Bad for our health

'Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.' So said American author Robin P. Williams.

Her remark was made with her tongue firmly filling out her cheek, but it may carry an important message for a culture that has become overly dependent on prescribed drugs. The message is this: reality and drugs are unnatural bedfellows.

Some developed nations are seeing alarming growth in the number of prescriptions issued for quite powerful drugs.

According to a report in this week's Sunday Times, the number of British deaths involving tranquilisers and strong painkillers has risen by 16 percent over the past five years.

In the last decade, the number of such prescriptions per year has jumped by more than 60 percent. This growth has featured drugs prescribed for anxiety and depression as well as those used to deal with pain.

Meanwhile, 11,000 women were hospitalised in 2011-12 with antidepressant poisoning. Apparently this is now a bigger problem in the UK than heroin addiction.

Where does this prescription culture come from? What is feeding our apparent hunger for pharmaceuticals?

I Got The Blues

At least two major factors play into this. The first is the growing number of cases in which physical ailments relate directly or indirectly to increased anxiety and mild depression.

More than one in five people in the UK live with very high levels of anxiety, according to The Office for National Statistics' Personal Well-being in the UK report for 2012/13.

Much of the problem relates to what experts call 'anticipatory anxiety', which sees many people making very negative projections into the future, about specific events or situations.

Anxiety is a challenge because it often builds up under the surface, over time. It can remain hidden until a person suddenly faces debilitating psychological or physical symptoms, such as those associated with anxiety or 'panic' attacks.

Drug use is not an adequate solution to the most commonly experienced forms of anxiety. Whilst the harsher edges of anxiety can, to some degree, be softened by treatment with drugs, the real problem is usually one of unhealthy habits of thought.

Drugs may help with the physical symptoms of anxiety, but the root problem most often requires other forms of treatment, such as empathic counselling - or, in some cases, self-help using the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for example.

Increased anxiety levels in our society are in part a product of vastly weakened support mechanisms, which traditionally helped people to deal with high amounts of stress. Families, neighbourhoods, community clubs and religious groups have all suffered as a result of changes to the social fabric.

These and other pressures - including digitisation, which has people retreating from the physical environment - have contributed to a loss of communal identity.

With that has come a perceived loss of emotional support. Where once we may have turned to a trusted family member or close neighbour to share a problem, many of us now have to go it alone.

Until, that is, the resulting anxiety begins to manifest itself in ways that are clearly damaging to our health.

When that happens, we're often forced to rely upon arms-length care of the type offered by medicos and other professionals. We simply haven't developed relationships of sufficient depth or strength within our immediate living environment to provide us with more hands-on solace and encouragement.

Science Rules, OK?

As a culture, we tend to believe that medical science - and science in general - holds the key to overcoming almost every human affliction.

Some social commentators have long warned that we are over-reliant on the NHS and on the medical profession generally.

Medicine may be the most humane of all the sciences, but it is now linked more closely than ever to other branches of science, such as chemistry. Overworked medicos rely heavily upon products and online guidance provided by chemists and others within the pharmaceutical industry.

And science generally is treated with a respect bordering on reverence. We treat the prognostications of eminent scientists as almost being inviolable.

In the process, we fail to recognise the fact that science is as much about questions as it is about certainties, and often more so. Scientific method works at its best when someone is questioning the status quo in the pursuit of a new paradigm.

We also overlook the fact that science is a pursuit undertaken by human beings, with all the frailties they bring to any process.

Without proper accountability - not only to other scientists but to politicians, the law and a cautious wider community - science becomes a form of secular religion. When that happens, scientists scoff at the subjectivity of other forms of belief while expecting that they will be shown a kind of priestly deference.

In a sense, our culture encourages us to place our 'faith' in drugs in a quasi-religious way.

Ubiquitous advertising by drug companies offers us near instant cures for even the most mundane aches and pains. In the process it oversimplifies our physical shortcomings, passes over our innermost pain and promises shortcuts to 'salvation'.

Some drug suppliers present narratives and images which suggest that our lives will improve on a wide variety of fronts, if we will use their products. They play on human aspiration in much the same cynical way as cigarette advertisers once did (and would still do, if they were allowed).

The commercial power of the drug companies is considerable. It is set to increase as we become more reliant on emerging biotechnologies, nanorobotics and the like.

We must take advantage of every reasonable possibility to end human suffering. But we must do so in an ethical way, keeping on eye on the difference between progress and progressivism.

The latter idolises pragmatism; it says, 'If a thing can be done it should be done.' It has little time for ethical debate or considered deliberation on what progress really means, in any holistic sense.

In the end, psychological and emotional wellbeing are not primarily found within the purview of the medical profession. They are not achieved with the help of science alone.

The sooner we can wean ourselves off an overwhelming reliance on pure science, the sooner we might be able to see our way clear to other important solutions for the psyche and the soul.