Fay Schopen (Opinion, 12 December) cheerleads what she considers the American ease of pill-popping. Even a casual glance at the medicating patterns in my country reveal that the poor, and people of colour, especially children, are those that are prescribed the most pills. And this is not because they have disorders. Working-class kids who "talk back" or resist the hopelessness of a brutal capitalism that has disenfranchised them are considered psychotic. Social disorder is now being treated as a psychiatric disorder. And the drug companies are making billions.
While each year drug companies launch new mental disorders with the kind of fearmongering that once belonged only to weapons manufacturers, what we need are studied sceptics who can talk back to Big Pharma.
In the meantime: about to lose your job? Might find it upsetting if you lose your home? Take a pill. You can get an antidepressant prescription in 13 minutes in most doctor's offices in the US. Big Pharma spends millions assuring us we are all very sick and in need of constant drugging. I expect that soon there will be a disease called Ferguson disorder. When young black men are heartbroken and angry at their lack of civil freedoms, instead of taking to the streets, they can sit back and take a pill.
Naomi Wallace
(Playwright, screenwriter), Otterburn, North Yorkshire
• As a 74-year-old who doesn't (currently) have to take any medication and who, apart from a few courses of antibiotics never has, I count myself fortunate and in no way morally, or any other way, superior to those who do. Fay Schopen is right, it is irrational and denigrating to sneer at anyone needing medication for chronic illness.
One part of her article worried me, however: the suggestion that Tamoxifen was not an option for the treatment of her mother in the 1980s. Tamoxifen has been prescribed since the 1970s and only if the cancer was oestrogen insensitive should it not have been the first-line drug treatment.
Americans may rattle, but in Japan, where doctors not only prescribe but dispense, they rattle louder.
Ian Skidmore
Welwyn, Hertfordshire
