The Unhappiest Place in the World
Americans are crumbling like stringless marionettes.
One in six now take a psychiatric drug. Prescriptions for depression and anxiety are at an all-time high. The use of antidepressants alone increased by almost 400% between 1988 and 2008. The country churns and swallows 90% of the world’s methylphenidate to treat attention deficit. From 1999 to 2017, close to 400,000 people died from an opioid overdose.
In a place that holds the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right, it doesn’t seem to be working out quite like the nation’s founding fathers intended. Its people are wallowing in depression, anxiety, agitation, and pain.
I’m not surprised.
Because in a culture in which happiness is considered a holy grail, its people will inevitably frown upon sadness as a nasty virus to be eradicated at all cost.
“Since cheerfulness and depression are bound by opposition, the more one is classified as normal, the more negative the other will appear,” says Christina Kotchemdova in From Good Cheer to Drive-By Smiling. “And when a culture labels normal sadness or depression as ‘abnormal,’ those who experience these emotions become alienated and ashamed.”
By the 1950s, the American war on sadness brought out the big guns with the introduction of the first antidepressant…
