The overmedication of America. Is it ethical to be handing out anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and ADHD medication like candy? Is it ethical to keep putting bandaids on big problems without addressing the deeper issues of long term mental health and societal issues? Who is responsible for the rising issues of depression, anxiety, and ADHD? Is overmedication detrimental to society? These are the questions that I will be addressing with this paper. In 1621, Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy and it was a huge hit. Published just before the Industrial Revolution in England, this book served many as the age of anxiety began to gain momentum. Burton’s main point was that melancholy is a part of life, part of what it means to be human, …show more content…
It is easy to view the world as doomed, and we don’t want to face it so we put our headphones in, keep our heads down, eyes on our phones so that we don’t have to look at what is happening to the world. According to my psychology teacher Ron Stout, 75% of Americans are on medications that they wouldn’t need if they would just slightly change their lifestyle. We can blame our quick fix, right here right now, no work attitude for the ridiculous amount of medications that we consume.Pharmaceutical companies have recognized this huge opportunity for profit. Today, depression has been professionalized, commodified, and industrialized. The advertisements for Cymbalta or Abilify are just like ones for whitening strips or fast food. They use psychological techniques to make these things look appealing instead of suggesting that we can just eat less processed foods for whiter teeth or that it would actually benefit us more than we know to cook our own meals instead of buying a taco that
Prescription and pharmaceutical drug abuse is beginning to expand as a social issue within the United States because of the variety of drugs, their growing availability, and the social acceptance and peer pressure to uses them. Many in the workforce are suffering and failing at getting better due to the desperation driving their addiction.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the first woman director of planning policy at the State Department and the president and CEO of the New America Foundation. She has taught at two of the most prestige schools in the country Princeton and Harvard Law. She is also the author and editor of several books, but the most recent one is called “The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World which was published in the year 2007. Slaughters essay is about trying to balance home life and work life, and it first appeared in the Atlantic in July/August 2012 issue and was also on the Huffington Post. This essay argues that women in high power jobs and government positions can have both a work life and also keep their home life. She started her essay with a little information on background about her job.
In today’s society, a lot of emphasis is placed on administering drugs and medicating people with psychological issues; however, most of these ailments and issues have the ability be treated through the use of talk therapy rather than medication. Americans are particularly guilty of over medicating when it comes to our more common mental health diagnosis such as, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. We as a society expect things to be done at the snap of a finger; in our advancement of science, we have been able to discover ways of offering the results we want quickly, inexpensively, and with little effort. Unfortunately, although the use of medications, also known as psychoactive drugs, occasionally remove the symptoms, but they do little to remove the causes of these mental health issues. In addition, to the lack of solution that the use of psychoactive drugs offer, they can also have unwanted and dangerous side effects. These can include simple physical irritants such as dry mouth and head aches, and can range up to dependency and substance abuse, and in some cases even death. Moreover, there are cases of inappropriate prescribing, where doctors are authorizing the use of medications that don’t work or are not pertinent to the issue the patient is experiencing. Furthermore, some of these doctors are issuing these medications without subjecting the patient to a proper mental health evaluation by a psychological professional.
During 1776, the United States was at war to gain its own independence from the hands of the tyrant King George III and his kingdom. As the fightt continued, the spirits of the U.S. soldiers began to die out as the nightmares of winter crawled across the land. Thomas Paine, a journalist, hoped to encourage the soldiers back into the fight through one of his sixteen pamphlets, “The American Crisis (No.1)”. In order to rebuild the hopes of the downhearted soldiers, Thomas Paine establishes himself as a reliable figure, enrages them with the crimes of the British crown, and, most importantly evokes a sense of culpability.
Sharon Begley, author of “Happiness: Enough Already,” proclaims that dejection is not an unacceptable state of mind and there are experts that endorses gloomy feelings. This reading explicates that even though every-one should be happy there is no need to ignore sadness, as both emotions share key parts in everyone’s life. Sharon Begley and her team of specialists provides the information on why sadness is supplemental to a person’s life.
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
There has been an increase in the Misuse and Abuse of prescription drugs to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). the number of children on medication for ADHD has grown from 600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million in 2013 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But although there is an over-medication of ADHD drugs, there is actually and under-medication since not all the right people are getting medicated. Many individuals lack insurance or are insured with health plans that do not cover the outpatient prescription drugs they need and cannot afford.10 Therefore, Individuals covered by various health plans and programs, and those who have no prescription drug coverage, pay significantly different prices for the same medications. As the demand for ADHD drugs grows, higher prescribing rates and increasing drug prices result, which creates problems for these number of Americans who cannot afford the treatment they require.
Cropper, Carol Marie. “A Cloud Over Antidepressants” Businessweek 3880 (2004): 112-113 Business Source Premeir. Web. 28 Jan. 2014
Stolzer, PhD, J. M. (2007). The ADHD Epidemic in America. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 9, 109-116.
The government of the United States of America is very unique. While many Americans complain about high taxes and Big Brother keeping too close an eye, the truth is that American government, compared to most foreign democracies, is very limited in power and scope. One area American government differs greatly from others is its scope of public policy. Americans desire limited public policy, a result of several components of American ideology, the most important being our desire for individuality and equal opportunity for all citizens. There are many possible explanations for the reason Americans think this way, including the personality of the immigrants who fled here, our physical isolation from other countries, and the diversity of the American population.
For the purpose of this essay, I have chosen to write about the theme revolving around alienation, anxiety, and panic. I would like to extend the theme of alienation and anxiety to include depression as that is a theme commonly found among some of these works. While discussing these themes, I will reference to two texts from the course text book. The first text is “Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid. The second text used for reference will be “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” written by Ernest Hemingway.
Every person has felt melancholy and dejected at one point in their lives as sorrow does not discriminate on race, age, nor gender. Even in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne, the protagonist, faces desolation in her life, which elicits an emotional response in myself where I am able to relate to the despondency she faces.
Psychology is a social science that aims to study the mind and the behaviors of humans. It aims to understand what drives humans to act the way they do. It differs from sociology and anthropology in that it takes accounts the individual rather than society as a whole.
The point that Alan Brinkley makes in his essay, “The Idea of an American Century”, was that the American people intended to use their nation’s great power following WWII in order to spread the American Model to other nations. The American people sought to use the United States new superpower status to push their way of life to the entire world even if that meant by force. The Vietnam War was the best example of this. The American people wanted not only to stop Communism, but also to install their own form of government upon the Vietnamese people. After coming out victorious in both World Wars, Americans felt that they would use their newfound power to spread their way of life onto others.
The topic that was chosen for this project is one that has been studied and looked into before. Many articles and even a few books have been written concerning the conflict of interest, the DSM, and the pharmaceutical industry, and literature also exists that deals with other aspects of the issue. Both sides of this issue contained relevant information for this project. In the literature that was anti-DSM, there was a clear bias. Using both sides, brought more neutrality to our perspective, which led to a less biased viewpoint. This project has taken a different path than others because it combines economics, political science, and sociology. Also, other authors gave their opinion on how this conflict of interest should be stopped,