The Vanity Fair of Magic Potions

When you are in distress, you look for help. When your body falters, you look for medicine. And when someone is searching for medicine, there will always be someone else ready to sell them exactly the “cure” that promises to make them whole again—to stabilize them, to restore vitality, to put them back on their feet.

It can be Big Pharma, a trillion-dollar industry whose innovation pipeline is designed less for the sick and more for the stockholders. But it can just as easily be the alternative medicine marketplace, which thrives on the same human desperation. If there is demand, someone will supply a potion, a capsule, a therapy, no matter how unproven.

I write this not as a theorist but as a man living with severe PTSD. For years I’ve swallowed the pills: Cipralex, Seroquel, benzodiazepines. I’ve clung to them in the hope that one of them, finally, would be the pill—the one that would calm the nightmares, silence the panic attacks, take away the bottomless dread. The one that would let me feel steady in the morning and safe at night.

It has never arrived.

The Industry of Suffering

The cruel irony is that the more common an illness, the more fertile the ground for an industry to grow around it. And PTSD—especially in a country like mine, scarred by war after war — is very common. That means money. That means new “solutions” announced every year, each promoted as a breakthrough.

Recently I’ve seen the push for hyperbaric oxygen therapy for PTSD. It requires patients to quit smoking, but beyond that detail, I have yet to meet a single veteran who swears it healed him. The advertisements are confident. The glossy brochures talk of “neuroplasticity” and “cell regeneration.” But on the ground? Silence.

I’ve read about nerve block injections, claiming miraculous 80% success rates. Yet outside of the company press releases, I have not found a single living, breathing PTSD survivor who tells me it worked for them.

Now the frontier is psychedelic drugs. They are described as “revolutionary.” And perhaps for some, they might be. But I have also seen the other side: trauma magnified, flashbacks intensified, fragile minds pushed further into the abyss. The same substance that might heal could just as easily destroy. It is a game of chance, and the patient is the wager.

The Old Snake Oil

In truth, what we are living through is not new. Picture a village fair centuries ago. A peasant comes into town, weakened by fever, desperate for relief. There is always a man at the stall offering the magic potion, the miracle syrup—a diluted concoction that promised to cure every ailment from colds to consumption.

I have been that peasant. I have bought the syrup. Only today it comes in a different bottle, sometimes stamped with the logo of a multinational corporation, sometimes with the holistic script of a healer.

What have I not tried? Capsules of lavender to soothe anxiety. EMDR. Psychoanalysis. CBT. Healing touch. Magnet therapy. Homeopathy. Acupuncture. Omega-3 supplements. Afternoon cups of green tea. I even gave up coffee. I gave up cigarettes. Yes, these changes are healthy. But when it comes to the terror of a panic attack, they are no more effective than Cipralex—good only until the next trigger, the next spiral into darkness.

The truth is, many of these remedies are just another version of the fairground syrup: comforting, distracting, sometimes useful in the margins, but powerless against the monster that is trauma.

Living Inside the Casino

I have written elsewhere that psychiatry is like a casino. You enter with your symptoms, and the dealer, the psychiatrist—spins the diagnostic wheel. Maybe today you are anxious. Tomorrow, PTSD. Next month, borderline personality disorder. The labels mutate with the clinician, not with the patient.

And upstairs, in the drug lounge, the cocktails change as quickly as the seasons. First the SSRI. Then the stabilizer. Then the antipsychotic “just for sleep.” Inevitably, the benzos. Pull the lever again. Hope the dice land in your favor.

But it is not only psychiatry that is a casino. The entire culture of “cures” for trauma is built on the same odds. The marketplace whispers the same message, whether it is a pharmaceutical giant or a healer with a crystal: This time, we have the answer.

It is a lie as old as suffering itself.

What Actually Helps

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not anti-psychiatry. There were moments in my life where medication quite literally kept me alive. I am not mocking those who try acupuncture or lavender oil or hyperbaric chambers. Desperation makes us seekers, and seekers will grasp at anything that promises relief.

But healing, at least for me, has never come in a capsule. It has come, strangely, through other paths:

Through writing, which allowed me to take my pain out of my body and put it into language.

Through art, which gave form to the chaos.

Through community, which reminded me I was not alone.

Through love, which anchored me when everything else was unraveling.

Through long walks in silence, where my body could remember it was alive.

And sometimes, simply, through time.

None of these can be patented. None can be bottled and sold. There is no billion-dollar incentive for “meaning” or “companionship.” You can’t build an IPO around a walk in the woods. And so the system neglects them.

The Endless Search

Every time my mental health crashes and I find myself back in a psychiatrist’s office, I feel two things at once: hope and despair. Hope that maybe this time there will be something different. Despair because I know the odds. Best case, they change the meds. Worst case, they add another one.

And somewhere in the background, I can hear the fairground barker: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! This is the potion that will cure it all!

I know better now. I know the truth: there is no single potion, no ultimate cure. There are only fragments, partial reliefs, things that help until they don’t.

But still, like the peasant at the fair, I keep searching. Because to live with trauma is to live with the longing for something, anything that might finally quiet the storm.

And maybe that longing itself is part of the illness.