Antidepressant Use in America. A Depressing Situation.

Don’t like the way your husband is handling the family finances?  Take some antidepressants! Angry with the school about your child’s report card? Take some antidepressants.  According to a government funded study, more Americans take antidepressants than any other drug family. Over 118 million prescriptions were written last year which is up a staggering 48% over the past decade. Some of this increase is the fact that more physicians are becoming adept at diagnosing the disease but I feel that the majority of it is due to marketing done by the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Richard Dworkin even states, “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness. Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives.”

While depression is a serious disorder, there are way too many cases where physicians are prescribing drugs for issues that have nothing to do with the disease. These medications have serious side effects and should be used only when a clinical diagnosis of depression is clear. Still, an even better solution would be to try using amino acid therapy first. The book The Healing Nutrients Within recalls many stories of patients with depression improving using amino acid therapy.

It’s so much about profits, so little about really helping patients. Amino acids can help people far more than antidepressants can. They just won’t make the pharmaceutical industry any money. America, the land where we medicate unhappiness.