Sadness or Depression? The question doctors forget to ask themselves.
- Liberty Pearl
- Feb 26, 2018
- 3 min read
I grew up in a fairly laissez-faire household. My parents nurtured and taught me, but refrained from coddling me from a young age. The answer to every teen break-up was “put some lipstick on and get out of the house”. The answer to every injury was “take some Calpol” or “put a band-aid on it”. The answer to every low in my rollercoaster life was “let yourself feel it, but don’t let it control you”.
As I have grown older, I have encountered larger obstacles. As any young person should, I have faced these obstacles head-on, with teen-angst at my side, and a rock and roll soundtrack to spur me on. Failed relationships, failed tests, failed friendships, death, destruction of self esteem and my unattainable wish to be perfect have all taught me tough and valuable lessons. In the last few years, I’ve noticed people around me who have been dodging their obstacles with prescription drugs, combatting the pitfalls of their lives with antidepressants, xanax, and adderall, or a cocktail of their combination. The motives of doctors, parents, and children to prescribe and use these drugs are not always medical - 20% of U.S. high-schoolers abuse prescription drugs, not even including those who are prescribed them legally (US News). The motives to use these drugs can range from their actual necessity, to the enhancement of a wild night out.
In my personal life, I have witnessed the dangers of prescription drugs. I ask myself, ow do teenagers as young as sixteen build up a drug dependency before they even enter college? Not everybody can counter their involuntary sensations without additional help, but it is the willingness of doctors and pharmaceutical companies to hand drugs out like candy which strikes me as more dangerous than the threat of suicide. My generation is being conditioned to think that sadness is not a natural feeling, and that drugs is the only route to combatting it.
Katinka Newman lived down the street from my family. She was a driven film-maker who, in her own words successfully “juggled” family life and her career. After a difficult year, including the breakdown of her marriage, divorce, and the sale of her family home, she became “depressed”. After visiting a doctor, she was prescribed escitalopram - also known as Lexapro. After taking the drug once, she became “severely anxious and restless” and experienced delusions, one of which included being convinced she had killed her two children. With side effects as drastic as these, how can we justify giving them to anyone without extensive investigation, especially teenagers who are still developing their abilities to deal with emotions authentically?
Granted, Katinka Newman may have been a special case, however, she demonstrates the real issue with the prescription system: the lack of emphasis on the difference between a natural human feeling, and genuine mental illness and dangerous levels of chemical imbalance in the brain.
Psychology Today attempts to draw a line between sadness and depression. It states that “sadness is usually triggered by a difficult, hurtful, challenging, or disappointing event, experience, or situation. In other words, we tend to feel sad about something”. Depression is something which does not require a spark. Somehow, those who experience depression feel sadness in absence of a situation which would normally cause it. This distinction is infinitely important, yet widely ignored. Many people - like Kantinka Newman - have been prescribed antidepressants for “sadness”, not for “depression”.
There are a number of reasons posed for the overprescription of antidepressants. However, the one which I find to be the most frustrating is the age at which teenagers are given them. Not to say that some teenagers may not be depressed, but instead that the exposure to this kind of “escapism”, so to speak, can happen at such a young age. If at sixteen, a child is taught that a drug is the easiest way to feelings of happiness, what chance does that give them in later life to effectively manage stressful situations?
The answer to this question is scientifically uncertain, but in my opinion very clear: little to no chance. There is no quick fix
to sadness or depression, but with easy access to antidepressants, the lines between the two conditions are blurred, and the former can become or seem to become the latter.
Suggested Reading: The Pill that Steals Lives
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH8HbaZJpik
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