What Do Pills Really Do To Change Your Life?

At best, a pill can calm or sedate you. Sometimes this might be a good idea, but more often it probably isn’t. If you’re too calm or sedated, how can you think? Without your capacity for thinking, you won’t be able to identify your wrong choices, mistakenly held premises, or unhealthy relationships in which you engage.

What disturbs me most about the trend towards “medication first/medication exclusively” is not the notion of medication itself. If a pill could cure problems as well as the medical establishment would have us believe, then life would be an effortless picnic.

A growing number of research studies are showing that self-esteem might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Low-achieving students, some studies show, think as highly of themselves as valedictorians. Violent criminals are no more likely to show evidence of self-esteem problems than are respectable high-achievers.

How can this be? 

Marital counseling and couples therapy are often a flop. This holds true even if the therapist is a pretty good one. Why is this?