It occurs to me that this point in time is a bit on the unusual side. Â Now, I have no real expertise in this matter other than that fact that I read too d*mn much, and have a fascination with the history of medicine, but it seems to me that humans, as a species, have been self-medicating in one fashion or another for many thousands of years now. Â Beer has been consumed by all ages as an alternative to water in many places where the water has been problematic to drink, over the counter remedies contained a host of addictive and what are now considered “recreational” substances from alcohol to opium to cocaine to radioactive bone shavings, you name it, we have consumed it, sometimes for fun, sometimes for necessity, sometimes to cure what ails us.
So it seems that this oft lamented tendency, this pursuit of this pill or that pill to change the way that we think, our anxieties, our inability to sit still or our unrelenting anger or any number of other issues, may not be a “new” tendency. Â We have always been medicated. Â The difference is that now we are medicated with a backstory, with chemicals that we can track and control and mix to precise doses. Â We know what these chemicals will do and why, as opposed to just getting us “feeling better”.
So what if this new “neurotic” norm that keeps getting lamented in media and on mommy blogs and educational sites, what is this has always been the norm?  What if we’ve just been covering up our true “normal”.  What if what we think of as “normal” was just the medicated version of humanity? Now that we are medicating less in search of a “healthy norm” we are finding that what we thought was normal, stable, mellow, reasonable is just the by-product of our own need to feel better?
