-By Jake T. Snake
I am always amazed by how you can tell who the demographic is for a particular show by paying attention to the advertisements. Increasingly in prime time, I see ads for medications that I am supposed to go tell my doctor to prescribe. It cracks me up that sometimes they don't even tell you what the pill is for, just that you should go ask for it. It's purple and matches my tie, so naturally I would love to swallow it and yes, we are still talking about pills. On the rare ocassions when I do catch the evening news, the ads are all for medications to treat osteoporosis, heart disease, erectile dysfunction and constipation. I am not the demographic...yet. There is it appears a pill for everything including happiness, the future side effects be damned. Just so you know where I stand at the outset, I take no medications and I like it that way. I do not feel that any of the people who peddle the various snake oils that we call modern medications have my best interests at heart. Too often, we are simply a consumer to be sold or a demographic to be seized. If the shit prescribed has terrible side effects, all the better, that requires another medication.
I am not a luddite. I do acknowledge that modern medications for both physical and psychiatric illnesses are lifesavers for many people. No argument there. What I will say is that I believe virtually everything is overprescribed. How else to keep paying out dividends to shareholders when the population isn't growing exponentially?
I was watching Saturday Night LIve last night and an advertisement came on for Abilify, an antipsychotic medication. Generally, or at least in the past when I worked in mental health, these were medications prescribed to people with major problems with their reality testing i.e. hearing voices, seeing things that were not in fact present. These are heavy duty medications with heavy duty side effects. No one in their (you should pardon the phrase) right mind would take these unless it was a matter of life and death. Not to put too fine a point on it , but the side effects are not anything you want to experience recreationally. This site contains self reports by people actually taking the drug as I believe the companies who do the trials for the pharmaceutical companies are fucking evil and would medicate their own mothers for a nickel, so we can't really trust them now can we? Long story short, Abilify is a heavy duty drug and you wouldn't take it unless it was a choice between that and seeing pink unicorns dancing across your field of vision for the rest of your existence. Pink unicorns whose personal agenda included tormenting you. That is if that sort of thing bothers you. Me, I have two daughters, that is my reality on many days. Hell, Thers has Molly decorating bedrooms in this sort of motif(but I digress...repeatedly).
Which brings me to the purpose of this week's rant. I am watching Saturday Night Live and the Abilify commercial comes on and I say Hmmm, that is interesting, Abilify isn't really a product for the masses...well, not yet. People experiencing episodes of psychosis are really a niche market in your humble narrators opinion. So I listen just a bit more closely. The ad tells me that if I am depressed, taking an antidepressant and am still feeling depressed, well then what I need is a heavy duty antipsychotic tranquilizer to shake me out of my doldrums. What the Fuck! These drugs are at their chemical base neurotoxins, like the fleaspray you put on your dog, only you are smart enough not to swallow that or allow your dog to swallow it. All of the antipsychotic medications are ultimately similar chemical derivatives of the granddaddy of them all thorazine. Thorazine has been used throughout history for many things. Why in this country in the 1930s the Department of Agriculture was distributing it to farmers to kill parasites on and in their pigs. The drug companies will tell you that the new "atypical" antipsychotics have fewer side effects and are less toxic. Two words-bull shit.
Pharmaceuticals need a growing market to make them profitable and if a drug designed to treat schizophrenia isn't profitable, then we will tell people that it is good for bipolar disorder/manic depression. If this still doesn't satiate our rampant avarice, well then we will tell those depressed folks who we already have on one drug that they need another and then they will be all better...we promise this time. Look around. How many of us have friends taking antidepressants who can't stop taking them without going through vicious withdrawal? Are the folks who sold us this bill of goods really the people you want to trust to put you on another "miracle" drug? It might be time to recognize that Paxil withdrawal really is worse than heroin. Check here as well.
Seriously, my friends, if you are depressed don't go within three miles of this fucking shit. Start walking, ride a bike, see a therapist, buy a bottle of Jamesons just don't for the love of all that is good about life put this fucking shit in your pie hole.
Oh! and if any of you work in the pharmaceutical industry or have close relatives who work in the pharmaceutical industry, I would love to know how you sleep at night knowing you are peddling completely unnecessary poison to people. That is what evil looks like. I take solace in the fact that with the downturn in the economy they are laying off some of the slimy legal drug pushers that hang around doctors' offices. Ya know given that they are always crying about how they are broke doing research and development for new drugs, when in fact 60% of their money goes to marketing. Maybe there are some silver linings in the economic downturn.