Hey, want a fun thing to do when you're just sittin' 'round the zeitgeist, waiting for a bolt of enlightenment or maybe just the apocalypse to rain down destruction and locusts and Godspit on your sinful little head? Something to do whilst you're nakedly sipping some fine sake and wondering when the melting icecaps will raise the oceans sufficiently that you can start taking a boat to work?
Extrapolate. That's what you can do. Draw it out. Take it to its natural conclusion. Grab hold of a juicy piece of ripe, low-hanging news and lick it and stroke it and promise to make it breakfast, and let it coo and whimper and whisper its wicked secrets in your hungry little id. Hey, it beats fornication. Oh wait, no it doesn't. Never mind.
Here's a good piece to start you off: Did you know that the use of prescription antidepressants in America has literally doubled in a mere 10 years? It's true.
From about '96 to '05, they say the number of your fellow patriots taking behavioral meds jumped from 13 million to a whopping 27 million, which is fully 10 percent of the American population, not including babies and cats and the Duggars. And that's only through '05. The actual number is probably far closer to 15 or even 20 percent by now.
Are you amazed? The slightest bit surprised? Taken aback? Of course you're not.
This is where you do it. This is where you get to load up your satire gun, fire up your dour prognosticator and crank your extrapolator to full power, and draw some nifty, if dubious, conclusions.
Because, do you know what this means? It means that, very soon now, maybe three, four or 30 years hence, just about every American and most of the planet, too, will be on some sort of narcotic, behavioral med, modifier, zinger or zapper or calmer or leveler designed to mollify or numb or dry up all your saliva, give you some really weird dreams and make you never want to have sex. It's not all that tough to imagine, really.
But why stop there? Extrapolate a bit further. Because if you look at it just right, this also means all depression and unhappiness will soon be coming to an end. Isn't that great? No more depression! At last! No more war. No more road rage. No more gangs. No more screaming at the dog or yelling at your spouse about the general lack of oral sex in your morning routine. Imagine.
Not quite convinced? Fine. Let us dissect. Let us perform a dangerous feat of only semi-drunken math to verify it all and keep your extrapolator well lubed and pumping hard. Ready?
Let's see: 13 million in 10 years translates into a little more than one million new antidepressant users every year, correct? That breaks down to about 90,000 per month, or 3,000 new users every 24 hours, which is about 125 every hour, or roughly two Americans jumping on the antidepressant train every single minute, 24 hours a day, every day of the week, nonstop forever and ever until we all die happy and narcotized and free. Praise Jesus.
But wait, that's not exactly accurate either. Because as we all know, modern life is nothing if not accelerating, gaining momentum like a Republican in a meth lab, like Sarah Palin shopping at Neiman's, like those aforementioned polar icecaps. The quicker they liquefy, the more exponentially they freak everyone out. Fun!
Did you know the world population is all set to reach seven billion straining, colliding bipeds by 2011? That overall, the global population is still exploding, and no one has the slightest clue how we're going to feed everyone, clothe them all and give them sufficient access to a nearby Starbucks?
So then, if we factor in insane population growth and the general acceleration of suffering and stress and misery in the world, and with it the concomitant, ever-increasing need to take some magic chemical compound to help calm it all down, we can safely say that it will be far more than two new users per minute -- probably more like one every second. Tick. Tick. Tick. There's three new users right there! How amazing it will be. And soon!
Of course, it's all a bit silly, is it not? Rare indeed are extrapolations like this very accurate. Rarely do such forecasts actually come to pass, given how they never take into account the wildcards, the potholes, the potential upheavals of what's expected.
Something always changes. There are always unforeseen variables, factors that no one saw coming. Who knows what might happen? Who knows what could affect those disturbing numbers? Maybe we won't have a totally antidepressed, overly medicated population by Malia Obama's second presidential term after all.
Our adorably insane conspiracy theorists posit that some lethal, ugly combination of global pandemic or WWIII or nuclear "accident" will soon reduce the world population to about a billion humans, and therefore will totally relax the stress levels overall and mitigate the need to take any pill whatsoever, mostly because we'll all be dead.
Others say global warming will soon solve many of our problems, simply by wiping out massive sections of livable space and taking giant gobs of the population with it, thus leaving the rest of us with far more access to really good wine and pot and Ecstasy and porn and, well, who needs Zoloft?
Or maybe it won't quite be so dour. Maybe it will be a more delicious confluence of world-changing factors that will ease the desperate need to antidepress.
Maybe the grand sea change, the great promise President Obama has already set in motion -- toward a new intelligence, peace, humanitarianism, environmentalism, the arts, a transformation of who the hell we think we are and just what the hell we think we're doing here -- will create a new, far healthier world sooner than most think.
Maybe, in short, there are more interesting, divine factors at play than most people are, at this moment at least, willing to realize. Possible? Of course it is. Shall we extrapolate?
Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, blogs, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is right here.
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