Worst of all, the biomedical approach makes patients out of essentially normal people and makes them dependent on outside forces—pills dispensed by a benevolent physician. Antidepressant drugs are not addicting in the usual sense; the patient does not crave them when they are withdrawn. Rather, when the successfully treated patient stops taking his drugs, the depression often returns. The effectively drugged patient cannot credit himself for carving out his happiness and his ability to function with a semblance of normality; he must credit the pills.
