Breathing Pills Like Air, Becoming Unblued By Michael Castleman

Breathing Pills Like Air

Depression is seen as a brain disease, and it is felt as an endless dark hole that you hopelessly try to climb out of knowing you are falling in deeper. As the population grows year by year, so do the amount of people diagnosed with major or chronic depression. Worst of all is that the number of patients increased and their age decreases since lots and lots of adolescents feel hopeless and have depression. It is all a chain, a cause and effect chain whereas the more patients are diagnosed with chronic depression they decide to turn to a psychiatrist and get prescribed medication. As a result of this more people turn away from other solutions like meditating, exercise, writing, and prefer to take in big amounts of medication
The article “ Becoming unblued” by Michael Castleman explains the reasons why cognitive therapy is a better than taking Prozac or another antidepressant medication. Cognitive therapy consists of correcting the distorted thinking triggered by depression and uses ultra-low tech.( para 2). However, more and more people turn to pills because they believe it to be cheaper, the problem however is that most of these people are actually in the mild- depression range which means they can help their depression without the need for medication. The article indicates, “ An estimated 17.6 million Americans suffer from depression each year… companies sold U.S. drugstores $3.5 billion worth of SSRIs… whose most tragic consequence, suicide claims more than 30,000 lives a year”( para 4-5 ). So many people are disappearing without a chance because we are not informing them that they are consuming drugs they do not need and also that they are taking too much of it. We can not ignore overprescription and overdose because it is an issue. The article also mentions other methods like acupuncture and exercise which are proven to improve one’s self esteem and health (para 7).Not also it would make people healthier, but it would also be cheaper because there would be no need to pay for pills or go to the gym they could work out at a park or even at home and whatever time they can. This would also induce their children or other family members to do more exercise which then would prevent from other diseases. There is no doubt that antidepressants do help some people and it is true but they also harm so many other people. The condition to prescribe medication is that it will only be given to the people who actually need it not to get an extra commissary in your