The use of antidepressants and antipsychotics has skyrocketed among children, adults, and the elderly—a trend seen long before the COVID-19 pandemic. One in six Americans now takes a psychiatric drug and many are on drug “cocktails,” with drugs added to treat the side effects of other drugs. Some people have been on the drugs or drug cocktails for decades.
Certainly, mental health conditions that respond to psychiatric drugs exist—but aggressive drug marketing has broadened original diagnostic criteria and added new conditions so that more people are diagnosed. For example, anxiety was never considered a mental illness until the creation of the diagnostic categories “generalized anxiety disorder” and “social anxiety disorder” in 1980. Neither were “alcohol use disorder” and prolonged grief deemed mental illnesses until they were included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013.
