The Australian commenter posing this question can look over here, at the States, to see what a national sedation policy might look like.

Not that every one of us has been zoned by Zeneca… mummified by Merck… Lalalanded by Lilly… but, you know, tens of millions of Americans have gotten there, and – out-of-it-wise – we’re way more advanced than the Aussies. Our best poets sing of it:

Let us go then, you and I,
Where America is spread out against the sky
Like a nation etherized upon a table…

In one particular way, Australia looked for awhile as though it might overtake us – i.e., in government-sponsored anti-psychotic dosing of children without psychotic symptoms.

To be sure, we’ve got Joseph Biederman (type his name into this blog’s search engine and enjoy).

But Australia’s got Patrick McGorry who, until he (under pressure from scientists around the world) abandoned the idea, thought it might be clever to experiment with giving fifteen-year-olds he determined to be “pre-psychotic” powerful antipsychotic drugs. Some people thought it wasn’t too cool to give “children who had not yet been diagnosed with a psychotic illness…. drugs with potentially dangerous side effects.” So last summer McGorry dropped the idea.

And now – under equally strong pressure from an outraged scientific community, McGorry has gone one step further.

Concerns about the overmedication of young people and rigid models of diagnosis have led the architect of early intervention in Australian psychiatry, Patrick McGorry, to abandon the idea pre-psychosis should be listed as a new psychiatric disorder.

The former Australian of the Year had previously accepted the inclusion of pre-psychosis – a concept he and colleagues developed – in the international diagnostic manual of mental disorders, or DSM, which is being updated this year.

Drug companies must be mildly dismayed. (Only mildly, because they’ll find a way around this.) Popular American news shows are pointing out that for most people anti-depressants are placebos with serious side effects. Critics are attacking the idea of a grief pill. And now the packed-with-potential idea of pre-psychosis (who ain’t pre-? and when will they figure out that an even niftier idea is clinically pre-neurotic?) is being savaged simply because some people think giving symptom-free people immensely powerful drugs is unethical!

Zoom in on the bigger picture here, if you will. Through incessant advertising, and through incentivized research professors at our universities, the drug industry is slowly rebuilding our basic human self-appraisals. We simply cannot get through life without pills.