Mental health in Spain: anxiolytics on tap and ten-minute appointments

Mental health in Spain: anxiolytics on tap and ten-minute appointments

Spain's public mental health system has been running like a field hospital for years: prescribing pills to paper over structural cracks no one wants to tackle. Public psychiatric care has become a dispensary of benzodiazepines and antidepressants, with appointments lasting barely ten minutes every two to four months, even for serious cases. The typical patient leaves the consultation with a renewed prescription, without anyone having looked into the real causes of their distress: job insecurity, unaffordable housing, social isolation, urban noise.

Medicalisation as a band-aid for an exhausted system

Pharmaceutical spending on psychotropic drugs has soared while waiting lists for psychotherapy are measured in months or years. The critical reading of this model is damning: it induces a chemical submission that dulls the symptoms without solving the underlying problems. The public psychiatrist sends to the pharmacy what should require changes in housing policy, working hours or noise pollution —Spain is the second noisiest country in the world, according to data from the thread—. Mental health is reduced to keeping the patient functioning like a productive NPC.

• Ten-minute appointments every 2-4 months for serious patients.
• Anxiolytics and antidepressants on tap from primary care.
• Almost no access to psychological therapy in the public health system.

The socioeconomic context as the root of the distress

Behind the rise in depression and anxiety diagnoses are factors no drug can cure: flats with no soundproofing where you can hear the upstairs neighbour as if they were in the same room, working hours incompatible with family life, constant social pressure through social media selling unattainable perfect lives, and a housing market that turns what used to be a normal prospect into failure. Society has become infantilised, as one line of analysis argues: people expect others to solve their own problems while corrosive envy is fed.

The result is a country where mental health is a collective problem addressed with individual solutions. As long as the structural causes —decent housing, noise, reasonable working hours, access to therapy— go unaddressed, the asylum will remain a metaphor for everyday life. How long will the chemical band-aid be enough?

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