In 2023, Ildefonso Hernández, former director of Public Health in Spain, stated in a headline in the newspaper EL MUNDO, that “It is not good that from the age of 60 the solution is drugs”. Furthermore, he constantly focused on the issue of mental health, where, apparently, their cure has been left in the hands of the various medications given to patients: «To give us an idea: the lack of response to mental health problems is now more evident. This has to do with the fact that too many biomedical responses have been given, with drugs that do not alleviate the origin of the disease. That is to say, the problem of the increase in suicides in young people cannot be answered with drugs. Spain is one of the countries, with Portugal, where it consumes the most anxiolytics and antidepressants. This is serious, because the underlying problems are not understood in this way. There are problems of discomfort underneath that have to do with social policies, with system responses in the field of primary care.
Without going into the terrible problem that plagues countries where governance is always on a knife’s edge, with endemic problems of tribal, religious, territorial or magical clashes, whose approach is necessarily seen internationally with the help of the relevant organizations, there remain the more democratic countries, where mental health is generated, on many occasions, by the violation of human rights that were already believed to be surpassed, such as the right to housing, to a fair job in a society. egalitarian.
Today, young people, for example, in Europe, are forced to not be able to develop a fair life path, due to the cost of living in general. Without access to housing, a place where a certain intimacy, a sense of belonging, develops; Young people end up mired in a despair that has no easy solution in the medium term. And that is when mental health problems arise, anxiety, lack of life plan, which leads them to a need to consume certain drugs (sometimes they enter the field of drug addiction) that, according to all health systems, would be the necessary help to correct their Mental Health problems.
However, society in general, and politicians in particular, do not confront this problem in a reasonable manner, entangled in a spiral of corruption, on the one hand, and apathy on the other, which does not provide solutions to the tangible problems that young people may have today.
Societies must move forward as a block. It is not enough for a president of government (Spanish and others) to affirm that the economy is doing well, when the shopping basket is becoming alarmingly more expensive, when one cannot access, I insist, decent housing (which generates social problems of occupation, etc.), when salaries do not adjust to the market that surrounds them, and it is not enough to be populist or liberal. In the end, it just consists of showing empathy and ethically trying to see which ideas generate the most possibilities of reversing the process. The greater the expectation, the greater the ability to generate plausible solutions, the more certain that young people will know how to address their situation, without having to go to the doctor to recommend the latest pills, necessary to move forward.
Psychiatrists, and doctors in general, empowered today to prescribe antidepressants and anxiolytics, justify prescribing such medications in the lack of expectations of young people. They have depression, anxiety, attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders (ADHD, something that has become very fashionable, and since the word sounds good, some laboratories have dedicated themselves to generating a series of medications directly related to this issue. They are the same dog, but with a different collar, but where marketing has a direct impact), but above all they are unhappy. Therefore they are medicated and that’s it.
WHY DOES THE POLITICAL-HEALTH SYSTEM NOT ASK WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY?
No doubt because this would entail a kind of measures that would affect the possibility of making people free and in dignified conditions. But who doesn’t want free young people in dignified conditions. Perhaps those who do not look at their age or their condition, perhaps those who look at them only as a vote, when they can vote, or as another patient so they can take certain medications.
We must not forget that with every pill we take, pharmaceutical companies and other gears of the health system make money as well. That is why, when Ildefonso Hernández commented in 2023 about “It is not good that from the age of 60 the solution is drugs,” He should also have added that, in the case of young people, with the passage of just two years, the pharmaceutical industry has stressed the need to turn children and young people into patients.
Mental health, after the confinement to which we were subjected during COVID, became a top hat from which all kinds of magicians began to extract diseases and pills that have screwed up our lives. They have turned us all into sick people, medicated or not, capable of buying anything they put on the table: epidemics, vaccines, masks at exorbitant prices, etc. Although young people, unfortunately, are the ones who continue to pay the highest bill.
Originally published at LaDamadeElche.com
