The rapid rise in antidepressant use in recent years deserves to be treated not only as a health issue but as a social one. Because what is at stake is not merely individual suffering — it is also the question of how that suffering is defined, classified, and “treated”.
SABRI UÇAR ÇALIŞKAN
One of the world’s quietest arguments is not taking place inside a pill bottle. It is taking place inside people. Especially when antidepressants are concerned. On one side stands modern medicine with its solutions; on the other, the fragile and intimate relationship each person holds with their own inner world. These two territories do not always move in harmony.
The rapid rise in antidepressant use in recent years deserves to be treated not only as a health issue but as a social one. Because what is at stake is not merely individual suffering; it is also the question of how that suffering is defined, classified, and “treated”.
Across Europe and much of the world, antidepressant use has more than doubled over the past two decades. In some countries, a significant share of the population takes these medications regularly. In England, roughly one in eight people is reported to be on antidepressants. This is not a personal preference. It is a mass orientation.
So what does this rise mean?
Is a person who feels sad, anxious, or disconnected from life truly ill — or simply living the natural consequences of the life they are living?
Modern psychology tends to answer this question with categories. Diagnoses, criteria, durations. If you have been unhappy for a certain length of time, you are depressed. If your anxiety takes a certain shape, you have an anxiety disorder. Human emotion is turned into a kind of catalogue.
And yet every person is a world unto themselves. Two people who suffer the same loss do not feel the same thing. The same grief, the same solitude, the same pressure resonates differently in every soul. But the system often overlooks this difference. Because standardization makes management easier.
The systems by which psychological disorders are classified are expanding steadily. More diagnoses, more categories, more explanations. To some, this represents progress in understanding the human being. To others, it is a mechanism for sorting and labeling them.
And at the center of this mechanism, there is a vast economy.
Antidepressants are no longer merely a treatment. They are an industry worth tens of billions of dollars. As of 2025, the global antidepressant market is reported to exceed twenty billion dollars, with projections placing it above thirty billion in the years ahead. This is not simply a healthcare sector. It is a market that grows, expands, and continuously acquires new patients.
Is this growth coincidence?
Or is it the modern system offering its own cure for the problems that the modern system has created?
Many critics see a contradiction at the heart of this. Because the system both produces the conditions that exhaust people and sells the remedy for that exhaustion. A person becomes unhappy; that unhappiness is then treated. But the source of the unhappiness remains unchanged.
Working conditions do not improve. Loneliness does not diminish. Meaninglessness does not dissolve. Only the person’s response to all of this is regulated.
This is precisely where antidepressants enter. They are said to restore the brain’s chemical balance. And yes, for many people they do provide genuine relief. But this effect does not work the same way for everyone.
For some, these medications make life bearable again. But for others, something else happens. A smoothing of the emotions. A loss of sharpness.
Many users describe this in similar terms: I no longer feel very sad — but I can no longer feel joy the way I once did.
Should this be seen merely as a side effect? Or as a weakening of the bond between the person and reality?
More pointed criticisms go further still. It is said that in some cases these medications alter perception and reduce a person’s sensitivity to the problems around them. The problem does not disappear, but the person’s relationship to the problem changes.
Anger in the face of injustice diminishes. The impulse to question meaninglessness weakens. Resistance to pressure fades.
And so a more compliant individual emerges. Calmer. Quieter. Less questioning.
At this point the debate ceases to be purely medical. It takes on a social dimension.
Because if millions of people in a society begin simultaneously to feel less — that is not an individual condition. That is a transformation.
Within the fast and unforgiving machinery of capitalism, the human being is increasingly expected to produce more and think less. To work constantly, consume endlessly, and question as little as possible. Those who cannot adapt to this structure are labeled as problems.
And at precisely that moment, one of the system’s softest-looking but most powerful tools steps in.
Antidepressants.
The matter is no longer simply one of medication. It is the fact that all of this has become a vast industry. There is an economy turning on the human soul. More diagnoses, more prescriptions, more dependency.
This cycle grows. Because the system feeds it.
Today millions of people take antidepressants for years on end. In some countries, rates of long-term use have risen sharply. What was once a temporary treatment is becoming a permanent way of life.
And here a harder question surfaces.
Is the person truly healing? Or are they simply adapting?
To put it more bluntly: in some cases, these medications may make the unjust feel just. The wrong feel normal. The absurd feel reasonable. Because they weaken the mechanism of protest within.
Anger diminishes. Questioning diminishes. Resistance diminishes. And what remains is a more manageable individual.
A robotic equilibrium. Neither fully unhappy nor fully happy. Simply functioning.
For some, this may be peace. For others, it is disappearance.
Because what makes a human being human is not only the capacity to feel well. It is also the capacity to feel disturbed. To notice when something is wrong, to react to it, to want to change it.
If those feelings are extinguished, what remains is a body that lives. That does not think, does not question, does not resist.
This is why some critics see this process not as a matter of public health but as a mechanism of control.
Manufactured concerns. Expanding definitions. Ever new categories of illness. Every person has a label. Every label has a medication. Every medication has a market. And this market keeps growing.
Because human suffering does not end.
But perhaps the real question is this:
Is the person truly ill — or is it the world they are living in?
There is no easy answer to that question. But perhaps the most important thing remains what it has always been.
