Zeitgeist, Purple pills, medicated teens, mass marketing and big pharmaceutical companies. A new cultural phenomenon?

Zeitgeist is a word which means something which most people know about or have come to know something of to the point where everyone has an awareness of the thing person issue movie war food or whatever is the thing in question. Trouble for us Zeitgeist takes ages to form, and when its to do with serious life threatening issues, Zeitgeist is almost useless in helping change to come about, because formation or mass awareness is so painstakingly slow and haphazard. And like a thousand Chinese whispers the public opinion can frequently miss-perceive and harden in its final form as something other than the fair and correct truth.

Think of depression. Zeitgeist has it that depression is an illness like any other - if you need your car fixed go to a mechanic, if you need your depression fixed go get some help at the doctor. But also the current state of Zeitgeist on depression renders a more dangerous image. Depression is a bye word for crazy people....blame it on depression. So the Zeitgeist on depression currently has one foot in each camp. Trouble is both are wrong. Here then is the true picture on depression and lets hope that one day soon the experts and change-adapters in society will come to the same conclusion and adjust the popular opinion with haste.

In a nut shell, Depression is prolonged sadness brought on by one of two things. Either the person has some bipolar or abnormal mood chemistry in their brain which can put them in a deep sadness despite their situation of life being sometimes very good, and the other depression is where a more or less normal person is continually smashed over the head and beaten up by one thing after another life throws every bad thing at them and nothing good. They realise after some years that things have not been going well for them and that usually puts a person in a depression. Ie If your life really genuinely sucks for a prolonged period of time you will end up in depression and that is normal.

So some depressed are in the category of abnormal brain chemistry while others just have a poor quality life. Enter the drug companies. You open up the pages of a magazine in the USA and you notice a full page add. "Ask your doctor if viagra is right for you" "Ask your doctor more about Xanax" Blah blah blah. In the USA home of money, more money and god versus hippies and burning bras, in this incomprehensible mixture of prostitutes and preachers we find the law allows for public advertising for medical products. So instead of a doctor seeing a patient and thinking what is the diagnosis, the patient lunges forward and demands product X because the billboard advertisement showed a guy just like him with a new full head of hair thanks to that wonder drug. "Ask your doctor if product X is right for you.".....

So these massive pharma companies develop some kind of mood altering drug that seems worth investigating from a scientific point of view - it wont necessarily prove to bear fruit but they see what's what. But then the marketing executives in the companies' marketing division get their hands on it and brand this new and untested mood altering drug as the cure to what ails ya. Did you know pharma companies spend 50% of their available money on advertising and only 50% on researching new disease cures. That's how important selling the story is in comparison to actually inventing new and excellent medicines.

So the marketing execs decide to get this new "antidepressant" and jam it lobotomy style up the gullet of anything that moves. Enter the magazine advertisement (again) "Are you having a bad day, trouble sleeping, arguing with your spouse, do you lack energy do you want more energy?" etc etc. Here we have the answer! Take Perkup its the latest lifestyle enhancement (from our marketing departments imagination and not really backed by care ethics and facts) and it will make you happy nirvana-like ecstatic and joyfull not some of the time...but all of the time. "Ask your doctor if Perkup is right for you."

So during this stage in world history around 1999 where the moral majority has it that if someone has any kind of mood issue they had better get on antidepressants so they can be happy all the time like everyone else. But trouble is nobody is able to be happy all the time so everybody starts taking antidepressants. Great huh?

Now parents become aware of antidepressants through women's magazines or billboard commercial advertisements and shows like 'Oprah' and being told by big pharma that their kids need some 'medication', just as some parents in the 1950's horrifically trusted the standard text book medical wisdom of the era and got their daughter lobotomised because she shamed them with a taboo, such as falling pregnant out of wedlock while a teenager, or their teenage son seemed queer and in 1999 the new medical wisdom advises parents on raising children and 'duty of care' comes in the form of a pill taken twice daily at lunch and recess. Little chip and Johnny are having trouble and the ADHD medication was fun but now the community is full of advertisements for some new purple pills their called antidepressants. Best of all most local family doctors endorsed the new miracle purple-pill/s as though it were truth itself, infallible and time-tested.

"But I didn't know I was depressed! What is depression anyway?" Says the kid,

"Well look you got bad grades last semester so now you get purple-pills to make you less noisy in class." Says the well meaning soccer mom, who has complete faith in the advertisements and trust in the wise family doctor. In reality there are few differences in the potent devastation that these drugs can cause to this well meaning soccer mom and her doted on offspring, and the only diffrernce between these legal drugs and the well known illegal drugs is that one set has lobbiests in Washington, while the other is illicit.

The TV says its ok. the newspaper says its ok. Oprah says its ok everyone in society says its ok so its ok. Take your purple-pills, support the shareholders. the majority of troubled teens in America today are 'medicated' and often failing grades poor academic focus can be linked to antidepressant usage and then abrupt cessation. The movie 'Garden State' won awards in 2004, and featured a 'medicated' teen, whos father had perversely had him on some kind of purple-pill type meds for much of his life. The ironic horror of Doctors - figures of authority and benevolent care, advising parents to pump themselves and their children full of relatively unknown pharmaceutical products that may ultimately cause problems instead of solving any. Often Pharma companies give commissions and free products to doctors if the doctors conform to the pharma companies' sales programmes. Its quite obscene. Eminem's song 'Purple pills' was so successful because it tapped into an undercurrent of consumer alarm.

Antidepressants dangerously take a persons vital instincts and put them on auto pilot. The person stops taking the antidepressants and suddenly they are left with no vital instincts functioning at all and no substitute there as auto pilot. The result is the KEY factor in explanation of such tragic phenomena. To clarify its not depression that causes tragedy, its the silly prescription of antidepressants coupled with the sharp cessation of the antidepressants. No its not depression that is to blame, no don't blame violent video games either, don't blame Marilyn Manson or back in the 1950's they blamed Elvis presley. Don't blame depression. You must lay the blame squarely with the marketing departments of pharma companies and the permissive advertising regulations relating to medicine advertising (Inappropriate) and the propaganda that brought into the public awareness the notion that a little pill can fix all your problems. They sold antidepressants as a cure-all and this lead directly to inhuman tragedy. Why has no authority attempted to research the concept that antidepressants cause serious problems. Some bright spark ought to do a PHD on this very subject.

UPDATE 9th March 2010:

Charmaine Dragun, it has been revealed, was in the process of 'coming off' an antidepressant pharma medication that she had been taking for ten years(!) when she jumped off the Gap in Sydney and tragically ended her own life. This little detail has only recently been released, a detail which has been ignored for several years. The fact that she was on antidepressants is further proof of the strengthening hypothesis, mentioned in the article above, that antidepressants are linked to uncharacteristic and senseless tragedies. The beautiful and talented Ten News reader and successful professional journalist Charmaine Dragun, may she rest in peace.   Comment