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Beware our growing reliance on tranquilisers

While any medication that can pacify the dreaded 'black dog' should be endorsed, what about taking anti-depressants because you are moving house?

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I sat on the aeroplane, breathing normally, my palms still dry, and not hating my fellow passengers for using up all my oxygen. I resolved to thank my GP when we got back to London: the little pill he'd prescribed to combat my claustrophobia and fear of flying which, over the years, has grown worse, had done its work.

But then something curious happened. During the flight, a little boy seated across the aisle started bawling: he clapped his hands on his ears, wailing, "Ear hurts, ear hurts". Under normal circumstances, maternal feelings stirring, I would have offered his mother the boiled sweets I suck during take-off and landing to offset painful changes in pressure; I might even have taken his palm to trace "Round and round the garden..." to distract him. Instead I sat, immobile and uncaring, skimming a magazine: the child's cries reached me as if from a very great distance. And when we landed, I found my hand-eye co-ordination so unreliable I couldn't properly manage the trolley.

Not that I was worried. About anything. My situation, since taking the little pill, had an air of unreality. When I relived the episode with a friend, she burst out laughing: "Classic!" My experience chimed in with her own: she'd been using Xanax, a popular tranquilliser, to ward off panic attacks. "Don't worry, you're not alone," she said.

That much is clear. So many women I've come across recently, in affluent south west London or at the inner city school gate, seem to be routinely pill-popping. Obviously, when even getting out of bed seems impossible, any medication that can pacify the dreaded "black dog" should be endorsed. But what about taking anti-depressants because you are moving house? Or tranquillisers to cope with a family Christmas?

In Britain, 46?million prescriptions for antidepressants were dispensed last year - most of them to women. One in three of us will need them in our lifetime. Little wonder that the new generation of such drugs are called "yummy mummy's little helpers".

Despite the light-hearted label, their impact is huge: over time antidepressants alter how our brain chemistry works, while tranquillisers depress the central nervous system almost instantly. Both, says Dr Max Pemberton, the Daily Telegraph columnist who works in mental health, can leave you "feeling spaced out, as if your emotional reactions were blunted".

And, as he points out, one of the ironies of mood-altering drugs such as these lies in how their side effects can mirror the very symptoms they are meant to relieve. The biological symptoms of depression and anxiety - lower libido, no energy, disconnected, even suicidal feelings - are often replicated exactly in people who take antidepressants or tranquillisers. Particularly common - and devastating - is loss of libido.

"It damages what for most people is their key cohesive experience - sex," says Dr Pemberton. "Not only the person, but the dynamics of their relationship are affected." Enter the Prozac Prowler, a man or woman whose partner has lost interest in sex as a result of medication. Indeed, "my wife's on antidepressants" is the 21st-century version of "my wife doesn't understand me".

Perhaps the UK Drug Policy Commission, which recently called for the legalisation of "soft drugs", should review the status of antidepressants and tranquillisers and how they are prescribed. Research indicates that too many GPs still see mood-altering drugs as a quick fix. Prof Sir Alasdair Breckenridge, the head of the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the drug safety regulator, recently acknowledged that NHS patients are over-medicated. Worse, when the time comes for doctors to review a patient's medication, research shows that most women are not offered an alternative prescription, while 24 per cent have to wait more than a year for a review.

After my own fleeting experience of the impact of such drugs, I find myself indulging (guiltily) in a new guessing game. Who, in my circle of friends and acquaintances, is on them and who isn't? The colleague who has put on weight and seems uncharacteristically placid: is she taking something? What about the neighbour who seems unconcerned when I point out that her toddler, still in his pyjamas, isn't fastened into the car seat? And at the school gates, the gossip is about the "zombie mummies": the ones who are so out of it that we worry about leaving our children in their charge. Distant, disconnected and medicated to the eyeballs, they are a new breed of Stepford Wife. How can they be good mothers? Or friends, workers and lovers?

I vowed to vet parents more carefully when, after a sleepover, my daughter Isabella confessed she hadn't had any supper because the mother (dad was away on a business trip) had shut herself in her bedroom and didn't surface until the next morning. "Didn't you know she's on antidepressants?" another mum reproached me. No, nor did I guess that one of my oldest friends was. I thought her offhand manner had been prompted by something I'd said. Our heart-to-hearts had disappeared, and she seemed suddenly to have lost all interest in swapping anecdotes. Just as I was about to confront her, she confided that her children leaving home had plunged her into depression and she was on medication.

Dr Richard Wolman, a medical psychotherapist, chides me for my "hysterical" reaction. The Stepford scenario is only true when there has been "poor management of the antidepressant'', he says. ''The good professional, GP or psychotherapist conducts a clinical diagnosis of any patient who complains of depression, phobias, anxiety: what are the symptoms, and do they need chemical assistance or counselling? He knows that from the moment he prescribes an antidepressant, he is committed to following up that person."

He has a point but the problem is that the drugs have become so popular that the determined patient can easily obtain them without their GP ever knowing. "There is a huge black market in benzodiazepines (the most common form of tranquillisers)," Dr Pemberton says. "And anyone who travels finds them readily available in Italy and Spain. Others get theirs on the internet."

And there is a conspiracy of silence over this. Time was, everyone on both sides of the Atlantic hailed the ''bottled sunshine'' pill Prozac as a wonder drug - and claimed to be on it. Today, people are more furtive about medication of this kind. High-profile women, including Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who has written movingly about her depression, and Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, who admitted she won't leave the house without her "lucky charm" Xanax, are the exception. "The connotations of 'mental illness' are still negative," says psychotherapist Fergus Greer. "My patients told me they had to feel desperate before they'd agree to ask for help from their GP because it would go on their medical record, and may have an impact on their jobs somewhere down the line."

Greer also points out that under-prescription risks our welfare as much as over-prescription: "There are people who can't even get out of bed, they feel so low. They can't manage their lives, yet they are scared of seeking help. They are the ones who won't be good at parenting or working."

He finds women are more likely than men to admit to depression. They are also more susceptible to it, agrees Dr Wolman. "Women bear the monthly trauma of mood destabilisation. Women in their forties going into their fifties are particularly vulnerable to this, given their declining level of oestrogen. It can provoke a physical crisis that no amount of therapy can cure."

Dr Pemberton says that middle-aged women are affected because, generally, they face a series of losses: their children, their sexual attractiveness, their libido and fertility. "These are not just hormonal changes, they are psychological." But he isn't persuaded that women are more prone to depression: "The only difference is that men find it more difficult to seek help."

Damian Thompson, whose recent book The Fix analyses our growing dependence on mood-altering drugs (and other substances), agrees that our world has changed dramatically as a result of so many relying on antidepressants and tranquillisers. "Some drugs ensure that certain feelings are not accessible to you any more. In some cases it's a mercy. In others, it blurs the personality, blunts its edges, and leaves people behaving 'out of character'," he says.

Why do we do it? I believe it is because we feel entitled to happiness as no other generation has done before. In our search for this nirvana, we have created a strange world where medicated personalities coexist with little real interest in engaging one another. It's a lonely and troubling scenario. Though not troubling enough, I think, to make me reach for that yummy mummy's little helper.

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