What You Think You Know About Depression Is Wrong

Feb 15, 2018 by apost team

A startling truth about depression was discovered in the 1970s, but that truth was essentially washed away by the medical establishment due to the problems it created. At the time, a group of psychiatrists from America released a sort of medical manual that described mental illnesses so physicians would have a uniform treatment system across the entire medical field. A section on depression was added in the 1970s, and it listed nine potential symptoms that a depressed person might exhibit. According to the manual, depression could be diagnosed if the patient exhibited at least five of the nine symptoms over a period of three to four weeks.
 

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Doctors quickly realized that if they followed those guidelines, they would be forced to diagnosis patients who were experiencing some sort of grief with clinical depression, which came with a prescribed medical treatment. That meant if someone lost a loved one, and they visited a doctor while grieving, the doctor would technically be obligated to treat for depression. To avoid this, a new clause was added to the depression section of the medical manual. The clause essentially stated that if a patient had lost a loved one within the most recent year, they would be exempt from treatment for depression.

While this seemed to work, it left a strange mark on the subject of depression. If depression truly is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and grieving people experience the same imbalance due to a specific stimuli, who's to say that depression in non-grieving individuals isn't caused by some equally traumatic stimuli in their personal life? If the chemical imbalance in the brain that directly causes you to feel depressed is itself caused by an external stimuli, then treating the symptom ultimately won't help the overall issue.

It wasn't long before the grief exception was removed from the medical manual. It didn't happen overnight, but gradually so as to avoid raising suspicion. Every time a new edition of the manual was released, the period of acceptable time for the grief exception to apply was reduced until it was taken out altogether. This prevented mainstream psychiatry from having to debate the merits of medical treatment involving antidepressants, which are obviously a huge source of revenue for many in the medical industry. The last thing they wanted to do was prove that antidepressant drugs are unnecessary and even potentially dangerous, but they accidentally came quite close to doing just that.

One professor from Arizona State University came to understand the idea behind the grief exception firsthand when she lost a child during labor. It became glaringly obvious to her that the medical industry was ignoring a huge factor when diagnosing depression: context. The medical community tends to act as if these sorts of mental distresses are actually diseases that can be physically cured. They fail to look at what could be causing the distress in the first place.
 

Treating symptoms only covers the deeper problem, but the medical community needs to focus on those deeper issues to prevent the symptoms from occurring.

 

To fully understand the cause of depression in a person's life, you need to take a comprehensive look at the life as a whole. Are their physical needs met, like food, shelter, and water? The answer is most likely yes, and you may not have even considered asking this question. However, it's just as important that the psychological needs of a person are met. Most people wanted to feel loved. Most people want to feel talented. Most people want to feel secure in their future. If society can't meet these basic needs, it causes a rise in depression levels, which is exactly what's happening.

Nearly 80 percent of individuals who take chemical antidepressants are depressed again within a year. Doctors will tend to brush this off as an adjustment to the drug, and they'll boost your dosage. What this really means is that the true source of the depression in your life is overcoming the effects of the drugs.

One of the best ways to think about what this means for the way depression needs to be treated is shown through the work of a psychiatrist from South Africa named Derek Summerfeld. While he was traveling through Cambodia on a mission to introduce antidepressant drugs, he found doctors who said they had no need for such chemical treatments since they already had a workable solution for depression. Summerfeld assumed the doctors were using some sort of natural remedy derived from local herbs, but the truth was much more interesting.

Summerfeld asked the doctors to explain their remedy, so they used one of their recent patients as an example. The man's leg was lost to a land mine, and while he was given a useable prosthetic, it made his job in the rice paddies much more difficult and painful. This made him anxious about his future and his ability to provide for himself, which caused him to become depressed. Doctors decided the best way to treat his depression was to provide a way for him to live a different lifestyle. They knew he could become a dairy farmer even with his condition, so they purchased a dairy cow for the patient. The lifestyle change was exactly what the patient needed, and his depression completely went away. The cow, according to the local doctors, was a better antidepressant than any chemical drug could have been, which is something modern doctors need to consider before writing yet another prescription. 

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