by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: August 06, 2009

American Style Economic System Causes Mental Depression

So it appears that the anti-depressant use in United States has risen from 6% of the population in 1996 to over 10% by 2005. It is hardly surprising that a 10 billion dollar "depression" fighting industry (that is bigger than video games) doubled the amount of regular users. After all, we've all seen the sharp uptick in glossy pharmaceutical television ads in the last few years that push advanced drugs to middle-age/elderly demographic. There's also of course the epic road that classification of actual psychiatric "disorders" has taken over the last couple of decades. The constantly evolving psychiatric bible (

DSM-IV-TR ) is not just the product of a very non-transparent and often political tug of war process by the powerful and all too human members of the American Psychiatric Association. It is also a product of the pharmaceutical industry. Here's a quote from one of numerous articles covering modern day psychiatric "science",

"Part of the debate emanates from research by Cosgrove and others2 who investigated the financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of 170 panel members who contributed to the diagnostic criteria produced for the DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR. Of the 170 panel members, 95 (56%) had 1 or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. In 6 of 18 panels, more than 80% of the panel members had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies"

Pharmaceutical corporations have not yet managed to classify all of the population as requiring treatment but we're fast approaching that point. If one looks at DSM-IV-TR listings of all possible "disorders", their statistical prevalence, and instances of co-morbidity (two or more disorders afflicting at the same time) then it appears that over 70% of the population has something wrong with them. It follows that the market is not yet saturated.

Now this would all be fine if the drugs were marketed as physiological augmentation of neural hardware. As I have written on the growing field of positive psychology, all people can expand their power if they complement their brain architecture with a mind enhancer. People already do that with b vitamins and coffee and future pharmaceutical breakthroughs will give artists ability to be engineers, engineers ability to be musicians, introverts ability to socialize, etc.

What is beyond sinister is a handful of oligarchs using the fig leaf of empirical research to tell most of the population that

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