GABRIELA OSORIO VILLASEÑOR PSY. D. WWW.PSICOTERAPIACATOLICA.COM 3 Medication and psychotherapy This "mental pandemic" has inevitably led in all Western countries to an increase in the use of psychotropic drugs such as anxiolytics, antidepressants, sedatives and antipsychotics, use that very often has degenerated into abuse2 . In Italy, for example, the two central regions Marche and Umbria saw an increase in the use of anxiolytics by 68 and 73 percent, respectively .3 But in reality, there is no need of "peer reviewed" scientific studies to attest to what is obvious and in plain sight. Any pharmacist can, confirm that since 2020 the best-selling products are precisely psychotropic drugs, and never before they have been so easily prescribed. We know very well that psychiatry, and in general all official medicine, have a mechanistic view of the human body, has a general tendency to reject natural, holistic and spiritual therapies, also and above all because of an increasingly less credible scientific research since it is totally in the hands of Big Pharma multinationals, therefore no longer independent but in enormous conflict of interest, which imposes a very drug-dependent "ideological" approach on physicians. The idea that it is possible to heal suffering with a simple pill has thus been consolidated: these drugs are also prescribed to children, despite the fact that there are no studies showing their effectiveness and worse, the long-term effects in their cognitive development. The most emblematic case probably involves eating disorders, which have increased exponentially since Covid, with the average age of symptom onset having dropped dramatically: personal experience, it is not uncommon to see little girls with anorexia nervosa as young as 9-11 years old in the hospital with nose-gastric tubes for force-feeding. These kids who are not even adolescents are treated with benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, antidepressants for months and sometimes years, without any scientific study having any credibility to attest in the long run the validity of such a dangerous approach: these drugs are prescribed simply because, when faced with objectively really complex and dramatic situations, doctors do not know what else to do. Drug therapy (which, it should be remembered, treats the symptom and almost never goes to the cause of the problem), should always follow the logic of the "minimum effective dose" for the shortest possible time, help in the peak phase of the disease (where in many cases drugs are useful and often indispensable) and be meticulously controlled with the aim of arriving at total elimination of the drug in the shortest possible time once the psychopathological condition is stabilized. Taking psychotropic drugs should always be accompanied by a therapeutic process with psychological specialists: the problem is that drugs almost always heavily interfere with therapy, since the patient is slowed down in brain function and is often incapable of the most mundane reasoning. This simple consideration should lead psychiatrists to prescribe drugs only in truly essential cases, always referring less severe patients to a "good psychologist."
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