Exploring the Medicalization of Emotions

Have you ever felt angry or lost hope because you believe that living a “normal” life is just not in the cards for you? Many people who are trying to live with chronic pain have experienced such feelings. Many of them have been conditioned to believe that only a pill can alleviate their chronic pain and they feel defeated when the pills stop working or never really worked at all.

How did they get to that point?

Today’s 21st-century chronic pain patients are impacted by treatment practices that were first instituted long ago. For example, in the 1950s, psychoactive drugs were promoted to doctors for the treatment of “nerves” among healthy patients. In the early 1960s, Roche marketed Librium and Valium to college students to alleviate anxiety. Today, nearly 50 million prescriptions are written for Xanax annually. Ritalin and Adderall are the go-to treatments for young adults struggling with ADD or ADHD. We’ve become a society with a tendency to take a pill to feel “normal.” In the process, we’ve redefined what “normal” means.

This mindset of “feel something, take something” has caused us to normalize that which we think or feel is abnormal, essentially to sedate or eliminate negative emotions and feelings. We have come to a point where we avoid discomfort at all costs. We are inundated with advertisements directing us what to tell our healthcare providers to help us avoid discomfort. The problem with trying to avoid discomfort at all costs is that it can lead to more discomfort.

An understanding of how we got here will help us address the current overuse of painkillers to treat chronic pain. The “War on Drugs” of the past several decades left no one to mind the proverbial opioid store. While we were taking back the streets from the ravages of crack cocaine and heroin, addicts found that prescription drugs were loosely regulated. Uninformed physicians — although a vast minority — found that operating “pill mills” was a lucrative business. By the time the government and public realized what was happening, the problem was at epidemic proportions. Nora Volkow, MD, the director of NIDA, recently stated the following regarding opiate addiction: “This is not an addiction problem as much as it is a public health problem.”

We believe that an integrated pain recovery treatment approach can successfully help chronic pain sufferers get well without reliance on addictive pain medications. You can recover from chronic pain without the continued use of addictive substances like opioid medications, benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety medications), alcohol or other addictive drugs. Ironically, prolonged use of these medications has resulted in an escalation of opioid dependence and opioid-induced hyperalgesia or a hyper-sensitivity to pain, rather than a reduction of it. This pill-centric approach makes life a vicious cycle of pain and drugs.

An integrated treatment solution can help to break the cycle and help patients and their families return to healthier lives with reduced or no pain, restored function and productivity, and – perhaps most importantly – joy.