“Then one day, she was chatting to a cholesterol expert about the potential link in the hallway at her work, when he brushed it off as obviously nonsense. “And I said ‘how do we know that?’,” she says.”

These are our “experts”, brushing off things about which they have no clue.

“How are all these medications affecting our brains? And should there be warnings on packets?”

Yet another warning in a list that makes people's eyes glaze over is not going to do much good. Additionally, people have a difficult time relating to just how bad these effects can really be. People also tend to overestimate their abilities to perceive the effects and endeavor to address them.

“But Golomb’s most unsettling discovery isn’t so much the impact that ordinary drugs can have on who we are – it’s the lack of interest in uncovering it. “There’s much more of an emphasis on things that doctors can easily measure,” she says,”

And what is it about medications that makes people willing to connect these dots? Money and a willingness to not want to know and even to deny what is known. The chemical industry is very good at this and we've known about that for a very long time. There are numerous studies that have found these same associations with various chemical products from artificial food colorings to laundry chemicals and more, with effects that include anxiety, depression, and rage. The ubiquity of chemicals with unknown physiological and psychological is staggering. It's gotten to the point where we can barely socialize without being inundated with the 21st version of passive smoking. People and places can't exist without dousing themselves and their spaces with chemical crap that also includes air "fresheners", candles, essential oils, etc. Road rage, infertility, anxiety, depression . . . all these psychological phenomena that have risen along with the public test lab that is our world. And chemical companies are using the tobacco industry's template of doubt and denial along with decades of honing the craft.

“But in order to minimise any undesirable effects and get the most out of the staggering quantities of medications that we all take each day, Mischkowski reiterates that we need to know more. Because at the moment, he says, how they are affecting the behaviour of individuals – and even entire societies – is largely a mystery.”

It's true. And if it's a problem for medications that are presumably scrutinized, what do we think is the case with the 10s of thousands of chemicals that are basically tested using the “honor system” of industry testing its own products for safety? These chemicals are not tested singly, nevermind in the near limitless combinations in which they exist in our daily lives.

“At this point it’s worth pointing out that no one is arguing that people should stop taking their medication. Despite their subtle effects on the brain, antidepressants have been shown to help prevent suicides, cholesterol-lowering drugs save tens of thousands of lives every year, and paracetamol is on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential drugs because of its ability to relieve pain. But it is important that people are informed about any potential psychological side-effects.”

And every one of these articles will include this boilerplate rationalization that's a lot more complicated – and different – than this.