Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (4 page)

•
in knowledge

•
in personal growth

•
in challenges

•
in realisation

•
in discovering life skills

•
in self-empowerment. 

These will bring hope. Medical terminology will only bring medicines.

NOTES

1
. Jeffrey Masson,
Against Therapy
. HarperCollins, 1997, p. 19.

2
. David Healy,
Anti-depressants and Suicide,
Briefing Paper, 20 June 2003; David Healy,
The Antidepressant Era.
Harvard University Press, 1999.

3
. Katherine Darton, MIND Information Officer, 26 January 2010.

4
. S. Donovan and R. Madeley, ‘Deliberate self-harm and anti-depressant drugs’,
British Journal of Psychiatry
, 177, 2000, pp. 551–6.

5
.
Forsyth v. Eli Lilly,
in the US District Court of Hawaii, 5 January 1998.

6
. ‘FDA asks drug manufacturers to include suicide warnings’,
Insight
, On the News, 22 March 2004.

 
7
. Guardian.co.uk:
Health: Best Treatments
in partnership with the
British Medical Journal,
‘Depression
in children’, 3 December 2009.

8
. MIND Press Release, 11 March 2004.

9
. BBC2,
Horizon
, ‘Pill poppers’, 20 January 2010; Nigel Hawkes, ‘Top-selling drug linked to increased suicide risk’,
The Times
and
TimesOnline
, 22 August 2005.

10
. Maxine Frith, ‘Prozac nation, UK’,
Independent
, 30 March 2004.

11
. ‘GPs get new anti-depressant rules’, BBC News Online, 6 December 2004.

12
. IMS Health, published in
USA Today
, ‘Health and science’, 7 July 2002;
Prevention and Treatment
, e-journal published by the American Psychological Association, 15 July 2002.

13
. For the latest advice on withdrawal, see antidepressant expert Dr David Healy’s protocol on http://www.seroxatusergroup.org.uk/David%20Healy%20Withdrawal%20Protocol%202009.pdf.

2

‘Is it just me?’

You know, we might need to re-evaluate your condition.
Why? Well, ‘depression’ is not simply
your
condition, is it? We can’t account for it by saying there is
something wrong with you
personally, as though you were a lunatic or an emotional oddball. Literally millions of people are currently experiencing despair. Indeed, we are seeing what has been called a ‘depression pandemic’.

THE DEPRESSION PANDEMIC

Consider these statistics:

•
In the US among those under 30, ‘major depression’ has apparently doubled over the past 25 years, and depression is projected to become the second highest cause, after heart disease, of disability in the country.
 

•
Ten million American children take antidepressants.
 

•
An investigation by Columbia University discovered that since 1987 the number of Americans being treated for depression has risen from 1.8 million to 6.3 million.
 

•
In Britain, according to government adviser on mental health Professor Richard Layhard, around 15% of the population suffers from depression or anxiety.
 

•
The cost to the British economy is around £17 billion, or 1.5% of the gross domestic product.
 

•
More than 6 million people in the UK regularly take antidepressants.
 

•
The NHS bill for antidepressants shot up from £18 million in 1992 to £380 million in 2002, and today one in three GP patient appointments involves a patient reporting depression.
 

•
In 2006 family doctors wrote out more than 730,000 prescriptions a week for happy pills, placing such pressure on the NHS drugs bill that medication for other conditions was being rationed.
 

•
When Norwich Union Healthcare carried out a survey of GPs, eight out of ten doctors admitted that they were over-prescribing antidepressants and three-quarters said that they were prescribing more of these drugs than they were five years ago.
 

The excuse given was a ‘dire shortage’ of counsellors. Yet the counselling professions in the UK are booming and remain largely unregulated. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, by no means the only accrediting body, in 12 years increased its accredited membership by a staggering
804 per cent
. And even such exponential expansion in the number of counsellors has failed to halt the rise in depression.

TO HELL WITH THAT LOT – WHAT ABOUT ME?

What has all this got to do with you, sitting there feeling like Mr Death’s PA? Well, as long as your ‘depression’ is treated as an illness afflicting
just you personally
– because you have a lot of problems, or because your problems are more serious than other people’s problems, or because your serotonin or other brain chemicals are out of kilter, or because your grandmother had it and you are genetically predisposed – we are not seeing the bigger picture.

Depression is a pandemic, and if it is a pandemic, it must have an underlying cause. You don’t get ‘depression’ from bugs. So the catalyst must lie elsewhere. I submit that the real reason for this global mushroom cloud of depression is this:

We have come to see our emotions – particularly negative emotions – as an inconvenience or an illness.

I therefore suggest that the most effective way to treat your ‘depression’ is to deal first of all with the ideology that has caused or contributed to it, and to show you how the current medicalising trend may have cast a pall of gloom over your emotional life. I say you didn’t just jump into this bottomless pit. I say you were pushed.

Task

Find somebody you know over 60, preferably someone who lived through the last war. Ask them what happened to people who were depressed in the 1940s or during the Blitz. Were they given counselling or medication, or cocoa and Vera Lynn songs? What worked for them? How did they manage to survive?

EMOTIONS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

Attempts to manage unpleasant emotions – known collectively as ‘stress management’ – have led to the current fashion for soothing patients and chemically adapting their moods. Those who take ‘stress management’ drugs often do not realise the connection between tranquillisers and depression:

•
Calming drugs are literally depressant drugs.
 

•
Chemically they depress the central nervous system.
 

•
Patients prescribed tranquillisers will often be given antidepressants to counter these ‘depressing’ effects.
 

•
Other calm-down therapies, in so far as they tranquillise the user, may also sedate feelings.

Think about it: ‘Anything for a quiet life.’ If you have given your brain this instruction, what do you expect it to do? Yet because we are all busy and faced with lots of tasks and problems every day,
keeping calm
may have become your watchword, your unconscious aim in life. And who could blame you! Stress 
management exercises a very powerful influence over patient care and is on offer from most primary care trusts. Indeed, the theory of stress management currently determines public perception of emotional health, even though its provenance and scientific evidence are both highly questionable.

There are over 15 million websites on the Internet offering ‘stress’ advice, and the calm-down industry has increased exponentially. The stress industry has more practitioners than GPs or members of our armed forces, spreading what it calls ‘stress awareness’ and telling people to look out for signs and symptoms of a condition that has over 650 different (and opposite) definitions. Practitioners command huge fees but are not regulated by anyone but themselves.

Arguably, this vast industry has had a disabling effect on vulnerable people who now believe they are mentally abnormal whether they are or not, and many of them now fit the classification ‘depressed’.

ARE MY FEELINGS SYMPTOMS?

When a person’s emotional suffering is assessed from outside, innermost feelings may be viewed by mental health professionals in a technical or medical way. Being viewed or labelled as mentally ill makes us vulnerable, because our own interpretation of reality may no longer be accepted. Wishes and desires and fears and anxieties may be seen as symptoms requiring treatment. Yet feelings are important, real and deserving of respect.

They may also, under the circumstances, be perfectly normal. If you have lost a loved one, or your job, or your home, or your freedom, or all four (as one or two of my unemployed trainees had done) it would be pretty darn weird were you to feel chipper. There would really
be
something wrong with your brain.

All animals, from us to dogs and elephants, are frightened and angered by having precious things taken away, and mourn and grieve for what they have lost. This process is normal and natural. It is not a disease, and if we allow it to take its course,
we grow and understand what has happened to us. But if we refuse to tolerate those bad feelings, behave as though we have a medical condition and then take drugs for it, we may well get stuck and not heal over. Despair then lingers. Nothing seems to shift it.

You are experiencing
the wet blanket effect.

The wet blanket effect

You are in a box underneath a wet blanket. It is dark and dank in here. You are like a portrait of yourself with a black background. You have become unlucky. Your efforts are half-hearted and lifeless and so go pear-shaped. Everything looks bad and tastes bad. You can’t explain to others the sort of wasteland that this makes of your life. You are at a standstill. Life goes on in the dim distance and seems not to have any relevance. You feel blank, yet scared. There is a bleak sense of foreboding that things will never get better, that there can never be a ‘cure’.

You can in fact get out of this box. There
is
a cure, and the cure lies in the sufferer’s own hands, though you will find it hard to believe this while despair is releasing its sedative substances into your brain.

The deadness makes it difficult to function, because the despairer does not care any more about life, or work, or relationships. There is no sense of being connected to others or to society. We are distanced and dissociated from everything that would normally be important, and from others, who fail to understand our state of mind. We are like dead people walking.

NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME

Loved ones may look on in anguish and wonder whatever they can do to help. After a few attempts to get us to ‘cheer up’ (or pull ourselves together), they may become exasperated by their own impotence, and then impatient with the ‘patient’. This in turn disinclines the sufferer from bothering anybody about that inner wasteland. We may simply keep silent or speak in monosyllables or become
morose with others, increasing the communication gulf. Despair is a desperately lonely complaint.