EWS Says "A Must Read":
http://counterpunch.org/ 08/20/09
With the innovation of increasingly marketable psychotropic drugs over the past four decades, public health officials have been free to legitimize healthcare budget cuts, hospital closures, and the widespread dismantlement of social services, by devolving responsibility for mental health to the individual and by transforming happiness into a problem of consumer choice. Miserable people – the exhausted assembly-line worker, the desperate college student, the alcoholic veteran – no longer pose a threat to the status quo so long as they agree to self-medicate and to keep themselves, thereby, in a state of artificial equanimity... Let’s be candid. The drug barons’ ongoing campaign to pathologize entirely natural emotional responses to hunger, humiliation, financial insecurity, racism, sexism, overwork and isolation is a mercenary tactic, designed to create markets, maximize profits and minimize dissidence.
