13/02/2025
“[Pharmaceuticals] are among the greatest advances in the history of medicine. Properly used, they can be a boon in alleviating suffering and in treating disease. But their indiscriminate and promiscuous use is making psychological cripples and chronic ailers out of millions of people. The unremitting barrage of advertising for [drugs], especially over television, has set the stage for a mass anxiety neurosis. Almost from the moment children are old enough to sit upright in front of a [television/computer] screen, they are being indoctrinated into the hypochondriac’s clamorous and morbid world.”
- Norman Cousins ‘Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient’ 1979