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Mike Baldwin's 'Age Of Antidepressants'

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Age of Antidepressants Our world has come to a point in history where we rely heavily on pills and therapy and diagnosis and doctors and studies, just to tell us what’s wrong with our personalities and our brains – for what? So pills can be prescribed and therapy revived for the diagnosis doctors proclaimed, backed up by studies they never named, all so they can keep their jobs? There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the excessive diagnosis apart from the goal of expanding one’s practice. Clinical studies are often discovered to be biased, or data manipulated. Whether the focus is on teenage trauma or debilitating depression, professionals tend to overlook important factors of influence. An array of sources have taken to this subject including a psychiatrist based in Berkley, a featured neuroscientist on TedTalk, a cartoonist named Mike Baldwin, and an analysis by s.e. smith. Seemingly, the age …show more content…

It demonstrates what most people expect an antidepressant to do, when in reality, over a long period of months it only stabilizes serotonin levels. The irony in this cartoon is purposeful because although doctors list off side effects and tell individuals what the medication does, people go into the psychiatrist with a set idea of an immediate cure. When results do not occur within the span of a week, they often reject the drug as successful, and end up back in the waiting room. In this way Baldwin shares Elson’s ideology that Americans living in today’s society do not want to put in the effort needed to cure themselves, they want a drug to do it for them. With media increasingly portraying medication as a magical cure to everyone’s problems, doctors find it increasingly hard to decipher whether or not medication is actually working; furthermore, determining if the individual is depressed or just going through a rough patch

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