2023: The year we stop medicating human distress?

A quarter of UK adults are currently medicated for psychiatric disorders, but why?

Throughout 2022, we were confronted with headlines and studies which showed rapid and significant increases in the diagnosis of mental health issues and the prescriptions of antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, sedatives and anti-psychotic drugs.

The NHS released stats in summer 2022 which showed that 8.3 million UK adults are taking antidepressants and a further 4 million are taking benzodiazepines and anti-psychotics for diagnosed mental health issues. With over 12 million UK adults now taking prescribed medication for their mental health, that’s just under a quarter of all adults in the country.

But it’s not just adults who have been impacted by this increase in psychiatric diagnosis and medication.

The Pharmaceutical Journal released data which showed that there had been a 26% increase in prescriptions of antidepressants to children aged 12-17 years old - and a 40% increase in prescriptions of antidepressants to children aged 5-11 years old.

Instead of accepting the often cited conclusion that mental illness is becoming more common, or, that diagnosis and treatment is just becoming better and so we are identifying more cases, what if both of those conclusions were wrong?

What if instead, we are moving towards the global, generalised assumption that all human distress is a mental illness?

What if this is a belief system, and not based in science at all?

What if all of this is linked to identity politics, and the need to identify with a common group to understand the human experience?

What if we are medicalising and pathologising normal responses to horrible experiences, and convincing 1 in 4 in our population that they are mentally ill?

What if convincing people that their troubles and traumas are all in their heads means that no one ever has to address our failing society?

This cannot continue. We cannot endlessly medicate and sedate our population until most of us are being told we are mentally ill and need a pill every day to stay ‘sane’.

Surely, we can see the patterns here. The world is in chaos. Life is hard. The economy is nosediving. Politics is a circus. The public don’t trust the police. The justice system isn’t working. People are struggling to survive. Millions of people are in debt. Millions of young people will never afford their own home. We are in another recession. Workers are having to strike to be paid fairly.

People cannot afford energy bills, so rather than the companies bringing their prices down, they are setting up foundations to ‘help people pay’ the extortionate prices. The energy companies get to keep charging the inflated rates whilst looking like charitable and caring entities helping their ‘vulnerable’ customers.

On top of all of this, the remainder of the entire population just lived through a pandemic which killed millions, socially isolated everyone for months at a time, stopped education, travel, support services, cancer treatments, operations, entertainment, socialising, and exercise. People lost their friends, family, children, parents and colleagues. Nurses and doctors quit their professions, totally burned out and destroyed from months of death and devastation.

Everyone from toddlers to the elderly sat on their sofas and watched the red death counter on the corner of the TV for months, as wall to wall news coverage informed us of how many people had died each day, and instructed us to stay safe and keep away from each other.

Reports of domestic violence increased, sexual harassment increased, child abuse increased, rape increased.

So let me ask this, what if our population isn’t mentally ill? What if our population is traumatised?

Our population cannot cope with the constant onslaught of traumas and daily distress. They are being told they are mentally ill, have disorders of the mind, of their attachments, or their attention.

But what if they are totally normal? What if their responses are healthy, expected, normal, justified and natural?

What if we are medicating away normal human responses to distress?

2023 has to be the year that this skyrocketing trend ends.

2023 has to be the year that we stop medicating distress, and we start looking at the toxic, difficult, chaotic world we have created for ourselves - and then promise to do something about it.

We can’t keep blaming society, forgetting that we ARE society.