The government insists that meaningful and empowering jobs are there for the taking in the way that a toddler might insist he didn’t eat that lipstick. Meanwhile, 7 per cent of British workers are now reliant on antidepressants. The 43 per cent rise in the number of antidepressant prescriptions in the UK since 2006 has been attributed “to the recession”, as if the mass self-tranquilisation of despairing workers were an inevitable response to the economic downturn.
But the surge in prescriptions indicates not so much an increase in “sadness” but a rise in the number of people taking these drugs on a long-term basis, often to combat stress or anxiety. Calling these drugs “happy pills” is misleading: antidepressants can be highly addictive and have a range of debilitating side effects, not least the numbing of emotional response. They can provide a vital crutch for people in recovery from serious mental illness but Prozac, Seroxat and Citalopram were never intended as solutions to fiscal instability.
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