America's Psychiatric Drug Addition

“Sell crazy someplace else; we’re all stocked up here,” says Jack Nicholson in 1997’s As Good as It Gets.

There was a point, not so many years ago, when Prozac did not exist, and neither did ADHD. People were depressed or distracted. There was not a lot to be done about it. Those afflicted had to live with their afflictions.

Medco Health Solutions’ (NYSE: MHS) recently released report shows that many people with mental troubles no longer have to suffer, or at least not as much as they used to. In a research report titled “America’s State of Mind,” the experts who did the work say that “more than one-in-five adult Americans took at least one medication commonly used to treat a psychiatric or behavioral disorder in 2010.” The drug companies make billions of dollars on the sales of these medicines. It is hard to say whether the treatments make most people feel better.

Medco makes a great deal of money when it treats the mentally afflicted. So do the large pharmaceutical companies and thousands of American doctors and hospitals. The MHS study’s weakness is that it fails to show whether medicines help, or perhaps to show that people who get the drugs feel better because of the attention they have received.

Douglas A. McIntyre