What if the drugs just make us... better? As in happier, less stressed, and more suited to what modern life requires from us.
Happiness isn't necessary to pass on your genes. Most animals, especially prey animals, spend much of their lives scared, because death is inevitable otherwise. We've now created a safe and pleasant environment our ancestors could only dream of, yet many of us are still unhappy. There's no real evidence we were broadly happier in the distant past either, we're just a different kind of unhappy now.
Seems to me we've developed a tool that makes people feel better and function better, perhaps by blunting some of the vestigial leftover emotions we needed when every tree might have had a sabre-tooth tiger hiding behind it.
"more suited to what modern life requires from us." This part scares me because I would prefer that we rearrange our economic and social world so that people can have more free time, more vacation, more relaxation, and way more social time too.
I have known many people in my personal life in the united states who have an extremely stressful and depressing life due to external stressors (job, debt) and in response are on powerful psichiatric meds with the sometimes-severe withdrawal problems mentioned in this thread.
It shouldn't be an excuse for not making people's lives better long term, but you also have to treat people where they are in life.
In some ways, certain problems seem to emerge from modern lives being too comfortable for the environment our brains are adapted for, but it's not as if unhappiness is a new thing, we just have better tools to treat it now. My life is about as good as any life can reasonably be expected to be economically, and I have as much social interaction as I want... but I'm still anxious (without sertraline).
It really seems like humans have been fairly unhappy throughout history, are fairly unhappy now in the best societies, and are fairly unhappy now in the worst societies too. We're a pretty unhappy species prone to quite a lot of mental health problems. Only difference being that in the past, eventually hunger would override your unhappiness and you'd have to get up and do something about it, which would take your mind off worrying about dying from that worsening foot infection and mourning over the twelve kids you've had die in their childhood.
I would also suggest that being overly negative around psychiatric meds itself can be harmful. I know many people who lived deeply unhappy lives and avoided taking them for years over fears of side effects and things they'd read about, only for them to eventually give in and wonder why they hadn't done it years ago. They do have side effects, but man, as a N=1, all I can say is sertraline improved every single aspect of my life. It's indescribable how much I owe to that compound.
I could function. I would be a lot more anxious. I'd probably function better in certain scenarios, just ones that I'm unlikely to encounter.
About 80% of people are prescribed psychiatric medications at some point in their life. Add in how many people use non-prescribed ones (smoking, alcohol, illicit drugs) for psychological support and you're going to have a hard time finding a control.
lol, I know plenty of people offline that are addicted to this shit too. It’s just that this forum and Redditors cheerlead about their addictions willingly. Most people are shyer about it.
Most of us have no idea how many non-commenting readers w/o first-hand experience are just reading, and so no ability to draw any conclusions about the number of ones who comment with first-hand experience. 100 people out of a 1000, and 100 people out of a million, are very different things.
I am also shocked that every time an article about guitar playing is posted the sheer number of posters who play guitar themselves. I mean what are the chances?
An HN post like this will gather like what, at most two dozens of anecdotes from a highly self selected user pool of maybe a million top? Is this how you base your "sheer number" on? Is this how you judge what is good or bad for your definition of social good?
