I actually thought it was pretty good. Profit-driven overtreatment is probably the largest realistically addressable systemic issue in U.S. health care. I think fleshing out that issue through the example of problems associated with benzodiazapines is the real intent of the article, rather than to demonize the drugs themselves. Its rhetorical flourishes make it overstated in parts, but it does allude to statistics and under-exposed disclosures (e.g. the industry ghost writing of top academic articles) to support most of its explicit claims. I don't find what it's saying difficult to swallow. I mean, the explosion of diagnoses of psychological disorders is bizarre if it's not mostly the work of a deceptive and successful marketing campaign. How many people's anxiety is really so crippling and intractable that the best option is a course of treatment that involves daily psychopharmacological manipulation leading directly to physical dependence on narrowly understood drugs that are linked to so many ADDITIONAL problems?
source
The article this graph is from notes that the most commonly used prescription drugs in the U.S. include "central nervous system stimulants for adolescents, antidepressants for middle-aged adults," both psychiatric categories. Read the
wiki page on antidepressant efficacy for an indication of how little benefit those have. Of course, we're talking about benzos, but I bring this up just show how easy it is to illustrate my contention that there's a ludicrous amount of overtreatment involving psychiatric drugs. I'm not surprised so many people think they need benzos to deal with anxiety either, since, after they take them for awhile, not taking them makes them feel worse then they ever felt before they had touched them. The drugs make a substantial difference for many at the beginning, sure, but then desensitization occurs and people are left nearly in the same spot, except now they're in a dependency cycle that's become their new normal and the idea of getting out of that is frightening.
Outside of institutions and special education programs, I'm skeptical that there are nearly so many people as who are prescribed or seek them who truly benefit in the long run from daily use of any current strongly psychoactive drugs. This is simply because, as the article alludes to, neurochemistry is profoundly complex, subtle, and particular in action, whereas psychiatric drugs are crude tools with largely mysterious generalized effects. The fact that such drugs are prescribed daily (the term for using street drugs at the dosages many are prescribed in this way is "chronic abuse," heh) means whatever unintended interference with natural neural processing they are causing is artificially maintained semi-permanently. Most psychological issues experienced by generally functional individuals naturally run their course eventually. Any drug that maintains an unnatural balance may very well interfere with the, albeit painful, cultivation of ultimately more effective personal coping strategies and other healthier means of regaining control of one's life. Presumably this is how things worked before the pharmaceutical industry, medical professionals, and academia formed a parasitic economic symbiosis that functions to deceive people into believing they suffer crippling conditions that can only be treated by lifelong use of expensive drugs.
Limited-regimen or single-dose treatments such as those used in MDMA or psychedelic therapies are where
psychiatry for the masses makes far more sense (in addition to DAILY. EXERCISE. ... seriously.). These drug treatments produce ongoing benefits by virtue of perspective changes rather than by blindly forcing interminable neurophysiological imbalances in the absence of deeper personal understanding. There's not nearly so much money in this approach though.
