There's Nothing Deep About Depression

[HuckleB]

There's Nothing Deep About Depression

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/magazine/17DEPRESSION.html?ex=1114056000&en=5af04cf989c2ba24&ei=5070

"...

A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask -- always the same question -- "What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time?" I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines -- Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?

It may be that my response was grounded less in the intent of the question than in my own experience. For 20 years, I'd spent my afternoons working with psychiatric outpatients in Providence, R.I. As I wrote more, I let my clinical hours dwindle. One result was that more of my time was filled with especially challenging cases, with patients who were not yet better. The popularity of ''Listening to Prozac'' meant that the most insistent new inquiries were from families with depressed members who had done poorly elsewhere. In my life as a doctor, unremitting depression became an intimate. It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.

Recent research has made the fight against depression especially compelling. Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive -- the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients' nerve pathways day by day. Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young -- not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ''mental illness.''

As a clinician, I found the what if challenge ever less amusing. And so I began to ask audience members what they had in mind. Most understood van Gogh to have suffered severe depression. His illness, they thought, conferred special vision. In a short story, Poe likens ''an utter depression of soul'' to ''the hideous dropping off of the veil.'' The questioners maintained this 19th-century belief, that depression reveals essence to those brave enough to face it. By this account, depression is more than a disease -- it has a sacred aspect.

..."

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Worth a read, regardless of one's world view, IMHO.

[The Witch]

1. Recommended.

Finally, someone who gets it.

[HuckleB]

2. Wow! Thanks!

I think this is the first thread I've ever posted that got a vote!

Salud.

[HuckleB]

3. Some good brain books...

Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of The Genome --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195167287/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465044050/ref=pd_sim_b_5/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Better Than Prozac: Creating The Next Generation Of Psychiatric Drugs --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019517979X/qid=1115651092/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-7070178-2351221

The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0974707708/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-7070178-2351221?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance


Yes, the links are to Amazon. Please buy them, if you so choose, where you feel most comfortable purchasing books. I actually checked these out from the library.

[Warpy]

4. There is absolutely nothing sacred about depression

and it doesn't confer any special vision, and if it did, sufferers would never have the energy to express it. It is, as the article pointed out, a disease that affects all body systems and is devastating to the lives of the people who are suffering it.

Van Gogh, Poe, and a lot of the other darker artists more likely had bipolar disease, with periods of mania punctuating the periods of deep depression. It was those periods of hyperactivity that enabled them to express all those dark visions. Without them, they'd have been bedridden or in the gutter, depending on family finances.

As for the SSRIs making people "pleasantly chirpy," I doubt the author has ever known clinically depressed people who have started taking an SSRI. There is no observable difference in the personality, beyond the fact that the person starts getting up and getting dressed even when s/he doesn't have to go to work, gets tasks done, and initiates conversation instead of replying in monosyllables when spoken to. I'm afraid SSRIs have gotten an unnecessarily bad press: they are literally lifesavers for people in deep depression. They do need to be combined with psychotherapy, though, something that isn't being done. They're no substitute for psychotherapy, just a powerful adjunct to it.

If you are blissfully free of clinical depression, you can never understand the life destroying effects of it. If you are a believer, you can never understand doubt. If you are blind, you can never understand yellow.

[shrike]

5. I never had therapy

after I went on prozac. But then, work has always been my therapy and once I came out of the fog I was able to get a tremendous amount of work done.

I agree completely with the rest of your post. Those who've never experienced it have no clue. None whatsoever.