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Depression? It's just the new trendy illness!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html
Janet Street Porter is a fucking idiot. Discuss.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html
Janet Street Porter is a fucking idiot. Discuss.
This article is so 1990.
"but back in the Nineties the biggest cause of sick leave was backache, with one in seven workers claiming it.
Only ten years later, the number of backache sufferers had shrunk by nearly half. Now, did chairs suddenly get more ergonomic? Did car seats undergo a radical redesign?"
No, of course not.
all our office stuff
is ergonomic as fuck
It's pretty trendy to be fair.
are there any columns in the Femail today
trying to scare people into thinking they have some new unspecified illness?
there usually are, unless there's been a celeb photographed with old looking hands earlier this week
Most people on here probably do have Asperger's to be fair
As for depression, being as it is defined by its symptoms rather than its cause, clinical diagnosis is as much about placing a label on it as anything else. If you think you're depressed, you probably are.
Dr Sean did diagnose us as social retards.
'Being depressed'...
...is different to 'suffering from Depression'. Very different.
If I broke up with my bird, I'd be fucking depressed about it. However, I wouldn't suffer from Depression as a result of it.
An easily made syntactic muddling, but an important one to clarify nonetheless :)
Not it's not
It's just a difference between conversational use and technical use. If you broke up with your girlfriend, you wouldn't be depressed. Or you might be, I don't know. But to be using the word correctly, you'd have to be suffering from the symptoms of depression. It's also one of the least important things in the world to clarify; the fact that people are seemingly *elitist* about depression is exactly the problem JSP is referring to. (I'd imagine, anyway - tl;dr.)
Ok, fair points... fair points :)
Maybe it's not an important syntactic distinction to make, but I do think it's an important symptomatic distinction to make. A lengthy period of sadness is, indeed, a symptom of depression; just like a lengthy loss of appetite is, indeed, a symptom of stomach cancer. Doesn't mean that the latter illnesses are present in the person experiencing them though.
I ain't elitist about depression! I just want people to understand the full gravitas of depression/being depressed (which is, also, what JSP would advocate as well. I think).
But depression is *defined* by its symptoms
Cancer is defined by its cause. You can't compare the two.
Fair point, again, fair point.
Depression is the Irritable Bowel Syndrome of the Mind.
Now THAT's catchy.
Depresson isn't merely defined by its symptoms.
As I say below, cause is relevant to a diagnosis.
Plus the symptoms of depression can actually be a cause of certain physical illnesses
so its really not as simple as "someone's depressed so they have clinical depression"
Okay, you're right
There may well be physical tests for some underlying cause, but if none can be found, depression is dismissed as a diagnosis. And, in my experience, an underlying cause is rarely tested for unless there are some other symptoms indicative of that cause but mutually exclusive with a diagnosis of depression.
Depression ISN'T dismissed as a diagnosis, that should say
In clinical psychology terms the distinction is relevant.
No-one would diagnose you with clinical depression or propose psychological treatment for a "life-stage adjustment" (i.e. being down because of a death, break-up etc.). There might be counselling but psychological intervention wouldn't be appropriate.
Contrary to what you say it's actually defined by its cause rather than merely its symptoms, though severity would be an issue to. Proper clinical depression would involve being really really down either without a significant trigger to an extent and severity beyond what you would expect that trigger to do. It's not true that if you think you're depressed you probably are clinically depressed.
JSP has written an appalling article but I do sort of get the point she's (badly) highlighting that people labelling many of thier negative emotions of depression does trivialise genuinely severe clinical depression.
Unfortunately
the article is so appalling that it too has managed to trivialise clinical depression. Which kind of distracts from her point, if not quite negating it.
Well, quite.
From what I read of it it's the typical 'throat-clearing' thing where you quickly acknowledge the one side but then slate the other...
"I accept clinical depression exists and is a severe illness but..." <long rant about how somebody over-exaggerate depression.
I'm certainly not sticking up for the article here.
Daily mail articles and guardian blogs
think we should all just stay away from them really.
And, actually
having just skimmed through the article again, i think you're giving her too much credit.
Despite her claiming that 'i am not denying that clinical depression is a real mental illness, or that it can be debilitating for sufferers' the whole article is pretty much that.
'Proper clinical depression'
What's that? Does it mean you don't get treatment for depression if your life is objectively shit? And I think you've contradicted yourself - 'No-one would diagnose you with clinical depression or propose psychological treatment for a "life-stage adjustment" (i.e. being down because of a death, break-up etc.)' and yet 'Proper clinical depression would involve being really really down ... beyond what you would expect that trigger to do'. So it is possible you'd be treated for depression in the aftermath of a person's death or a break-up, right? As long as your reaction to that death was considered to be disproportionate. But again, a disproportionate reaction is a symptom, not a cause. And really, who is anyone to judge what a disproportionate reaction is?
The test for depression is a doctor will ask you a few questions. That's it. There are no blood tests or urine analysis. There's no resorting to this 'depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain' bullshit which seems to get perpetuated in places like this. What do people think, that doctors have opened up a load of depressed people's brains? It's just a theory. It's not even a theory about *all* people's depression, just *some* people's. A few weeks ago, somebody on here asked "What can I do to cheer up my mum? She's depressed" and somebody else replied "There's nothing you can do - depression isn't just being a bit down, it's a chemical imbalance in the brain". That's surely more damaging than anything JSP has said.
But anyway, I'm getting off track. You're usually going to be the best judge of what's going on inside your own head. It's rare that you'll be so far gone, your judgement will be too impaired for you to know what's right and what's wrong, with regard to depression, anyway. If you can't get out of bed in the morning, if life seems too much of a chore to continue with - you'll probably know that better than anyone else.
To be fiar y
But, to be fair to those people who you mention...
...all medicinal treatments for depression are about redressing a chemical imbalance in the brain, aren't they? SSRI's (your seroxat's prozac's etc.) that's what they DO! So, are doctors handing out pills to redress a chemical imbalance in the brain, despite not being entirely sure that that's what the problem is?
Bit scary that.
It's a regular criticism of the anti-psychiatry movement
I think I read a response somewhere to do with diabetes, pointing out that (effective) treatments for diabetes were administered even before anyone knew what caused it, but I can't find the quote for the moment.
Sure but the treatments were still chemicals.
I mean whatever anti-depressant medication does is a chemical reaction, even where people aren't sure exactly what works and why. There has to be a chemical reaction involved.
I mean "chemical imbalance without external causation" though
That's my bad for being ambiguous, but it seems to be what people usually mean when they just say "chemical imbalance". I think the system by which SSRUs works is at least fairly well understood - serotonin makes you happy, something which keeps it in your system will make you happier. That makes sense without any need to understand the underlying causes of depression. I'm not supporting the anti-psychiatry movement, I was just making the point. Although that said, newer studies of antidepressants, with more rigorous testing as well as stricter criteria for success, are apparently casting significant doubt on their effectiveness. Many antidepressants currently on the market would not be approved under current new-drug regulations (although that was just according to one article I read).
I'm always a bit suspicious of articles but forward by the anti-psychiatry movment
as it seems often it seems they're primarily based on a gut dislike and they tend to only use scientific evidence when it can be interpreted to support their beliefs and in those cases over-exaggerate its importance.
But at the same time it's an interesting area and whilst I tend to feel far more persuaded by the psychiatric specialists arguments, I'm also mindful of how little is actually known about the brain and mental health. I remember a psychologist once saying that psychiatry is pretty much where medicine was at the end of the middle ages where there's various things that seem to work but nobody really knows quite why and they're just like apothecaries handing out herbs and hoping for the best and psychology's less developed still and in many cases not really that far beyond superstition and guesswork.
That said these were the steps medicine had to go through before it got to where it is today and they did set the stage for major discoveries to be made later that couldn't have been made otherwise. And a lot of the medieval treatments did work, even if the cause was unknown.
But it's an interesting area.
It wasn't put forward by the anti-psychiatry movement
It was an article more generally about the placebo effect, but it used antidepressants as a specific example. I'll try to find it.
Here it is:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
I don't know where to start with that last paragraph
How about "I will defer to someone who has more experience of the topic than myself"
theguywithnousername?
Was it you who said only a doctor can help someone who's depressed?
It was definitely either you or DK. By the way theguywithnousername (if you're reading this) - do you happen to have one of those questionnaires lying about that they give to new patients who suspect they might be depressed? I think some people might find that quite informative.
I vaguely recall saying something like that
but the way you've put it above takes it completely out of context. Can't remember what the discussion was, but based on my own experiences I'd imagine I was saying that you can't continue to beat yourself up if you can't 'fix' someone you care about.
Maybe a bit out of context
but I was pretty angry about it at the time. PRETTY ANGRY. So maybe I just misinterpreted what you were saying, but I'm certainly not trying to misrepresent you now. I've been trying to find the original post and my reply, but I've failed. Probably going to buy some soap now.
I just had a look
Can't find it either. It wouldn't surprise me if I said it in a blunt or obnoxious way, but I can say now that I certainly don't believe that only a doctor can help anyone experiencing depression. I do however think that you can't always take it upon yourself to 'cure' someone's depression (which isn't to say you just wash your hands of them) and that, depending on length and severity, it reaches a point where consulting a professional is advisable.
idk. My opinion, if you can even call it that considering it's not something I feel especially strongly about, is based solely on my own experience, and not in-depth research, as yours seems to be.
To be honest I think you know you're being a bit silly and looking for an arugment
"Proper clinical depression" - clinically significant depression as diagnosed by a psychologist, psychiatrist, somebody who works in and has studied mental health rather than self-diagnosis. Many people whose lives are objectively shit do develop mental health problems, rather unsurprisingly, but being unhappy about your life being objectively shit in itself wouldn't mean you'd get treatment for depression.
I've not contradicted myself - I've clarified. You wouldn't get treated for a depressive reaction to life-stage adjustments but would if it was a clinically-significant strong and sustained reaction. There's no contradiction in that.
It's true the diagnostic methods for depression do come entirely down to the patient's subjective reporting of symptoms but that doesn't actually equal "everybody who thinks they're depressed is depressed". I've attended three years worth of diagnostic meetings in psychological departments and written letters rejecting unsuitable referrals and there are certainly people who feel they're depressed but it doesn't meet 'clinical significance'. Which answers your other question - who is anyone to judge a disproportionate reaction? Certainly psychologists do this and don't by any means take everyone referred to them. Incidentally a lot of GPs aren't great at spotting depression and will tend to over-diagnoise or under-diagnose. That's not a criticism but they obviously aren't specialists.
The chemical imbalance in the brain stuff confuses a lot of people. It's not really true to say it's just a theory - there is a chemical element to clinical depression (anti-depressants couldn't possibly work if this wasn't the case) but it obviously doesn't mean there's nothing you can do to cheer someone up and I'd agree saying that is pretty damaging, especially as feeling depressed and being clinically depressed are different things and someone feeling depressed doesn't mean they have a chemical imbalance in their brain. And it's true anti-depressants don't work on everyone which implies a chemical balance isn't the full picture. Plus a lot of people require cognitive help as well as the anti-depressants if they want the symptoms to go away in the long-term so it's definitely not just chemicals, even though the evidence is they play a part.
Some people do over-estimate the seriousness of their symptoms but certain;y if you can't get out of bed or if life seems to much of a chore to continue with that would be clinically signifcant depression.
The last things I'd add are that
a) this is confusing and there's a lot of blurred lines involved. I don't profess to be a mental health expert but I spent three and a half years working in mental health and know enough to know I'm not entirely wrong in what I'm saying here.
b) None of this means people shouldn't seek treatment for depression. Obviously the best person to tell you if you're depressed or have any other mental heath problem is a qualified mental health worker. Increasingly GPs will have one workng at their surgery and it's much better to go to the doctors and get your symptoms checked out than to dismiss them.
I'm not being silly or looking for an argument at all
I know that GPs will give antidepressants to pretty much anyone who asks for them, and I'm sure there are people who end up in psychiatrists offices claiming to be depressed who aren't depressed at all, but then I'd argue with the idea that they thought they were depressed in the first place. They'd probably been feeling down for a few days and thought "Hey, I know - I'll get some pills to take the edge off. That's easier than confronting my problems." No doubt those people are not depressed, but I don't think that's inconsistent with saying if you think you're depressed, you probably are.
Like I say, my experience working in mental health goes against what you're saying.
But I'm not an expert obviously.
I don't see where you're explicitly disagreeing with what I'm saying though
Unless you're talking about the distinctions between
major depressive disorder, dysthymia, adjustment disorder, etc. I'm conflating them all, to be honest.
I think I feel you're simplifying rather than disagreeing outright.
I just don't think it's as straightforward as "if you think you're depressed you probably are" or that the people wo turn up in psychiatrists offices necessarily know whether they're depressed or not (it's really difficult to turn up in a psychiatrist's office these days incidentally - certainly where I worked you'd end up seeing a psychologist in the vast majority of cases as psychiatrists have ultra-strict referral criteria. That's a sidetrack of course).
And the reason I picked up on your use of 'proper clinical depression' by the way
isn't that I was being arsey, but I felt you were suggesting some people's depression was somehow less valid than that of others, irrespective of its extent. Which there may be some truth to, in the sense that spontaneous depression seems to resemble a conventional illness more than something like adjustment disorder does, but it doesn't change the fact that there's something wrong, nor the treatment that will be received. And nor should it.
Adjustment disorders do tend to be treated differently though.
In terms of being referred to a counsellor to talk through things rather than drugs or psychological therapy (which tends to be about changing the way you think).
The reason for this is because of the danger of clinicalising and labelling abnormal negative emotions. I mean if you suffer a bereavement or break-up or whatever it's undoubtedly utterly shit but there's nothing wrong in feel a lot of the negative stuff you feel, and it probably helps you in the long-run. Certainly taking any kind of medication or therapy to suppress those emotions would be damaging and it'd be irresponsible to treat all negative emotions as evidence of mental illness.
But I'm not making value judgements here about severity or validity, just the extent you can and should help people.
Do you mean normal negative emotions?
I think people are quite happy to clinicalise and label normal negative emotions, both patients and onlookers. To take the most extreme example, if someone kills themselves, it's much easier to say that they must have had something wrong with them than it is to say it was a good judgement call. For our own well-being, I mean. The idea that someone could simply lose all sense of value in their own life is unfathomable to some people.
In most cases killing yourself wouldn't be a result of 'normal' negative emotions though.
The fact it drove you to suicide would indicate a depth and extent of negative emotions beyond what most people experience.
Most people will have fleeting suicidal thoughts at some point during their lives but certainly not so much so as to act on them.
It depends what you mean by 'normal'
I'd classify a normal negative emotion as any which can be deemed more or less appropriate given the situation. In that sense, a negative emotion being extremely powerful doesn't necessarily make it abnormal, and it's in that sense I mean that it's sometimes comforting to clinicalise them. If the emotions *are* abnormal, i.e. inappropriate, then clincalising them seems the right course of action.
Also, in case you missed it further up - do you happen to have one of those questionnaires lying about that they give to new patients who suspect they might be depressed?
I stopped working there a couple of months back
but they're online:
http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/Generalised-Anxiety-Disorder-Assessment-(GAD-7).htm
http://steppingup.washington.edu/keys/documents/phq-9.pdf
there was another one too but I've forgotten it's name so can't find it!
Normal is obviously a tricky word to define but I'd agree with your definition. However I'd also feel desire to kill yourself would very rarely fall into this category.
Cheers
The only reason I asked if you had any hard copies is I thought people would just write them off as being the same as those self-diagnosis websites you get. Which they basically are, but I thought the point of that would be missed.
It's not taken as definitive though.
Sometimes people score highly on these but are judged as sub-clinical and sometimes people score lowly and clearly need help.
They're useful diagnostic tools but not an absolute diagnosis in themselves.
No, I realise that
but I thought it was a useful way of showing how much of a role simply saying how your feeling plays in diagnosis.
Sure.
I mean ultimately all psychologists etc. have to go on is how you score your feelings and how you talk about your feelings. As you said a few answers up, there's no objective test you can apply.
It will sometimes be the case people over or under-state the problem, or that it becomes clear in the course of the assessment that what they think is the problem isn't really the main problem but I certainly don't dispute people talking about their feelings or there is to go on; I'm just still not convinced it's entirely reliable!
I hate janet street porter so much
http://unspeak.net/take-a-moment-to-consider/
^ everyone should read that link.
I'd like to see a Ben Goldacre/Steven Poole tag-team.
with Simon Singh
cheering them on from the corner of the ring?
With his hair, I imagine Simon Singh as a katana-wielding, manga ninja.
(who’s also a bit of a whiny emo, to keep the girls interested)
he is generally a bit better on evidence than Poole though
the Unspeak book got a bit ranty.
maybe Francis Wheen could get involved
Robin Ince could wank over them all from the stands.
i don't know any of these people (aside from robin ince)
what do they do?
Ben Goldacre does the ''Bad Science'' column in The Guardian
He's the one I was involved in a very minor Andrew Neil scandal with.
?
Andrew Neil ''allegedly'' denied the link between HIV and AIDS
Ben Goldacre made the observation that this is never mentioned in conjunction with Neils public persona (via. Twitter). I followed it up by fabricating an anecdote whereby I interview Neil and his people ''erected a wall of silence'' when the topic was raised. Goldacre ''retweeted''...Neils name became a trending topic for a couple of hours.
http://celebrifi.com/twitter/Ben-Goldacre/531581
Is that not pretty libellous?
Whilst I don't agree with any words that Janet Street-Porter has chosen, and will continue to choose, to describe ANYTHING...
...some of the thinking behind this article has sound ideological foundations.
There is a muddying of the lines between 'being a bit down for a while' and 'suffering from a clinical form of depression'. Or, more simply, being depressed (a fleeting feeling for the most part) is not the same as suffered from depression (an illness).
A lot of people will claim that they suffer from depression when, in reality, they are too lazy to face up to the miseries and trivialities of life. This is fact. I KNOW people who do this. We think happiness is a God given right. It ISN'T! Happiness is something to be worked for and attained, just like anything else in life.
If I'm quite honest, the NHS could be spared millions in dishing out pills and delivering therapy if certain people responded well to a good course of common sense.
I mostly agree, but the demarcation between the two is blurry.
And one of the first signs that you might be developing depression is sudden onset of laziness and lack of motivation, so expecting somebody to snap out of it is like saying to a polio victim, oh just fucking well walk straight. I'm not prone to depression, and yet developed it a couple of years ago after something traumatic happened. It was more than just Being Down, but yet it was directly caused by these events (and being in early 30s at the time, this was not my first brush with trauma, hence me saying I'm not naturally susceptible.) Had the events not happened, I'm sure that my brain chemicals would have continued to be quite content.
Also, the NHS is stuck between a rock and a hard place. I fucking hate that cliche, but my delete button is sticking. If it medicates people who might be a bit 'borderline' then it's 'dishing out pills' and if it doesn't and then something happens to that person, then they've sent away a vulnerable person who probably needed some help. It's so tough. I hate medication and am not convinced as to its longterm efficacy as a psychiatric tool, but used as a coping tool to help people through until they can tackle the real issues, I think it can be very useful.
shes right, though.
Her sister was my boss
It was really sad when she died :(
I'm not a complete cynic . . . BUY MY BOOK
I'm not a complete cynic, but I am a 100 per cent ruthless realist. I've written two books about my no-nonsense attitude to life. The first, Life's Too F****** Short, has been published all over the world, from Slovenia to Sweden, Spain and the U.S.
My next book, Don't Let The B***ards Get You down, was serialised in this paper, and attacked the huge amount of drivel beamed at women on a daily basis, telling them what to eat, what to wear and what miracle cream to splodge on their faces in order to achieve a mythical level of perfection.
erm, like this you mean . . . http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/index.html
i've decided recently that any time i feel depressed, it's just an adult sulk.
i think you should only ever be really depressed about
death/illness
really bad money issues...crippling debt, no where to turn etc
really bad job issues...every minute sucks the life out of you
really bad relationship issues...your one true love packs her bags
i know that covers a lot of the life spectrum, but they're the power five that i'd expect a genuine rut....like proper....wtf is the point in life...
anything else is just throwing your toys out the pram and can probably be avoided by pulling yourself together.
As sweeping generalisations go that's reasonably solid
as long as you're describing being down in the dumps about things rather than actual clinical depression, which I'm sure you're aware is a very different thing.
yeah sure, but i don't know much about it.
i take it with clinical depression, the case is that you will be depressed despite circumstance...it's all about chemicals in your body etc....like chicken pox.
''i've decided recently that any time i feel depressed, it's just an adult sulk.''
Amen, micky. I'm only going to whine when Mother dies.
i'm inclined to agree with certain sentiments in the article
it does seem like every bourgeois housewive this side of Cobham is claiming to suffer from acute depression... maybe it's because the more you have the more you want but some of them need to wake up and smell the coffee.
but the aga is out and the bloke can't come round till tuesday
and tuesday is the day of daisy's ballet recital....tim is working all hours to pull in that new multi-million pound contract, so he can't take any time off work, and on top of that, i promised i'd help out with a cake sale for the local W.I.
fml.
:-)
This is where someone links to 'My Tornado Hell' isn't it?
http://mytornadohell.livejournal.com/
Whey!
i've found my new band name
forget paris, paris...now it's 'a glass-free spot for Douschka'
what a fucking band name
it sounds like a lost jd salinger short story
*douchebag
JSP: I don't mind her.
She's defo a gobshite, and often objectionable, but ultimately correct a lot of the time. Bit of a female equivalent of Will Self.
In this case, the worst bit is:
"If you’re a black South African woman growing up in a township, or a mum in a slum favela in Rio, or a supermarket shelf-stacker in Croydon, or one of the band of low-paid female workers who go to work at 3am to clean the offices of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain in the City of London, you probably aren’t afflicted by depression."
*probably aren’t diagnosed with depression. - Doesn't mean you can't suffer from it.
She's fallen into the trap of taking /some/ poorer /populations/ who seem to be more happy with their lot (presumably on the basis of "happiness" surveys or censuses comparing, say, South America with the US) and transposing that with examples of random individual poor folk.
Logic fail on this occasion I'm afraid, JSP.
it's more about articulation i think when it comes to class, not just diagnosis.
how many female supermarket stackers are given public platforms to put their feelings into words
is articulation a word?
you know what i mean
or infact have the ability to put it into words
or the inclination.
us middle classes are much better suited to navel gazing i would've thought....doesn't mean the poor aren't sad.
Indeed.
'Depression':
nanny-state lingo meaning "Short of something to do, bored."
Just like:
'ADHD': aka "Needs a slap-syndrome."
'Dyslexia': "Not very good at spelling."
But if you do have any of the above, here's loads of government money for you to go and spend on things to make you feel happier.
Dear Daily Mail: sign me up.
but as people have said, those terms are probably abused a fair bit
i've often read words backwards or mixed up their order and wondered aloud, like a wanker, if i might be dyslexic.
definitely do a test.
one of the lads at uni did one and they were like "OMG you DEFINITELY have ADHD, here's £200 a month".
He came in the next month with one of those mini laptops and a blackberry.
*dyslexia
Getting mixed up with my words... Hold on a second!!! :O
maybe
i always follow my wondering up with...'well, my sister is dyslexic, so if it runs in the family...'
does it run in the family?
see this is absurd....fucking middle classes.
Your ignorance speaks for itself, Clarkson.
No need for me to go to town on this one.
Let's hope you take that attitude if someone you know suffers from depression then.
I'm sure they'll be grateful for you dragging them out of bed and find them some fun-filled activities to do.
also...can we take this oppertunity
to again say what a giant thunder-cunt liz jones is...
all that biz about moaning about money and then having pensioners offer her their last 50 quid....fucking disgusting.....what an awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, person.
Not just offer - Liz Jones accepted it too.
What's this?
I missed this
i assumed there had prob been a thread
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/16/liz-jones-inundated-cash-offers
jesus...look at that fucking face
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/05_01/39LiJonesMS_468x575.jpg
it's like a testicle that's been given vouchers for a session in the make-up department of Debenhams.
''The Witches'' comes to mind
nobody has mentioned the possibility
that a lot of people's lives are shit because of depression, rather than the other way round.
I used to think 'being depressed' was a person's way of not cracking on and dealing with problems, or in other cases, a direct response to stimuli - but I've seen what depression can do to people, with or without an obvious trigger, and I was clearly wrong.
It is a label to put on a collection of symptoms, but that doesn't mean the symptoms aren't real and in acute situations, life wrecking.
I have a close friend who in theory should have been depressed around age 21. His father had killed himself, two years after his mother had drank herself to death and his extended family pretty much disowned him. But he handled it like a trooper, carried on with his degree, did well, maintained his friendships, his relationship and made a massive effort to see positives wherever he could.
Then this year, apropos of nothing, he crumbled to bits (7 years after all the horrible stuff went down). Can't get out of bed, can't make decisions, anxiety attacks galore, lost weight. Whether this is a delayed reaction, post traumatic stress or as his doctor believes, depression, it doesn't change the fact that a formerly vivacious, confident, happy lad is now stuck in a complete black mess and can't see a way out for himself.
That's not to say that someone feeling the same as my mate, but who hasn't experienced the same trauma, isn't equally 'entitled' to be depressed.
Sure, there are plenty of people who believe themselves to be depressed when they're merely feeling a bit glum, but I'm sure there are lots of people who genuinely don't have a clue what's stopping them from experiencing happiness.
Wow, that article is long and most probably boring
Self-diagnosis is fairly annoying, but I don't feel any need to split hairs with anyone who says they're depressed. The semantics aren't really important when they're trying to convey that they just really don't feel good.
I didn't read the entire article I admit
she is right to some extent I think if we assume
1)there has been a considerable increase in the prevalence of depression
2)this increase can be described as a trend
ergo, depression is a trendy illness
this whole argument depends on the definition of depression. we are dealing with an inherantly subjective term. people are more readily diagnosed with depression now than they ever were. this is not to say the seriousness of the disease has changed, just cultural perceptions of it. is depression 'scientifically real'? yes. is there any difference between clinical depression and ordinnary depression? is clinical depression simply prolonged periods of ordinary depression? is it 'more severe'? how is this possible to judge? does it necessarily involve suicide attempts?
scientifically, anti-depressants make anyone happy, whether or not they suffer from clinical depression
This is quite a highbrow thread
For you, 'stairs.
You'll notice I've kept my involvement to a minimum.
Re: Trends.
ALL LEVELS OF REPORTED CRIME ARE DOWN EXCEPT FOR RAPE AND PAEDOPHILIA.
Oh noes, the only possible explanation is that actual amounts of rape and paedophilia crime are on the up. I will ignore that X-amount of rape and paedophilia crime incidences used to go unreported before due to wider social attitudes. Things were much better in the good old days when there were fewer reports of rape and paedophilia.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE RIGHT NOW?
Never mind JSP. The attitude of a lot of people on this thread is
for want of a better word, depressing.
Jesus.
Depression is a 'real illness'. And yes there is a MASSIVE difference between 'being depressed' and 'having depression'. Yes, it is annoying when people with the former whine about the latter, but get over it.
Oh and FYI anyone moaning about the NHS spending money on depression when people suffering from depression need to be told to pull themselves together: in almost every health authority in the land depression leads to a GP stuffing a citalopram prescription in your fist and if you are VERY lucky maybe a bit of 'counselling'.
CBT is the form of depression treatment with by far the highest level of success and it is one that (in most areas) the NHS refuses to fund.
I know, tl;dr. This is probably my longest ever post on here.
loads of ^this
I have no idea why she seems to think that the government/nhs is throwing money at mental health, or that talking therapies are widely available. I thought that to get therapy on the nhs you had to go through an extremely long and exhausting begging process.
The waiting list is at least 6 months
Probably close to a year or worse. Demand >>> supply.
There's fuckloads of money being poured into it via the IAPT programmes.
Certainly in some areas anyway, I think it's being rolled across the country.
And certainly CBT is the main thing being funded.
This raises its own problems (CBT is nothing like the cure-all everyone thinks it is and there's a huge danger that the funding push towards treating mild-moderate depression and anxiety will mean severe and more complex mental health problems will be ignored) but over the next couple of years waiitng lists will get drastically shorter in most areas.
Good
I think thats needed, nice to know.
fucking this
What basically none of you are doing is questioning not whether JSP has a 'point' but why she chose to write the article in the first place. What's her agenda? That's right, victimising imperfection and apportioning blame rather than showing sympathy. Classic Daily Mail cunt tactic.
Remeber when aids was trendy in the 80's?
i yearn for the days of female hysteria
christ why did I post this?
It'll come round again. These things always do.
that's because you can't always eliminate the cause.
you can't bring people back to life. it's also why CBT is usually paired with medication. the medication fixes the cause (in this case the chemical imbalance) and the CBT deals with the symptoms.
hmm
some things i've experienced:
feeling completely unable to get out of bed, then feeling completely exhausted when i finally do.
feeling low for really long periods of time
feeling achey all over for no real reason
being unable to be positive even when things are fine.
these are all symptoms of depression right ? but i genuinely have no idea if it was just me being really negative. this was about a year ago, things are far better now so i dunno.
i was probably just smoking too much weed. that would explain most of what i listed above, but i still get them now and then, even tho i now almost don't smoke the stuff at all (once every 6 weeks or so)
the problem with mental health problems is that you can have them severely, a fair amount, and a tiny bit where it's not really a problem. so if you plot it on a graph, the point where people seek help/have problems in day-to-day life will be different for everyone.
The really incredible thing about that
article for me is that there are a number of good blanket arguments against increasing medicalisation of psychological disorders, including the influence of private commerce and cultural shifts. A number of good arguments that she somehow manages to completely sidestep, making herself sound like an idiot in the process.
To anyone in this thread saying she has a point, no; she's misrepresenting (and possibly misunderstanding) the debate in order to sell her book. Try this instead:
http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/podcast/rss/Aubrey_Lewis_Lectures.xml
^ this.
the woman is a complete retard. she should be trolling message boards, not getting paid to write shit
isn't this part, just, sexist?
"At this point, I'm afraid to say, I laugh out loud. The idea of feeling sorry for a bloke with low self-esteem is, frankly, risible. Let's just call it karmic revenge for all those years men have been in charge of everything."
what is she trying to prove here? this article has no fucking point other than for her to assert herself as some ideal model of society and rally together other like minded feminist snobbish presumptious dickfaces.
meanwhile completely offending and alienating people who have serious depressional problems.
Janet Street Porter always bitches about men
she's that stereotype of a man-hating feminist made real.