Sleeping Pill Use Soars Among Young

Use of prescription sleep aids has tripled among young adults between 1998 and 2006. A new Thomson Reuters study of medical and drug use has found a 50-percent increase in use of the drugs among all adults under 45, who also appear to be using the sleep aids for a longer period of time to help them fall asleep.

"I find it very worrisome that young people who should have a very strong and healthy sleep system are now finding they are turning to medication to help them get to sleep," Donna Arand, a sleep specialist at Kettering Hospital Sleep Disorder Center in Dayton, Ohio, told Reuters News.

Two-thirds of those in this study population were taking non-benzodiazepine hypnotics ~ such as Sanofi-Aventis' Ambien CR and Sepracor Inc's Lunesta. These newer sleep aids in rare cases can cause sleep walking.

Click here for the complete Reuters article.

America the Anxious

Edvard Munch's 1896 painting entitled "Anxiety."

News Flash:

Anxiety disorder is now the number one mental-health problem in the world.

Update:

Anxiety disorder is disproportionately prevalent in the United States.

Today’s edition of Salon.com featured a searing column after my own heart, in which writer Meredith Maran lays out the situation regarding Americans’ susceptibililty to anxiety disorder. (See my April 16 post on antidepressants, “Knowing Too Little.”)

“Turns out that anxiety disorder -- a spectrum that includes panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, phobias and the catch-all, generalized anxiety disorder -- is now the most prevalent mental health problem in the world,” Maran writes.

“Like Burger Kings and Botox clinics, AD (anxiety disorder) is disproportionately prevalent in the U.S. According to the most recent World Mental Health Survey, Americans are the most anxious humans on earth,” she goes on. “Forty million of us -- that's 28.8 percent -- suffer from the ailment that the National Institutes of Mental Health defines as ‘an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations.”

By the way, I bring all this up to amplify my two most recent posts –- the one on the “New Survivalists” who, as you read this, are stocking their basements with still more canned goods, and yesterday's regarding the possibility that fear of apocalyptic cataclysm resides deep in our racial memory.

But racial memory or not, Americans seems to have a particular vulnerability to anxiety, as Maran notes in her article. “We're nine times more likely to be anxious than the Chinese laborers who assemble our children's toys, whose working and living conditions would make us run screaming for a Xanax IV. And 94.4 percent of Mexicans -- bone-crushing poverty and barbed-wire borders notwithstanding -- have never experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. But move a Mexicano north of the border, according to a study in the December 2004 National Institutes of Health News, and his mental health will deteriorate faster than you can say ‘Campesinos sí, NAFTA no.’

Maran –- like you, like I -- wants to know why.

“I call on Patricia Pearson -- novelist, anxious person and author of A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine). The book is a genre-busting page turner: a portrait of Pearson's lifelong struggle with anxiety, melded with a journalistic investigation of what ails her, and me and us. ‘Mexicans have stronger family ties, deeper connections to their community, greater involvement in collective rituals through their churches and unions and schools,’ Pearson tells me. ‘And there's less onus on the individual in Mexico to achieve material success.’”

From there, Maran summarizes her own experiences with various therapies and, of course, antidepressants.

(To bring you up to speed, I believe certain antidepressants are valuable for certain people. They can be literal life savers. However, I shudder at the number of people I know who are on them because the medical/pharmaceutical industry treats antipressants as a panacea for almost any negative mood, many of which are natural to our lives as human beings.)

Okay, back to Maran. She and Pearson discuss antidepressants, which Maran refers to as “Pain Begone.”

She writes: “’Drugs can be helpful,’ Pearson allows. ‘But in my case they never resolved the underlying issues.’”

Bingo.

Knowing Too Little

As time goes on, the widespread use of antidepressants may come under more scrutiny, which I would personally welcome. I have too many friends taking them. Some days it feels like the people on “serotonin reuptake inhibitors” significantly outnumber those of us who chose to suffer our demons.

Antidepressants are now, in fact, the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.

I am not “against” antidepressants. There are people who desperately need them, both for their own well-being and the well-being of those around them. But I know of too many cases of pharmaceutical shopping – “if you won’t prescribe it, I’ll go to somebody who will” – in hopes of scoring this latest wonder drug. (Unless painkillers have now taken over the top slot on the drug shopping list.)

In a column in today’s New York Times, Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, brought out two points about antidepressants that further unnerved me.

First, the fact that antidepressants – because they emerged during the 1980s – have not been subjected to long-term testing and nobody knows the effects of people using antidepressants for major portions of their lives. The longest maintenance study so far of one of these drugs, in this case Effexor, lasted two years “and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.”

It’s true that Congress has reauthorized the Prescription Drug User Fee Act expanding the FDA’s drug surveillance. But that points to the second fact Dr. Friedman mentioned that’s scariest of all: The suppression of negative clinical information about antidepressants.

A study in January’s New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that of 74 clinical trials of a dozen antidepressants, 97 percent of the studies with positive findings got published. Only 12 percent of the studies with negative findings have ever been published.

Put simply, bad news about antidepressants seldom sees the light of day.