75% of Med Students on Antidepressants or Stimulants (or Both)

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1977

From Pamela Wible MD: “In 1990, even I was severely depressed as a first-year med student. So my mom (a psychiatrist) mailed me a bottle of Trazodone. I thought I was the only one crying myself to sleep. Turns out occupationally-induced depression is rampant in medical training. Now schools dole out antidepressants like candy. Stimulants are used by med students like steroids in athletes. So where do we go from here? Should ‘progressive’ med schools distribute samples of Zoloft and Adderall during orientation?

Problem is, physicians must answer mental health questions (right next to questions on felonies and DUIs) to secure a medical license, hospital privileges, and participate with insurance plans. Check the YES box and be forced to disclose your ‘confidential’ medical history and defend yourself—again and again for your entire career. Treated like a criminal for taking meds to cope with the torment of medical training (and practice).”

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8 COMMENTS

  1. This is not a scientific study but a deduction from a collection of testimonies.

    MIA should not promote articles whose conclusion can not be rigorously verified.

    Here is an excerpt from a scientific article (Fond, 2018, p. 15-16) about the use of legal and illegal drugs by medical interns in France:

    psychiatrists (N=302), other interns (N=1863) and Whole sample (N=2165)

    Current cannabis use disorder: 12.3%, 5.2% and 6.1%
    Current alcohol use disorder: 40.7%, 32.9% and 34.0%

    Psychiatric follow-up: 35.4%, 15.9% and 18.7%
    Anxiolytic consumption: 10.6%, 6.1% and 6.7%
    Antidepressant consumption: 7.9%, 2.3% and 3.0%
    At least one daily psychotropic consumption: 7.9%, 2.6% and 3.3%

    Ecstasy: 24.4%, 17.0% and 18.2%
    Cocaine: 21.8%, 12.4% and 13.9%
    Mushrooms: 16.5%, 11.3% and 12.1%
    Amphetamines: 10.2%, 5.6% and 6.3%
    LSD: 7.1%, 3.9% and 4.4%

    Fond G, Bourbon A, Micoulaud-Franchi J-A, Auquier P, Boyer L, Lançon C, Psychiatry: a discipline at specific risk of mental health issues and addictive behavior? Results from the national BOURBON study., Journal of Affective Disorders (2018), doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2018.05.074

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  4. The religion of pill worshipers have a lot of consumers of the object of worship, what a surprise. not.
    ___________
    (Neurologist) “I’m on Zoloft (sertraline). I’ve taken it for 20 years. Don’t like that? Think that means I suck as a doctor? I don’t give a shit.”

    http://drgrumpyinthehouse.blogspot.ca/2014/11/happy-pills.html

    “I’ve been off my Lexapro for a month and it turns out that’s bad.”

    http://apotential.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/you-could-cut-the-irony-with-a-knife/

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  5. This sounds like an opportunity for you recovered orthomolecular patients living near a med school, as you’re likely better informed about clinical nutrition than the students AND the teaching staff at these institutions. This provides an opportunity to secretly treat such individuals for appropriate rewards, while providing appropriate references for those caregivers with addiction problems themselves, who were sobered through the use of orthomolecular means.

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  6. this is just sad. I”m not a big fan of the medical establishment, but I’m not gung ho against the whole industry, either. Plus…I hate to see -anyone- pushed so far that they need psychotropics on a regular basis. I agree that reviving interest in Orthomolecular–not that it ever was incredibly popular, but it did get a lot more press say, in the 70s, than it does now–would help a lot of people, “experts” included.

    if the elites and elites-in-training of our society are drugged up, what does that say about everyone else? what hope is there for “the rest of us” if our leaders and experts need their chemical fixes, too?

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    • I suspect it depends on what the chemical fixes are. Methamphetamine doesn’t have a good reputation (at least for most of us), given that it was Hitler’s favorite drug (his “doctor” shot him up with it every day, until the producer’s factory was bombed near the end of the war and the “unmedicated” Fuhrer collapsed). Downers don’t have what it takes, either (picture the president on the nod during a global crisis, though that might not be so bad with our present one). Doesn’t look like a bright future for presidential stoners.

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