The very picture of health

Hmm.

More than a quarter of patients on antidepressants in England – about two million people – have been taking them for five years, the BBC has found.
This is despite there being limited evidence of the benefits of taking the drugs for that length of time.
A doctor who runs an NHS clinic helping people off the pills says withdrawal symptoms can make it hard for some to stop taking their medication.
Withdrawal guidance was updated in 2019, but he says little has changed.
More than eight million people in England are on antidepressants – which are prescribed for depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and other conditions. That’s one million more people than five years previously, NHS prescribing figures show.
The new figures on long-term use – for the period 2018-2022 – were provided to BBC Panorama by the NHS, following a Freedom of Information request. The data gives an overall picture but does not reflect the circumstances of individual patients, some of whom could be on antidepressants long-term for good reason.

—sigh—

Look, there are many and varied ways in which your body can let you down, as I know unfortunately well. And there’s any number of “add-ons” you can use to make up that deficit. Cf. the walking stick I use whenever I leave the house (I don’t need it indoors but it’s a fairly necessary tool outdoors), or the glasses I’ve worn for 40-odd years to compensate for my eyes being shitty. And the numerous medications I take on a daily basis to, frankly, stave off death, one of which is indeed an antidepressant I’ve been on since the time of The Incident. I take all seven of them religiously each day with breakfast. Obviously I will die one day, but that day may come later and less painfully with those meds than it otherwise might without them.

And no one that saw me out and about with the stick would judge me for using it, but they might look less kindly on me for the citalopram at least and maybe the other meds as well if they knew about them. And I sense a sort of judgey undercurrent about the article; if it won’t come out and say antidepressants are Bad Things, it feels like it wants you the reader to think that they are. After all, they don’t even work for that long and they’re hard to get off of, and if “some” people have good reasons for being on them long term, surely that means other don’t and you should probably look down on them (and yourself if you’re one of them).

Digital Dickhead up there certainly does, since he thinks “healthy lifestyle advise” should be enough for people. I was sufficiently irritated by him to follow through to his Twitter profile, and was somehow not surprised to discover he’s an Elon cultist, but I was almost immediately struck with this:

I didn’t even have to dig for this, it was only just slightly down his profile. Mr Healthy Lifestyle Advise is apparently not the peak of physical perfection I’d thought he might be if he’s taking, frankly, more add-ons than I am. I’m not actually going to judge him for that (I could almost certainly do with adding a multivitamin or something to my own regime), but I will judge him for being a smug cunt. Just because your pills don’t need a prescription like mine do doesn’t make you better than me, boy…