Not since Trini Lopez howled that if he had a hammer, he’d hammer in the morning, has everything in sight looked so much like a nail.

The hammer is serious anti-depression medications and the like, and the nail could be us. In this scenario, Trini Lopez is the vast horde of over-enthusiastic psychiatrists who can and do prescribe a panoply of heavy-duty drugs, possibly without thinking all that hard about it.

Let me roll back here, and tell you how I got on this roll.

A friend of mine had been having trouble sleeping, and so he asked two of his doctors about it, who separately recommended psychiatrists. He went to both to see what they would say, and came away with two wildly diverse diagnoses, and prescriptions for two distinct and potent drugs. He also came away with bills for nearly four hours of professional consulting, as one doctor started out with a 2½ hour session, and for this, you need to think lawyer rates,

Now through all this, he insisted on saying two things: (1) He had had a serious accident decades ago which severely crushed his face and required extensive reconstructive surgery at the time and (2) He often snored loudly at night and his partner reported that his breathing would stop and then start up again.

Neither of the psychiatrists considered either of these physical conditions relevant, and both thought heavy medication needed to be started right away.

He finally went over the top when he came home with the second prescription in hand and logged onto the Internet. There he found out he was about to set out on a course of medication whose closest relative was lithium, and nothing like this had been explained to him. Fortunately, his general practitioner stepped in and put a stop to all this nonsense, setting about to look at the obvious before taking any other measures.

Here, we have a case where the rich have a lot more in common with the poor than you might realize.

For a number of years, I came into contact with people who received free medical treatment through our city services. It seemed that everyone marked history by the drugs they were taking over time: “That’s when I was on such-and-such and gained 60 pounds.” Or “That’s when I on this-and-that and was in a fog all the time. I couldn’t work.”

Only the poor, with a plethora of free medical services, and the rich with limitless options, can fall prey to this alarming trap.

But then I thought of another example, that could happen to someone in the middle: What if a woman was getting good results with anti-depressants found herself pregnant?

Popular medications that appear in the studies I found are presumably harmful to the fetus as they show up as detectable symptoms in the babies post-birth. But if these mothers-to-be decide to go off their medication, they may not take their pre-natal vitamins, eat right or go to the doctor. And they may turn to alcohol and cigarettes for relief. Then there’s the damage to the people around them, as real depression looms large in any relationship.

Other studies report that depression may run deeper than we suspected in pregnant women, easily masked by the typical symptoms of pregnancy. And if treated? Well, it seems to be a case of “you’re darned if you do, and darned if you don’t.”

I’ve been a big proponent of these kinds of medications for people who suffer from depression, but now I’m beginning to wonder. The human condition is hard by any measure, and sometimes medical technology doesn’t make it any easier.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.