"Drugs are bad, Mmm'kay?"

There is a theme ribboning itself around my life, of late. One of madness and death and the ever-present face of our own perceived dysfunction. Everyone I talk to thinks there's something wrong with them. Everyone believes they are broken and is despairing in their lives, wanting to know why they can't seem to make it better. Can this be? If everyone is broken, than what is 'normal'?

My week has been discussions of pills and self-medicating and psychiatric drugs and all the things that will patch up our own little brain chemistry to make us "right". Each person believing profoundly that they are supposed to feel some other way, that if they were "normal" they would. Each person reaching a point of believing that whatever the effects of the happy-pills, the result would be bigger than the risk. Then they could be "normal". They would be "fixed". Then, maybe they would not spend the hours of their lives wondering why they feel like they are waiting for something to happen.

And in the midst of all this despair about normal and dysfunctional, broken and fixed, happy and miserable; an action. One woman left her house and walked down to the waters edge to sit outside and die in the cold. And she did. By herself, alone in the dark, she let nature end her life in a way that pills had never been able to do. And Nature - cold, unstoppable and pitiless, did what Nature does and finally accomplished the job. I find some sort of irony in the fact that all the toxic man-made medications in the world couldn't succeed in taking her life no matter how many times she tried, and Nature, that force that has been here all along, did it overnight.

Yet another argument that we've become too reliant on drugs in this culture.


Credit: www.fukitol.com