by BRUCE E. LEVINE
In the U.S. in 2022, 49,476 people died by suicide, and there were approximately 1.6 million suicide attempts. Not included in suicide statistics is the even more common U.S. “death of despair” of drug overdose death, numbering 107,941 in 2022. While most of us are not attempting to kill our pain in a manner that puts us in the emergency room or the morgue, the majority of Americans are less dramatically trying to disconnect from painful lives.
It is convenient for apologists of U.S. society to see those of us overwhelmed by our pain—anxious, depressed, dissociating, or in some other way having difficulty functioning—as suffering from a “mental illness” and in need of “treatment.” However, the more that Americans have bought the idea that there is an epidemic of mental illness which requires greater access to treatment, the more fucked up we are all getting, and the more we enable a fucked up society to become increasingly more so. Not only is psychiatric treatment—which for most patients means psychiatric drugs—not helping many of them while making some feel even worse; we have also been sidetracked from examining what it is about society that is fucking up so many of us, and we have been diverted from pursuing those nooks and crannies that have yet to be dehumanized.
First, how are the majority of us today disconnecting from our painful lives? Next, what is the core source of our painful lives? And finally, what is a path that makes more sense than increasingly more mental health treatment?
Using Drugs to Disconnect
One way to disconnect from our emotional pain is through psychoactive drugs, which includes not only cannabis, alcohol, and illicit hard drugs, but a wide array of psychiatric drugs. Drugs are by no means the only way we try to disconnect, but I will begin with them.
Recently reported in the journal Addiction, a 2022 U.S. survey revealed that there are now “more daily and near daily” cannabis users (17.7 million) than there are such high-frequency alcohol users (14.7 million). While far more people continue to drink alcohol than use cannabis, the median alcohol user reported drinking 4 to 5 days in the past month compared to the median cannabis consumer who used it 15 to 16?days in the past month; and cannabis users were 7.4 times more likely than alcohol drinkers to use it on a daily basis.
While there is little hypocrisy among alcohol and cannabis users about trying to disconnect from their unpleasant realities to feel better, there is enormous hypocrisy when it comes to psychiatric drugs among some users and most prescribers, who would rather call these drugs “medication,” even though these drugs are in the same psychoactive category as alcohol and cannabis.
Thankfully, there are a handful of non-hypocritical, non-bullshitting psychiatrists such as Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network and author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008). Moncrieff points out, “Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin. . . . Alcohol helps to reduce social anxiety not because it corrects an underlying biochemical imbalance, but because features of alcohol induced intoxication include relaxation and disinhibition.” Moncrieff explains that psychiatric drugs—rather than correcting an abnormal state in the manner of insulin for diabetes— “induce an abnormal or altered state,” and are in the same category as alcohol.
Just how many of us are using psychiatric drugs? In 2020, it was reported that 16.5% of U.S. adults were prescribed psychiatric drugs; so out of a U.S. adult population of 258.3 million in 2020, 42.6 million adults were taking the edge off with prescribed “medication.” This total does not include the millions more Americans under 18 put on psychiatric drugs, often to make their inability to adjust to an alienating school and other surroundings less painful for their parents.
Disconnecting By Other Means
Today, much of the U.S. economy is fueled by buying and selling that which disconnects us from painful realities. For many of us, our “drug of choice” is not an actual drug.
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