This week's not-so-startling news that the use of antidepressants has doubled came as no surprise to us, and probably not to any non-comatose person any of us know. In fact, there's a high probability that a goodly percentage of the people we all know are on anti-depressants and have become part of that statistic.
The reason for the rising tide of prescription drugs is so basic that it is somehow completely overlooked and certainly never mentioned in any of the studies or analysis of the issue. It starts when children are about four. In The Grief Recovery Handbook and When Children Grieve, we explain how a child's normal response to a painful event is converted into a lifelong, incorrect philosophy for dealing with feelings.
It begins when parents inadvertently teach thier children to consume external substances in a misguided attempt at helping them deal with an internal emotional reaction to an event that has affected them. No matter that it is not the parent's intent to harm. That's the impact—and sadly, it can last forever.
Here's how it goes: A four-year-old girl has had an emotionally painful experience on the pre-school playground. The other little kids have been mean to her. She arrives home quite upset. She goes to Mom or Dad and spills out her tale of woe, with tears attached. This healthy, normal expression and display of human emotion is met with the sentence that you already know is coming: "Don't feel bad. Here, have a cookie, you'll feel better." It doesn't have to be a cookie; even a health-food treat creates the parentally approved idea that we deal with feelings by consuming food.
The child has presented a sad feeling to someone she trusts—a parent or guardian. The emotion is immediately dismissed with "don't feel bad," and then anesthetized with food. She is distracted by the cookie and the energy created by the food, but the painful emotions she experienced haven't been talked about or heard.
The truth is the child feels different, not better. Think about it. Load a little body up with sugar and something will change. Sometime later, when the little girl wants to talk about the event at the playground, she's told, "We don't cry over spilled milk." Again, the child and her emotions have been dismissed.
In early childhood we are constantly coached, guided, and advised to use external substances to override our feelings. Is it any wonder that after childhood, we simply shift our substances of choice to alcohol or "recreational" drugs? We also have to ask if the shift in societal acceptance of prescription drug use makes it easier for people to acquiesce to being put on meds for dealing with the normal emotions of grief.
Troubling Doubling of Antidepressant Use Totally Predictable
This week's news is not really new. In April 2007, the results of the National Comorbidity Study were published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Volume 64 [Authors Wakefield, Schmitz, First, Horwitz, et al]. The study of 8800 clients established that a large percentage of the grieving people diagnosed as depressed and placed on antidepressant drugs were not clinically depressed. The study suggests that those people would benefit far more from actions—like those of talk therapy or Grief Recovery—which can keep many of them from developing full blown depression.
The depressing news about the increasing use of antidepressants included this terrifying quote, referring to the 50,000 people studied between 1996 and 2005: "During this period, individuals treated with antidepressants become more likely to also receive treatment with antipsychotic medications and less likely to undergo psychotherapy."
Terrifying for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is the escalation of the cookie cure, which later in life translates into prescription meds as treatment when grief or unresolved grief is incorrectly diagnosed as depression. When the meds don't help complete the grief, the griever is then put on more meds, to counter the original meds that didn't work because the griever wasn't clinically depressed in the first place. Did you get that?
Maybe children need to learn to just say no to cookies, and find someone willing to help them talk about what's hurting their little hearts.
Russell Friedman
Sherman Oaks, CA
www.grief.net
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As always, agreement is welcome, but disagreements or polite debates are encouraged.
At the end of our last blog we teased you with this announcement of our next entry: There are at least 43 life events that produce feelings of grief, but not all of them are sad. Riddle that, or tune in next time to find out why that's true, and much more.
Current news demanded that we write about the antidepressant issue first. Stay tuned for the 43 life events post—coming soon.
