Thanks to Beyond Blue readers Barbara (formerly known as “Babs”) and NYJLM (who writes her own blog, “So Love Is Hard and Love Is Tough” for forwarding me the link to Judith Warner’s opinion piece, “Overselling Overmedication” about the volumes of literature coming out these days about America, the Nation of Prozac, where overmedication is the norm.
I feared her article was yet another “anti-medication” treatise–and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been a bit fragile and grumpy as of late–so I tucked it away for a time when I was more chemically imbalanced, well fed and exercised, to read on an afternoon I was less angry at all the people who pontificate against drugs.
That moment never came, but I read her article anyway, and was very delighted by her nuanced argument, not to mention the exhaustive research she had done before penning a piece that touches our territory.
I’ve excerpted a few paragraphs from her piece, but it is worth going to her blog yourself (by clicking here) and reading the entire thing.
Thanks, Judith! You make me less angry! Hooray!

Let’s get beyond statistics, percentage changes in diagnosis rates and billions earned off human suffering by Big Pharma. And let’s just try for a moment to get real.
Most of the critics decrying the over-medicalization of the American mind rest their arguments upon the bedrock assumption that people who have nothing wrong with them – happy-go-lucky types who essentially make a wrong turn on their way to Starbucks or soccer and end up in the consulting room – are being medicated for largely fictitious concerns.
But search your minds and memories: Have you, or people close to you, ever taken medication in a lazy or thoughtless way? Eagerly? As a lark? Ask around a bit; find out what kind of desperation led others to the point where they had to accept psychopharmacological help.
(Write and tell me. Tell us all. But please don’t send abstract social observations or share stories about people you don’t actually know. First-hand knowledge and real life only, thanks.)
The psychiatrists I’ve interviewed over the course of the past four years say that they have yet to be swamped by frivolous patients showing up in their offices looking for pills to help them tweak troublesome little aspects of their personalities. “Not only have I not encountered many [such patients], I haven’t encountered any in my office or even in detailed phone calls,” Kramer, most recently, told me.