Are antidepressants zombifying American culture?

Why are things the way they are?

Why does it feel like things were better before?

Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

No, that’s not exactly right. Everything — emphasis on thing — wasn’t better before. Well, maybe it’s the people then. Yes, that’s it — the people. Why does it seem like people were better before? No, that’s not it either. Not quite. People weren’t better before. There have always been the wicked and the evil and the lazy and the annoying. The world has always had problems.

Well, what is it then? What is it that I am feeling, you are feeling, and we all are feeling? Why does everything feel “off” for lack of a better word?

There’s a lot of answers, and a lot of them are pretty good. Answering questions this big is like looking at an object at a table from different directions. There are multiple correct descriptions of what is sitting in front of everyone, and all the answers help paint a clearer picture.

Ostinato of apathy

But is there an answer, a detail, a fact, or an X factor that sits under all the other things and runs like an ostinato through seemingly unrelated domains connecting the dots in a strangely unifying way?

Perhaps.

And if I were to try to list a single X factor that weaves like a thread through all the various forms and domains of decline, descent, malaise, and dysfunction, I might conclude that the fact that connects all these problems is something insurance covers, doctors prescribe, and we are all supposed to nod along with.

SSRIs and other forms of antidepressant medication.

I saw a video recently of an extended family. In a self-satisfied, joke-y sort of way, they all listed the medications they were on. It wasn’t a real joke, it was clear they were all actually on these things, but the video was joking about how funny it is, or something. Like many things TikTok, the tone was a plain, mundane, nihilistic, uncapitalized “lol.”

Of course, TikTok isn’t real life. But it isn’t exactly fake life either. This family of drug-dependents might be a bit of an exaggeration, though not necessarily a fabrication. Spiritually, the video is correct. More people are on these drugs than ever before, and that’s an undeniable fact of reality.

Drugs not hugs

This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was young. Drugs existed, both legal and illegal ones. Prescription drugs to help you be less depressed existed too. There were jokes and themes about Prozac in the 1990s, and before my time, in the midcentury, they were juicing disturbed people up on all sorts of stuff too. But the prevalence of them, overuse of them, and unabashedly flippant taking of them was nowhere near what we see today.

When I was young, the only people who were on this stuff were people who were decidedly “messed up.” Those who had genuinely tried to commit suicide or were really on the brink. And it wasn’t a good thing, and it wasn’t used flippantly. It was serious stuff. Somewhere in the last few decades, this attitude changed.

SSRIs and other antidepressants are the X factor under so much of the general malaise and dysfunction in our perplexing and seemingly decaying culture. At first, it doesn’t really make sense, or it just seems like a bit of a stretch because people think these drugs just “make people happier,” but that’s not exactly what happens. Even if they do seemingly “make people happier,” or at least less depressed, that isn’t the only thing they do.

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Dead inside

Listen to people who have been on these drugs describe how they make you feel. The picture isn’t exactly a rosy one. It’s better than suicide, but it isn’t normal. A very common observation you hear from people is that they make you feel dead or like you don’t care about anything. They also lower libido and what might be described as general drive.

These drugs don’t only impact one’s happiness. They bleed out and into all these other things, and when you have people taking them at the scale we do in the U.S., the culture shifts in ways that are unintelligible and confusing to those of us not on anything. Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.

Because of all this, our society is more full of de facto zombies than ever before. No wonder young people feel listless. No wonder achievement and striving for greatness seem naive or corny.

No wonder people aren’t partying.

No wonder the birthrate is in the tank.

No wonder the Democratic Party has become what it is when so many of its voters exhibit depression and anxiety.

No wonder everyone dresses like slobs.

No wonder there is a general apathy that bleeds through everything we see and hear.

No wonder the interior design is bland and factory-like.

No wonder everyone feels like tomorrow is going to be worse than today.

No wonder — to answer our first question — things are the way they are.