Years ago, I was friends with a scientist at a drug company. She said corporate marketing told the researchers that they potentially could find a use for just about any drug discovered that would affect a change in the body. If researchers found a drug that did not work on a target condition corporate marketing may be able to find another use for it. There is some truth to that. Plenty of drugs have off label uses but taken too far it just adds to health care costs. For example, Viagra was originally a (mostly failed) angina drug that found another use.
Beta blockers are a good example of how a drug is often repurposed for other conditions less serious than intended. Beta blockers are old, outdated hypertension drugs that are no longer first line treatments for high blood pressure. For instance, propranolol has found a second life as a drug to reduce performance anxiety. The following was reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1967 to treat symptoms of cardiovascular disease, propranolol has become the go-to pill for dealing with all sorts of stressful situations, from public speaking to first dates.
“The effects on the brain are the effects that cause the decrease of anxiety,” Ghaemi says.
Another example of drugs that are useful but overprescribed for less serious conditions are antidepressants. The following is from Newsweek:
Prescriptions for SSRIs have soared. We now spend almost $300 billion a year on mental health care, yet rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide remain stubbornly high. In any other branch of medicine, this would be called failure.
The overreliance on pills didn’t happen by accident. In the 1990s, Prozac and its successors were marketed as lifestyle enhancers as much as medical treatments. Direct-to-consumer ads, legal only in the U.S. and New Zealand, trained people to view sadness as a chemical imbalance.
Health and Human Service secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently raised concerns about overuse of antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Writing in Newsweek, psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert argues that the drugs are not the problem. Rather, he believes the problem is a culture of medicating emotions and painful feelings rather than teaching people coping skills.
The damage is not only medical. It is cultural. Difficult emotions have been redefined as disorders to be erased rather than signals to be understood. Sadness, anger, fear, frustration: these are not pathologies. They are forces that push us to adapt, grow, and find purpose. Medication can dull pain, but it cannot provide insight, teach coping skills, or build resilience. That comes only from the work of therapy and the harder work of facing life directly.
Most people have never been taught how to endure and process powerful emotions. Instead, they avoid them, often by numbing themselves with medication. The result is a nation quick to medicate but slow to mature, fluent in diagnoses yet struggling with resilience. And because this pattern is most visible among the young, who come of age in a culture that treats hardship as trauma, we risk raising a generation less equipped to handle the ordinary difficulties of adulthood.
Severe depression is indeed a serious medical problem, but Dr. Alpert argues the pervasive use of antidepressants exceeds medical necessity. SSRI drugs partly surged in use due to their low cost compared to 30-minute or 45-minute weekly therapy sessions. Prior to the introduction of effective antidepressants, talk therapy was the norm. Depressed patients trekked to their psychoanalyst week after week and talked out their feelings. Thinking back to the old Bob Newhart show people with garden variety neuroses met for group therapy. That would probably be a way to teach people how to cope with life better than writing a prescription for Prozac. Talk therapy may have less efficacy for severe depression but talk therapy can teach marginally depressed patients to work through painful emotions.
Read more at: Why America Medicates Sadness | Opinion – Newsweek
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