This means to discuss a dangerous trend in Pakistan’s healthcare system. Psychiatric drugs, once designed to heal fractured minds, are now handed out as quick fixes for almost every ailment imaginable. Walk into a clinic with asthma, chronic back pain, hormonal imbalances or even just a stubborn desire to lose weight and you might leave with an antidepressant or a sedative instead of proper treatment.
What began as rare off-label use has crept its way into a national habit. Antidepressants are repackaged as diet pills. Antipsychotics are slipped into treatment plans for breathing difficulties. Mood stabilisers are prescribed to sedate physical complaints unrelated to mental illness. There are no psychiatric evaluations, no thorough warnings, just a prescription pad and the assurance that “it works”.But it doesn’t heal. It harms.
Patients unknowingly become dependent on medications meant for conditions they never had. Underlying illnesses remain undiagnosed while symptoms are chemically masked. Worse still, these drugs can trigger psychiatric side effects in otherwise healthy individuals, creating the very disorders they were never prescribed for.
This is not medicine. It is negligence with a pharmaceutical stamp. And it is quietly altering the health of a nation.
We need more than polite reminders for “responsible prescribing”. We need regulation, mandatory psychiatric consultation before these drugs are dispensed and public education on the dangers of this casual pill culture. Psychiatric medication should be a tool for targeted healing, not a universal shortcut for every physical complaint.
Because when we begin medicating asthma with antidepressants and chasing weight loss with antipsychotics, we are not treating illnesses, we are running an unmonitored drug experiment on millions of unsuspecting Pakistanis.
Rekhmeena Sahibzada
Islamabad
