Years ago when I worked on Wall Street, the employee benefits manager once told me that 30% of the bank’s staff in the United States were prescribed Prozac. It is perhaps the most famous antidepressant medication in the world. But it is just one of a multitude of similar drugs that are used to treat mental illness.
I didn’t ask that manager for details, but my guess is that many more than three in 10 of the employees were medicated with antidepressants. At the time I saw it as sign that the stresses of that workplace were affecting a vast portion of people. It is true that such stress, like that found in the high pressure jobs of investment banking, can trigger such things. But it’s also a fact that depression can arrive without apparent reason or cause. It can even afflict the young, such as 21-year-old comedian Kevin Breel.
His book, Boy Meets Depression: Or Life Sucks and Then You Live, was published Tuesday.
Read more here.
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