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Medicating Our Feelings,Patients seeking a more joyful existence and relief from worry, stress, and anxiety often
fall victim to the messages endlessly displayed on TV and billboards. Often, instead of gaining relief, they fall
victim to the myriad iatrogenic side effects of antidepressant medication. Moreover, a whole generation of
antidepressant users has been created from young people growing up on Ritalin. Medicating youth and
modifying their emotions must have some impact on how they learn to deal with their feelings. They learn
to equate coping with drugs rather than with their inner resources. As adults, these medicated youth reach for
alcohol, drugs, or even street drugs to cope. According to JAMA , “Ritalin acts much like cocaine.”(43) Today's
marketing of mood-modifying drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft ® makes them not only socially acceptable but
almost a necessity in today's stressful world.
Television Diagnosis,To reach the widest audience possible, drug companies are no longer just targeting medical
doctors with their marketing of antidepressants. By 1995, drug companies had tripled the amount of money allotted
to direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers. The majority of this money is spent on seductive television
ads. >From 1996 to 2000, spending rose from $791 million to nearly $2.5 billion.(44) This $2.5 billion represents
only 15% of the total pharmaceutical advertising budget. While the drug companies maintain that direct-to-consumer
advertising is educational, Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe of the Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, DC,
argues that the public often is misinformed about these ads.(45) People want what they see on television and are
told to go to their doctors for a prescription. Doctors in private practice either acquiesce to their patients' demands
for these drugs or spend valuable time trying to talk patients out of unnecessary drugs. Dr. Wolfe remarks that one
important study found that people mistakenly believe that the “FDA reviews all ads before they are released and allows
only the safest and most effective drugs to be promoted directly to the public.”(46)
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