Language is very telling of attitudes - would it be the same talking about medication for high blood pressure?
Working in a busy press office for a major mental health charity Rethink Mental Illness, I often get calls from journalists asking if I can put them in touch with someone to interview about their experiences of mental illness.
Nothing unusual about that. What I have noticed about these conversations however, is the familiar phrases that so often tend to pop up. Do we have anyone who has been ‘parked’ on medication for over 10 years? A mum who is ‘hooked’ on Prozac? Take a look at almost any media coverage about antidepressants or antipsychotics and you’ll often find this kind of language creeping in. Every time new figures come out showing increases in prescriptions for these types of drugs, we get a flurry of calls from the media asking if we’re ‘concerned’ about the ‘shocking rise’ in the ‘antidepressant epidemic’.
What I find worrying, is the automatic assumption that a rise in prescriptions, or someone taking medication for a number of years, is necessarily A Bad Thing. Medication for mental illness can save lives and give people the stability they need to survive. That may be for a few months, it may be years. While no one wants to be on any kind of medication unnecessarily, for some people, it’s the best option. The language used in the media around this is very telling. There is a clear dividing line between those who simply ‘take’ medication, such as people with diabetes, and those who are ‘hooked’ on it - people with mental health problems.
Antidepressants in particular are often written about in the context of someone trying desperately to ‘give them up’ as if they’re some kind of bad habit.
