It is easier to prescribe antidepressants to those suffering from social deprivation, such as housing shortages, than to solve them with efficient administration. Dr. Joan-Ramon Laporte’s diagnosis is categorical: we medicate too much and not for our own interest, but for that of those who profit from hypermedication.
With our public budgets – and, alas, taxes – we are providing easy pharmacological solutions, which primarily benefit those who sell them, to social problems with a more complex solution than prescribing medications.
And if you doubt your diagnosis, review the following statistics: 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 years of age, seven times more than those under 65; the unemployed, four times more than the employed, and those who do not have housing, are prescribed six times more than those who do.
Laporte asks for more biochemical training for doctors and that the outpatient visit not be reduced to the mere extension of the prescription, but rather that they provide more support to the patient beyond the mere pharmacological prescription. In other countries, such as Sweden or Denmark, much less is spent on medicines and much more on clinical care and support.
We Spaniards are the ones who go to the doctor the most and take the most medication in Europe while the threshold levels of cholesterol that require statins are reduced, which are prescribed massively without taking into account their side effects; or the level of what is considered obesity that requires medication is also lowered.
If the expense of that immense amount of useless medications were dedicated to solving homelessness, or poverty and loneliness, it would be much healthier for everyone except those who benefit from massive prescriptions.
The founder of the Institute of Pharmacology of Catalonia puts an end to the last two paradoxes of pharmacological invention: the new classification of psychiatric diseases of 2015 specifies that sadness, 15 days after the death of a loved one, is pathological and that You must prescribe antidepressants, when in the previous 2008 classification that period was three months. And the Body Mass Index levels at which a patient was considered obese are also increasingly lower while the price of semaglutide injections for weight loss increases.
And what only adds weight are the forecasts for arms spending that European countries are going to have to finance in the face of war threats that are proliferating everywhere.
During these days there are calls from our European leaders: Macron, Scholz, Von der Layen… For us to increase military spending in the face of the progressive hardening of the Russian, Chinese and, in general, positions of the Global South towards the West.
The prospect that in January the Trump-Xi Pin-Putin-Netanyahu axis will turn the planet into a much more unstable and bellicose place gives wings to those in favor of more cannons to avoid submission or worse yet, Russian aggression; but no one has yet explained where that money will come from: from our taxes, yes, but from those that were destined for hospitals and schools.
For this reason, the former president of the European Parliament Pat Cox celebrated the 25 years of the EU this week in Barcelona with a speech that, if not pro-war, was certainly pre-war. The dilemma that our leaders, like Cox here, present to us is to rearm ourselves or fall into irrelevance, or worse yet, into submission to Russia, China and the Global South. Maybe it’s what statesmen should do, but we don’t know who will vote for them after they do what they have to do; because today they seem more convinced than their voters of the need to rearmament.
The week counted
Berthold Gunster, founder of the omdenken philosophy, explained to us how to turn a problem into an opportunity while Nicolás Sampedro, bullfighting writer and former bullfighter, ‘el Aventorero’, discussed the return of young people to the bullrings in search of the challenge of what forbidden. And Clancy Martin, finally, explains to us his suicide attempts, which began when he was seven years old but which have served to give a sense of personal redemption to his existence that he shares with us here. Happy Week, friends.
