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you do know that the dictionary is written by people though right? so they completely miss understood what it meant and just whacked it in anyway
Depression : State of mind or Medical condition
- Thread starter paradisiac
- Start date
you do know that the dictionary is written by people though right? so they completely miss understood what it meant and just whacked it in anyway
you do know that the dictionary is written by people though right? so they completely miss understood what it meant and just whacked it in anyway
I also told a lie, it has more than two definitions - but the rest are meaningless to the discussion.
2a long and severe recession in an economy or market:
the depression in the housing market
(the Depression or the Great Depression)
the financial and industrial slump of 1929 and subsequent years.
3 [mass noun] the action of lowering something or pressing something down:
depression of the plunger delivers two units of insulin
[count noun] a sunken place or hollow on a surface:
the original shallow depressions were slowly converted to creeks
4 Meteorology a region of lower atmospheric pressure, especially a cyclonic weather system:
hurricanes start off as loose regions of bad weather known as tropical depressions
5 Astronomy & Geography the angular distance of an object below the horizon or a horizontal plane
Soldato
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They chuck pills at us and kick is out the door. Ocd spectrum disorders? Ssri. Anxiety disorders? Ssri. Depression? Ssri.
Walk in to A&E with your arm hanging off and you'll be sorted out no problem.
Soldato
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There are multiple forms of depression, some rooted in physiological brain disorders which will be as variable as our physical health. Some people will be more prone to broken bones or cancer, others to mental instability or self-destructive gloominess.
But my experience -- and I'm heading for 50 fast -- is that you can get mentally unfit in the same way you get physically unfit. Bad behavioural habits, poor choices, focusing on the wrong goals.... or having no goals at all. There's a nasty negative feedback loop which is easy to slip into and hard to get out of, especially in an age where we often lack the social or extended family support we used to have.
So I believe most "depression" is simply the mental equivalent of allowing yourself to get overweight and unfit, and a health industry has grown up to medicalise that condition.
External pressures can clearly be a big factor too, but what most people know and are treated for is not a disease or illness, it's a social condition which only the individual can change. However in the same way you can couch potato yourself into serious illness or immobility, you can certainly become depressed enough to be beyond self-help. So I have no problem with it being taken seriously.
The problem is that too many people have devalued the genuine cases with the mistaken belief that life is supposed to be easy.
But my experience -- and I'm heading for 50 fast -- is that you can get mentally unfit in the same way you get physically unfit. Bad behavioural habits, poor choices, focusing on the wrong goals.... or having no goals at all. There's a nasty negative feedback loop which is easy to slip into and hard to get out of, especially in an age where we often lack the social or extended family support we used to have.
So I believe most "depression" is simply the mental equivalent of allowing yourself to get overweight and unfit, and a health industry has grown up to medicalise that condition.
External pressures can clearly be a big factor too, but what most people know and are treated for is not a disease or illness, it's a social condition which only the individual can change. However in the same way you can couch potato yourself into serious illness or immobility, you can certainly become depressed enough to be beyond self-help. So I have no problem with it being taken seriously.
The problem is that too many people have devalued the genuine cases with the mistaken belief that life is supposed to be easy.
Soldato
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I agree with this completely after a couple of life changing events over the last 5 years. Being made redundant after 20 years having worked hard to reach a good position in the company and also turning 50 last year. I saw a poster in the docs surgery recently regarding CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and for the first time in my life I feel like I need some help to get myself back on track.
The NHS give a damn, but it's a Sisyphean task trying to tackle mental health in the UK. Our living standards and general wellbeing are quite low compared to other European nations - we are some of the most overworked, stressed, and pessimistic people out of the whole bunch. Look at other nations with similar living standards and you will see - especially in cultures where it is not so taboo - suicides rates rise dramatically (e.g. Japan, honour-bound society).
The fact is that mental health is probably the biggest single health problem for the Western world. The single biggest unacknowledged problem, I guess you could say. And it is extremely expensive to properly care for - just as expensive in the long-term as a person suffering a serious physical illness. A GP, quite simply, does not have the funding or the time to refer every single one of their depressed or anxious patients to a specialist for therapy. Therapy is expensive and, furthermore, underfunded. The result? Most GP's only have one real path of treatment open to them: heavily-subsidised medication. Hence everyone is on pills but hardly anyone is properly getting the treatment and psychological help they need - because it's so bloody expensive.
Soldato
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It's cheaper to throw medication at a patient with regards to NHS service. Long-term therapy is just too expensive and only in rare cases it is recommended. Shame really.
Exactly. And medication is a bit of a lottery, really. Different types affect different people in different ways - you have to trial a whole bunch, which can be quite a turbulent and uncomfortable process. Furthermore a lot of people seem to harbour the delusion that if they take a pill every morning all of their bad thoughts and negativity will just magically disappear. The medication is one tiny supplement in a bigger programme of treatment that rarely gets implemented properly.
While treating it is incredibly difficult & expensive, plenty of statistics on prevention are widely available (based on certain factors which seem to lead to mental illness).
Compare mental illness rates by income inequality by nation & you see a very strong correlation between the two, while obviously correlation does not imply causation - we do fully understand some of the causal links.
For example, stress related to a threat to self esteem is significantly harder to deal with mentally (cortisol production is 4 times higher in cases which a threat to self-esteem is involved) - it's quite easy to see how income inequality in a nation can lead to a feeling of worthlessness, being "lower" than another (which seems to be a strong core of many mental illnesses).
Prevention is always better than cure.