The majority of Spaniards allocate more than 40% of their income to pay for their right and that of their children to housing. For those who cannot afford to exercise that right, we subsidize – oh, with our taxes – instead of a ceiling, like other countries, all the antidepressants necessary so that they stop worrying about the problem. We are European champions in pharmaceutical spending.
We are treating – or covering – serious public management deficits with tons of unnecessary medicines, which, above all, benefit those who manufacture them.
And housing is not the only social problem with a complex solution to which we give a simple, immediate and useless, if not unhealthy, pharmacological response: the poorest quintile of Catalans consumes seven times more antidepressants than the richest quintile; women, more than twice as many as men; those over 65 years of age, seven times more than those under 65; the unemployed, four times more than the employed; and those who do not have a safe roof, in short, six times more than those who do. Wouldn't it be healthier to allocate less taxes to medicating them and more to building those homes?
But it's not just social problems: are you sad because a family member dies? Pastillazo! In 2008, the Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatric Diseases advised prescribing antidepressants when sadness over the death of a loved one persisted for more than three months; In 2015, it is only fifteen... days. The same thing happens with cholesterol levels, which are increasingly lower, requiring the popular statins, despite their side effects. As for the revolutionary – and very expensive – injections of semaglutide to lose weight: is it a coincidence that previously someone with a BMI of more than 35 was considered obese and now to be obese it is enough to exceed 30?
In 2022 alone, Catalan doctors issued 150 million prescriptions: more than half unnecessary, according to the founder of the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology, Joan-Ramon Laporte, who leaves me sleepless with his accurate Chronicle of an Intoxicated Society. So I will take a sleeping pill or an antidepressant, like three out of ten Catalans.
