The majority of Spaniards allocate more than 40% of their income to pay their and their children’s right to housing. For those who cannot afford to exercise this right, we subsidize them – alas, with our taxes – instead of a ceiling, like other countries, all the antidepressants necessary for them to stop worrying about the problem. We are European champions in pharmaceutical spending.
We are treating – or covering up – serious deficits in public management with tons of unnecessary medicines, which, above all, benefit those who manufacture them.
And housing is not the only social problem with a complex solution to which we give a simple, immediate and useless, if not unhealthy, pharmacological response: the poorest quintile of Catalans consumes seven times more antidepressants than the richest quintile; women, more than twice as many as men; those over 65, seven times more than those under 65; the unemployed, four times more than the employed; and those who do not have a safe roof, in short, six times more than those who do have one. Wouldn’t it be healthier to spend less tax on medicating them and more on building these homes?
But it’s not just social problems anymore: are you sad because a relative has died? Pill! In 2008, the Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatric Diseases advised prescribing antidepressants when sadness over the death of a loved one persisted for more than three months; in 2015, it’s only fifteen… days. It is the same with cholesterol levels, which are increasingly low, which require the popular, despite the side effects, statins. Regarding the revolutionary – and very expensive – injections of semaglutide to lose weight: do you think it is a coincidence that before it was considered obese who had a BMI of more than 35 and now to be obese it is enough to exceed the 30?
In 2022 alone, Catalan doctors made 150 million prescriptions: more than half unnecessary, according to the founder of the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology, Joan-Ramon Laporte, who leaves me sleepless with his accurate Chronicle of an intoxicated society. So I’ll take a sleeping pill or an antidepressant, like three out of ten Catalans.
