Pharmaceuticals as a Stress Remedy?

Western (allopathic) medicine does not acknowledge what we think of as stress and does not have a stress remedy. Western medicine provides a number of psychoactive substances some of which are used as anxiolytics, anti-depressives, anti-psychotics and more. This is an acknowledgement of states of anxiety, depression and other psychological difficulties. Stress however is not considered a medical condition and thus we do not have a pharmaceutical stress remedy.

From a holistic perspective the fixation on the superficial level alone is inadequate. Most of us agree that anxiety and depression are the surface level manifestations of something deeper. For thousands of years eastern and holistic medicine have treated the underlying issues, i.e. the underlying stress. Unresolved psychological, emotional, and other stimuli aggregate along the pathways of the nerves in such a way that the functioning of the nervous system gets impaired in terms of mood, feelings of well-being, and what lots of people would call their energy levels.

There is no pharmaceutical that can improve one’s energy level in a healthy way. There are pharmaceutical stimulants such as amphetamines, but these stimulants are short lived, short acting and have adverse short and long-term effects and can quickly drain the resources of the body. A good stress remedy works to resolve the underlying issues of the primary obstructions that are leading to states of anxiety and depression.

For example, a common complaint associated with depression is that people feel as though they have no energy. In many cases this is a false perception. It is not that a person in this condition lacks energy. They simply have not organized their energy well. Their energy is subconsciously or unconsciously sapped by maintaining old distortions of the electromagnetic fields surrounding the nerves. Because of this there is less overt energy to engage in whatever activities they are interested in - thus the depression. The answer to depression from the Western perspective is to give people an anti-depressant so that they can not feel their stress. In this scenario people actually lose awareness and have even less consciousness of the underlying obstructions. Another option for some is to self-medicate with everything from amphetamines to cocaine and other drugs, or even coffee and nicotine, all of which are stimulants. At best, this category of stress remedy produces superficial, short-term results.

There are a lot of ways in which people attempt to address the symptomatology without addressing the underlying issues. The most frequently used class of pharmaceutical stress remedy for anxiety and depression are the SSRIs - selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors - including Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Welbutrin etc. As serotonin moves from one nerve to the next, typically the nerve that released the serotonin will reabsorb it. These drugs prevent the resorption of serotonin after it is moved into the synaptic cleft between two nerve cells. In other words SSRIs trick one’s brain into thinking there is more serotonin in their body than there actually is. These substances are great if they need to be used on a short-term basis to get people through crisis situations. But if the underlying situations are not addressed, coming off of these substances can be challenging. And not only does one still have the underlying discrepancies, blockages, distortions, stresses and tensions that they had before but now they have the additional ones that accumulated because their consciousness was not been allowed to engage any of what's been going on during the course of the pharmaceutical consumption. In the short term it can be necessary and critical but these drugs were simply not designed to be effective long-term stress remedies. And in many cases not only are these drugs ineffective but they can create a number of long-term difficulties.