There are so many naturally occuring (and highly predictible) patterns in the world that would be interesting to track.

The US as a country is stupidly overmedicated. Between 1993 and 2003 the cost of prescription drugs in the US (in dollars) has quadrupled. Thats absurd.

What ever happened to those wonderful free market forces that protect the consumer? Apparently if you are sleeping with the government then competitive walls can be built rather high.

There are many beautiful things about psychotropic drugs that cure depression:

• They make drug companies tons of money.
  
• Government pays for a large part of the research and patents protect the profits.
  
• The enhanced serotonin levels create a background noise which sometimes makes it rather hard to think deeply or question things.
  
• Whether or not drug companies admit it, hundreds of people at different IP addresses have stated that the drugs are addictive and they can't get off them easily.
  
• At the end of the day the problem that caused your depression is still there. The drugs do not make it go away.
  
• People with diverted attention find it easy to fall under the poor me category. If the medication does not make them better then they are even more likely to become more apathetic.

At the end of the day you get simple minded apathetic people who make drug companies rich and are easily manipulated. What a wonderful world.

This post seems to be on about a recurring topic on this blog and may have no original content up to this point. Perhaps I am "spamming the search engines" with this rant...or maybe not.

What created the desire behind this post is the fact that it is not even 2am yet and I have already had mutliple comments on my depression blog today. And a bunch of them yesterday. You can tell that the season is changing because more people are searching and commenting about their problems with depression and drugs that are designed to threat it.

Its just another pattern I notice.

Certainly the network is growing (due to additional post and page creation and increasing link popularity) and will naturally spread itself out, but in the winter it seems to spread a bit faster than in the summer.

Being a marketer...and more specifically a "socially active on the web" one who tries to do a bit of reverse engineering of information systems you get to pick up on lots and lots of interesting patterns.

Lots of patterns frustrate me or make me sad, but at least I can recognize a few of them...