Mal Fletcher comments on the rise of anxiety disorders and an over-reliance on science

Mal Fletcher

'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.

Improving one's reality is not best served by a reliance on drugs.

A few years ago, I was speaking at an event in Sydney, Australia. Just a few miles away, a global conference of psychiatrists had just adjourned.

In its press release, this convention declared this to be the 'Age of Paranoia'. It raised concerns about the rapid increase in the number of people suffering from anxiety, depression and various phobias.

In light of this, some developed nations are seeing alarming growth in the number of prescriptions issued for quite powerful drugs.

According to a report in the Sunday Times last week, 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.

Dr Andrew McCulloch, Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation, noted that: 'Symptoms of anxiety can amount to mental illness or predispose towards it and may lead to more serious problems such as depression, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder if they are not tackled early on.'