INFERIOR WAYS OF COPING WITH STRESS: TRANQUILLIZERS AND STRESS

posted by admin in Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid

We are discussing inferior ways of dealing with stress, and I have no hesitation at all in placing tranquillizers high on the list.

If someone who is suffering from nervous tension as a result of stress takes a tranquillizer, it damps down the disharmonious over-activity of his brain cells. There is less anxiety. He feels better. So when he feels tense again, he takes another pill.

Three things happen. In the first place, if his stress reaction is at all severe, and if his nervous tension is really worrying, he soon finds that he needs to take two pills instead of one to achieve the same result.

The next phase in this saga is that he suddenly says to himself, ‘I am taking too many of these pills. I must stop.’ He tries to stop. Becomes very tense again. Then he realizes, ‘I am hooked.’ So he just continues, and hopes for the best.

This sequence of events is obvious to everybody. But the third consequence of taking tranquillizers seems to elude people’s notice. It is simply this. The individual who is controlling his stress by taking tranquillizers is living an inferior quality of life to those who have learned to achieve the same result by simple means consistent with our natural biology. Tranquillizers have made millions of dollars for the drug companies. They have saved doctors hours and hours of time with their patients. They have reduced the nervous tension of hundreds of thousands of sufferers. But they have taken the shine from the brightness of life of those who take them.

The person taking tranquillizers has a better life than someone ravaged by nervous tension who is not taking them. But the one on the pills loses quite a lot. On the pills, he cannot attain the full potential of his intellectual capacity. The edge of feeling is blunted. Things that would have appeared beautiful are now just all right. Feelings of excitement, ecstasy, wonderment, bliss are foreign to him. Love life becomes a commonplace matter. In short, the real meaning of quality of life is lost when the dampening effect of tranquillizers on our nerve cells reduces life to the common experience of daily existence.

There are, however, two sets of circumstances in which tranquillizers can be of undisputed value. The person who is overwhelmed by the stress of some terrible personal disaster needs some help to quieting the disordered brain cell activity. The sight of a loved one suddenly killed. Involvement in a motor accident causing death of others. The sudden awareness of a betrayal of trust. Such events may be devastating. But they are short-lived. Tranquillizers will help. But within a day or two, as homeostasis is restored, the tranquillizers should be withdrawn.

The other important use of tranquillizers is in the treatment of schizophrenia. This mental illness, which has been called the ‘cancer of the mind’, is often characterized by a confusion of what is real with that which is imaginary. There may be a lack of cohesion between thought and feeling, so that the patient gives a silly smile when he is thinking of something sad. He may come to hear his thoughts as if they were talking to him, and this may progress to hearing outside voices talk to him. The patient may feel that various groups of people are against him. If the patient be a man he may feel he is the Messiah, or if a woman, the Virgin Mary.

Schizophrenia is not uncommonly precipitated in shy, sensitive, introvert young men or women by stress. In these cases the problem initiating the stress is usually a personal problem. It is often something imagined resulting from the patient’s inherent sensitivity. It is often in the areas of sex, homosexuality or religion. In our present state of knowledge, patients with schizophrenia usually require treatment with one of the tranquillizing drugs of the phenothiazine group.

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