Radar?

This week I caught this article when I visited the Radar website. The article is not published in the paper, but was available to have a look at online. My Brother incidentally also published his thoughts.

I doubt that Jack Marx believes depression doesn’t exist. I think the take home message of the article is that depression is over diagnosed and drugs are over-prescribed. The article is written to tell us that difficult behaviour is diagnosed as a psychological disorder.

Another point of note in the article is today, we look for all sorts of excuses to explain our behaviour. This is not new: the very first excuse “It was the Women you put here with me, see Gen 3. But today – it’s the drugs, it’s my parents, it’s my culture, it’s the suburb I live in, it’s my peers, it’s the fact that no one warned me, or it’s simply an inability to take responsibility for my own actions.

I found the tone of the article very hard to take. No, I am not suffering from depression, I know people who do, and who have. Many people are likely to look at them and say, get over it, and the article does nothing to dissuade their friends from this course of action. It is also counter productive as it insinuates that those who are depressed not only choose this state, but also are proud of it.

I would challenge Jack too on happiness. Happiness, or Joy is an extremely useful tool for the medical profession (Patch Adams is but one example here, also think of the visits of well-known sport stars to hospital words – there are pages and pages of the positive effects of happiness and laughter to patients).

It was quite an interesting read. Interested to hear what you thought if you saw the piece.