PressEthic

When did it become the “in” thing to have a mental disorder/neurological problem/behavioral tick? Why is it that every time someone has a panic attack, it’s “anxiety disorder” or if you can’t sit still all the time you have “adult-onset ADD”? It’s trendy now to be on Paxil or Zoloft or Ritalin. If you need to take Ambien to get to sleep, it’s obviously because you’re so stressed out from your busy important life that you can’t sleep without it. It has become almost a mark of status to be taking some sort of drug for some sort of ailment.

When Tom Cruise went on the Today Show and ranted and raved about how psychology is voodoo medicine, and how problems like post-partum depression can be solved with vitamins and exercise, he sounded like a complete lunatic, and I’m sure many people had a hearty laugh at his expense – me included. But maybe there’s a grain of truth to his delusional ranting – maybe there is an overabundance of medications and diagnoses going around.

Or maybe the problem is in the way these drugs are marketed – everyone has seen the commercials. A soothing voice asks you if you have some of these symptoms, and you look at yourself, and you go, yeah I guess I do feel out of breath sometimes, so maybe I need this nice drug. And then once you have whatever drug you want for whatever disorder you think you have, your friends start relying on you to tell them what’s wrong with them, and maybe slip them a couple of pills. And you’re a regular armchair psychiatrist, and you don’t even own a DSM-IV.

And then again, maybe the problem is that we’re all looking for a quick fix these days – we don’t tough anything out, and we don’t tolerate weakness. If we can’t sleep, there’s a pill to fix it – can’t eat, take a pill – feeling too sad, too happy, too horny or not horny enough, pill. We don’t stop to think that maybe we’re feeling nervous or stressed out because we have a big project coming up, and not because we’ve got an anxiety disorder.

Maybe Tom Cruise was on to something. Maybe we wouldn’t have been able to dismiss him so easily if he hadn’t sounded like he needed some medication for the crazies.