A one-person play by Jennifer Berry. Here’s a review:
Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry’s one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded marketing blitz through the eyes of its masterminds, unwitting (and complicit) abettors, and victims through her portrayal of an advertising executive, a physician, and women and children who are prescribed heavily marketed antidepressants.
(via David Dobbs)
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Well, just in case someone sees this who thinks anti-depressants are bad, I want to say they improved my life and, more importantly, the lives of my children.
I used to be a depressed and anxious mom who could only handle a part-time clerical job. Gross income: $14k a year. Once the anxiety and depression got under control I was able to use the fabulous brain nature gave me and make a lot more money: during the boom I was making $97k a year and now make a respectable $67k a year. Anybody who says money doesn’t matter has never been unable to feed their kids.
Making more money enabled me to leave the husband who started getting violent once the kids were big enough to have their own opinions. My daughter is going to a good private university. My kids’ lives are so much better than they would have been if I never started taking an SSRI.
So what if it made me gain weight? So what if it kills my libido? My having a boyfriend wouldn’t be good for my kids anyway. I don’t care about side effects, I care about making life good for my kids. I bought a house by myself. I’m sending them to college. They are well-adjusted and happy, and that is better than anything.
SSRIs are great. And best of all, my kids won’t need them because they grew up with a mother who wasn’t nutso, like mine was.
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