By Professor Doom
“Are you on drugs?”
--common response to
an individual exhibiting strange behavior. It seems a fair question to ask most
students on campus today.
Every day we get
to see another example of insanity on campus, and while I usually blame it on
the student loan scam, another explanation comes to mind:
Wow! Please
understand, when you go to these kinds of doctors (more accurately called “drug
dealers”), the primary thing they’re going to do is give you a prescription for
drugs. It’s not complicated—these drugs are almost certainly addictive, so
prescribing these drugs is a great way to make a lifelong customer. Many of my
students have told me of how they jump through hoop after hoop to get “their” drugs
that they “need,” whether it be Adderall, Paxil, Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin…or a
host of others.
So, yes, if 25%
of our college students have been diagnosed for a mental health condition, then
they’ve almost certainly taken drugs that (supposedly) treat that condition.
Does anyone else think something is very
wrong here? 50 years ago, these drugs didn’t exist. Back then, did we honestly
lose 25% of our population to mental illness because we didn’t have these
drugs? If these drugs are truly necessary at this level, how did we not notice
25% of our population consistently going bonkers before the drugs were
invented?
The report I’m
snipping from has a bunch of little cited factoids, but just one more for now:
Almost 73 percent of
students living with a mental health condition experienced a mental health
crisis on campus
I concede 20ish
is a stressful time…but I really wish we gave our kids better guidance than “go
see a doctor and take drugs for it.” Allow me to digress a moment with a couple
of short anecdotes.
Student: (clunk)
One time I was
passing out algebra tests, and a student just passed out as I handed it to her.
She was most petite, you could have given her cement shoes and she still
wouldn’t have weighed much past 100 lbs. The problem was, she’d just donated
blood to the bloodmobile on campus (in violation of their donation guidelines).
The first thing she said when she came to her senses?
Student: “But I drank
my Slim-Fast this morning!”
I don’t think she
needs drugs, and I don’t think the drugs she was taking was helping (and for
what it’s worth, I never had much luck with Slim-Fast, I got up to 6 of those
shakes a day and still never lost a pound).
Another quick
anecdote from me passing out tests, in vector calculus:
Student: (runs away,
in tears)
I thought I’d be
up for the Math Professor Hall of Fame for breaking a student so quickly…she
apologized later, it was some personal problem that just happened at a bad
time, relative to test day. I doubt she went on drugs over it, and sure hope
not.
The main problem
I have with all these drugs being passed out, to 25% of our students (and by
extension, a like amount of our population) is they go on the drugs for life. I know plenty of people who
take these drugs (because, hey, I know plenty of people), and I think I know
exactly one person who’s managed to get off them—and I’m being optimistic.
So, what are
these drugs for, anyway?
So, depression is
the primary thing being treated. I sure don’t want people to be sad, of course
I want them to be happy. Maybe it’s a valid solution is to get 25% or more of
the population addicted to drugs…it might be a fair price to pay for happiness,
I admit.
Now, I’m very
suspicious about the pharmaceutical industry, I really don’t think many of
these drugs are as efficacious as claimed. I mean, I know they’re addictive, I
know they have side effects, so it’s possible they’re not utterly useless, and
might be helpful. That said, I know how trivial it is to jigger the numbers in
a statistical study to show a drug is powerful…so I know it’s trivial to make a
completely ineffectual drug look like it’s good for something. With such huge
profit margins on these drugs, I see a motive to get lots of people addicted to
them.
I wonder if I
can use statistics to show these drugs are useless?
Hmm, we’ve been
passing out these pills for decades, and mostly for depression. Hey, what
symptom of depression is impossible to hide, and really hard to bury with
statistics? Suicide. It’s hard to fake being alive when you’re dead, and deaths
have to show up somewhere. Hmm, don’t we track suicide rates? Yes, we track
them very carefully.
What have the
suicide rates been like for 15 years of hardcore drugging of our population,
mostly for depression?
Only one ethnic
group experienced a decent decline in the above study: black men. That,
unsurprisingly is not a dominant group on campus, and, I suspect, not a group
likely to go to get drugs from a psychiatrist.
Now, studies
are trying to spin the huge psychiatric drug problem of our students in the
obvious way: to say we need to set up more fiefdoms to track and care for our
students’ mental health.
Rubbish.
I don’t give a
damn about yet another peer reviewed study showing that these pharmaceuticals
are actually useful for depression. There have been plenty of “independent”
studies showing these drugs are worthless…the people doing such studies are
inevitably attacked, and discounted because “they have an axe to grind” with
the pharmaceutical industry.
I’m certainly no
doctor, but it seems quite obvious to me that if the drugs we’re giving to
prevent suicide are empirically
leading to an increase in suicide…we should stop using those drugs, and we
should strongly, strongly, question whether the drugs are doing more good than
harm.
Instead, the
response to strong evidence we’re addicting 25% of our kids to useless (at
best) drugs is “we should set up more fiefdoms to take care of our drug addicts
on campus.” Why not instead ask some questions about these drugs, in light of
the easily available evidence?
Even more
importantly, why don’t any of the people in power ask this question?
No comments:
Post a Comment