A moving article in The Wall Street Journal ("Generation Xanax: The Dark Side of America's Wonder Drug"/March 13, 2025) aroused these thoughts. Myths such as such the unsophisticated etiologies of "chemical imbalance" and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have long troubled the mental health field. The latter has diagnostic symptoms which are identical to the anxiety and depression associated with nearly all medical and behavioral disorders. While a hospital administrator, when I spoke to the Director of Psychiatry about the side-effects of psychotropic medications he angrily stormed, "There are no side-effects!" And he was not a stupid man, one of his degrees being from Cambridge University. Myths that reduce income tend to have long lives.
That psychotropic medications can have crippling physical and mental side-effects tends to be ignored and the Wall Street Journal asrticle does a worthy service, describing the disabling psychological and neurological symptoms and even suicide of users. What's eqally troubling was another article describing the current push of several drug companies to create and market drugs which allegedly "cure" schizophrenia and Bi-Polar Disorder though their psychological etiology has been understood for decades except, of course, by those who don't want to know. Abetted in these quests are many present-day psychiatrists, which is understandable since today's psychiatry residents receive only 10% of the training in psychotherapy that residents gained sixty-years ago.
A large study fifty-years ago found that, of previously severely disturbed hospitalized psychiatric patients, the most favorable outcome post-discharge was those who received no medication with the highest rate of recidivism being with patients who were prescribed medication while hospitalized and after discharge, with former patients who were prescribed medication while hospitalized but not after discharge having an in-between recidivism rate.
To paraphrase the sixteenth-century proverb of the English writer, John Heywood, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.