Coming from a culture where psychiatric medications are not normalized (because people simply couldn't afford them, if pharmacies even carried them), it is pretty disturbing how many people take some kind of pill. You can't help but feel as though so many people shouldn't have anything wrong with them such that they need pills -- i.e., mental illness should not exist at such high rates lol.
(And, as subtext, should be feared and stigmatized.)
This is a dangerous take, and I would recommend you do the reading to upgrade that feeling to a thought, with all the relevant context.
The idea that someone should be a certain way, and that they shouldn't need a pill, is making some heavy assumptions about what's needed to exist in the world. This is something that's changing rapidly - one can no longer make a comfortable living doing many jobs, and most of those are the kinds of things you could do if focused thinking isn't in your wheel house.
Speaking as someone who thought that way for a long time, and has a severe executive functioning disorder, I can tell you it was wrong minded. I spent over a decade trying to just "push through" because I felt "I should be enough without it" and I didn't want to be dependent on a medication. I flunked out of high school and then college, went through a series of careers that always flopped, and watched my relationships fail because I couldn't keep a job or a schedule.
At some point, I became fed up with my situation and started seeking help. After admitting that I might need this help, things got immediately better in my head, and then in my life. I taught myself to code and I now work in tech, which is the story of career I had given up any hope of ever achieving. I no longer struggle to make ends meet and I have a stable and fulfilling life, which wasn't going to happen unmedicated. I know this because I tried.
If this isn't you, then great. But please recognize that by putting up barriers to others getting this stuff, we've almost certainly forced people like me into lives that are measurably worse and less productive for society than they could otherwise live.
Seems reasonable that a large percentage have suboptimal neurological issues that can be helped by a drug for the same reason so many have suboptimal vision: it doesn’t stop you from reproducing often enough to be selected out.
I don’t disagree with you. But… we can tell when eyes are messed up by verifiable flaws in the mechanisms, we can literally look in and see the issue. Not exactly so for brain meds.
I agree that the biology is more complex and these conditions are less black and white but I’ve seen people helped by meds as dramatically as eyeglasses.
It can be truly stark with ADD. I’ve seen people have miraculous improvements to their lives from ADD drugs.
> I’ve seen people helped by meds as dramatically as eyeglasses.
With ADHD I was unable to get out of bed properly, unable to shower more frequently than every 6 months, unable to perform any other basic hygiene, unable to do any of the hundreds of hobbies I've enjoyed over the years but spontaneously lost the ability to actually do, unable to do any of my chores until weeks after they got really bad, etc.
I'd let things like toothache or fucking organ failure go unnoticed for weeks while I was too lazy to tell anyone because I was hoping it would just go away. Ended up needing a root canal because I waited too long, and an IV to stop my pancreas from failing (!!) because I waited a week before telling anyone about the very obvious pain in my side.
I had to drop out of school because I literally couldn't leave the house after some winter break. Just out of nowhere, my brain was like "nah, no more school". I proceeded to lose three jobs because either I became so unable to do them that I had to quit, or I loved the job far too much to quit, so I got fired when I tried for weeks and failed to overcome my brain just completely refusing to function at all.
I was so depressed that I would sleep for 12 hours every time and I sometimes wouldn't even be able to stay up that long before falling asleep again. There was no 24 hour schedule. I could not stay up long enough to make it through a 24 hour day even if I slept for over half of it. I slept because I was so bored, I was so unmotivated, so starved and unable to do anything that I would just be trapped in bed wishing I could get up but unable to think of any possible reason why that would ever even help. It's the classic depressive mantra of "what is even the point" except the mantra came first and the depression followed.
It's even worse than just glasses. You could be completely blind and still not be as dysfunctional as my case of ADHD. I wasn't in control of my own body or my own brain. I felt so isolated and dysphoric that I developed a fucking dissociative disorder because I was unable to identify with my own body. It's baaad, it's baaaaad, it's really really bad. Even people who know what ADHD is just don't believe my case of it because it's so bad.
But some dextroamphetamine just... fixed it. Literally. It's just gone. No more dysphoria. No more struggling to get out of bed. No more struggling to take showers, or wash my stuff, or do chores, or eat food, or do any hobby I want. No more depression, no more intrusive thoughts, no more excessive sleep, no more inability to fulfill promises or jobs or obligations or expectations or desires... the difference is so great that I could cry. I could cry because of how good my life is now. I could cry because of how long it took me to realize that I had ADHD and it could be treated. I could cry because of everything I lost in order to get to this point. Or I could cry because the only reason I found out is because of a single kind Redditor who just so happened to change my entire life... could cry because of how nobody else ever noticed...
To be fair, nowhere did they say pills shouldn't exist... just that not everyone in the entire world should be taking a big pile of them. Reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty where nobody eats food anymore, they just have something like 30 pills shoveled into their mouth.
But... something about saying that feels wrong to me. Sure, I feel like doctors should not be offering pills to people who do not need them, especially stupid overprescribed shit like antidepressants, especially SSRIs. But some people need pills... some people really, really need pills...
