent.” “The banks 
got bailed out, we got sold out.” “Hey, hey, ho, ho, corporate greed 
has got to go.” “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what 
democracy looks like.” On this march, we paused at the International 
Trade Center (in the Ronald Reagan Building), where there were about 75 
demonstrators protesting the tar sands pipeline. As some of our 
marchers had earlier participated in their protest, the pipeline 
protesters returned the favor by joining our march. We shouted our 
appreciation and our morale kicked up another notch. 
Leaving Freedom Plaza at the end of my short stint there, I thought 
that even a little dose of democracy, especially when it has not been 
experienced, is the best damn antidepressant that many people will ever 
experience. And even if the cynics are right and the movement dies from 
cold weather or gets large enough for the corporatocracy to bring out 
their tanks and crush it, something still will have been won. Everybody 
who participated will remember that their demoralization and despair 
was “cured,” at least for a time, not by a pill or any other consumer 
product but by their own political actions. 

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