The Maze of Modern Medication: Insights on Mental Health, Pharmaceuticals
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another weekly debrief of my life and brain! This week, I managed to squeeze in some podcasts while in my office and on the road. I also decided to check my total time spent learning in the first quarter of the year and found that I had spent 117 hours learning, whether podcasts, online courses, or audiobooks! I have often written about my regret of spending much of my twenties playing far too many video games, and so today, I find myself seeking real-life ways to level up my mind and body. This leveling up has, for me, primarily focused on learning and educating my various opinions and ideas. As someone who loves numbers and statistics, tracking what I am feeding my mind has allowed me to take inventory of how I am spending my time and also pause and consider how the things I am learning might be changing my perception of the world around me. As I continue to learn, I see the breadth of knowledge that remains undiscovered to me. The more books I read, the longer my list of books I want to read gets. I hope for many of you who have chosen to support my writing here that you, too, have found yourselves inspired to learn and grow in some new way!
The Mind, Body and Soul
Last year, I shared that I had my wisdom teeth pulled as they had begun to cause problems for me. It was a simple procedure. I was in and out within an hour with a small bottle of pain relievers, and I returned to work. It took a couple of days for my mouth to heal, so I ended up taking those pain pills a couple of times, primarily before bed, but I never did finish them, and eventually, I disposed of them. I grew up skeptical of medications, and my mother would always seek to find natural alternatives with a cabinet of health books stacked tall! We did not have the financial means to go to the doctor except in the worst cases, and so we would often find ourselves ingesting some homemade remedy. My skepticism only increased as my Dad would later be prescribed medications that would lead him to become suicidal and mentally unstable to the point of having to be induced into a mental ward. So, for me, I have long found myself questioning the wisdom and viability of the mass prescription of these drugs.
Last week, I wrote about Christ's suffering and how His suffering was the means by which we have been saved. I have also written in the past about why suffering is important. Suffering and pain are the mechanisms by which we are most often prompted to change our environment. It is a signal that something needs to change, and often, that change is something we need to intact in our lives. This also means we are generally going to be responsible for creating that change in our lives. We, as a human species, have not been very good at personal accountability since the fall in the Garden of Eden. Since rebelling, we have always found a way to point the finger at someone or something besides ourselves. Today, there are companies that monetize this proclivity. Our culture in America has become increasingly allergic to taking personal responsibility for their lives. We create new constantly create new categories of mental and physical diseases. Everyone wants a quick pill solution to solve their problems. Beyond this, we have become ever more obsessed with the belief that happiness should be the chief pursuit of life, and often, if we are not happy, then there must be something wrong with everyone else, or we have some form of imbalance of chemicals in our brains and its NOT OUR FAULT, but it’s okay there is a drug that can fix this for us.
About this time last year, I read through a book by Dr Sarah E Hill called “This Is Your Brain on birth control.” Within this book, she details many of the terrible side effects that are commonly experienced by young women who take these drugs. When I began asking questions regarding this drug to my female friends, I was often met with a high degree of resistance. This was a taboo subject that I, as a man, was seemingly not allowed to discuss or have opinions on. But as I read through this book, I found myself alarmed at the side effects being experienced and the very real possibility of permanent physical and psychological damage that could occur from prolonged use of these substances. A few months ago, I was introduced to a bright young female podcaster “Alex Clark,” and her podcast called “The Spillover with Alex Clark.” Through this podcast, I have become ever more aware of the chemical and drug-laden environment within which we live and the horrifying effects it is having on both our physical and mental health.
Thinking through many of these ideas, I found myself wondering what percentage of Americans today are on some form of pharmaceutical medication. The results I found are that as of 2024, an estimated 66% of the US population is on one or more prescriptions.
Having seen firsthand many of the side effects of my dad being prescribed a varying collection of anti-depressants and the skepticism of my mother anytime a doctor tried to prescribe her child any medication, in the podcast above, Dr. Roger McFillin details many of the practices of modern doctors and the careless prescription of mind-altering drugs. He also details some of the permanent side effects of these drugs. One of the side effects he details is that antidepressants are literal numbing agents of our emotions. These drugs are designed to make us less capable of those natural warning signs that something is wrong. They make people increasingly apathetic, and the resulting life effects are often terrifying. One of the most horrible stories Dr McFillin shares is a story of a father who killed his 11-year-old child due to the drugs he was on. Dr. McFillin also shares how the numbing effect that these drugs can have is permanent and irreversible on the genital area, resulting in an inability ever to experience sexual climax. Considering these details and the increasing number of people who are increasingly reporting lower levels of sexual satisfaction. I also can’t help but wonder if these side effects are also part of what has caused an increase of 4000% in trans identification among young women. I have no proof of this, but I am simply speculating what downstream effects of these drugs have been on a generation of young people who have never known a life apart from them.
Abigail Shrier, who wrote “Irreversible Damage,” continues her pursuit of understanding what is affecting the children of today and why so many young people today seem to be increasingly unprepared for the challenges of life. Some challenges as simple as getting a driver license. I just began Abigail’s latest book called “Bad Therapy” and hearing her dig deeper into the subject of what her observations of these downstream effects are. Thinking through the various problems we have created for today’s young people, I can’t help but ask the question, “What can be done? As so many of these problems seem to be coming to a head today, young people are increasingly unprepared for the challenges that life will inevitably This past week, I also learned that Jonathan Haidt released a new book a couple of weeks ago called “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” here to yet another author has identified that something is going on with the upcoming generation who is increasingly unequipped.
I have added this book to my reading list as I continue asking what can be done to help this struggling generation. Within my current role, I am responsible for hiring new personnel, and increasingly, I find an increasing cohort of young men in their late teens and early twenties who are incapable of maintaining a professional career. I find an increasing number of both young men and women who have no confidence and no clue how to conduct themselves in the adult world. As I consider all these ideas, I can’t help but ask how all these various factors are interwoven, creating this current cultural moment of anxiety and depression, a generation of young people who are increasingly opting out of marriage and committed relationships. A generation of young people who seemingly can’t function without the assistance of some form of pharmaceutical intervention or therapy. I realize there are use cases for many of these technologies, but the mass distribution and the flippant application as a cure all in many cases concerns me.
I am no expert, nor do I pretend to be, and the thoughts I share here are my own based on the information I have learned through the various books and podcasts featuring vetted Doctors, so I close there. I hope you have learned something new and have learned something new.
