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hi all At 07:40 PM 2000/02/03 -0500, Carole Hercun <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >Hi janet marie: Do you think any of the people quoted here >have ever traveled the nine circles leading to the Hell of >full-blown Clinical Depression? Been there, done that... me too, me too. >And it takes more than happy thoughts and good intentions to >drag you back to any semblance of sanity... absolutely! the old saw "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is at best woefully inadequate and at worst cruelly and even dangerously patronizing when one considers that cd is the leading factor in suicide >Sure, one's environment, stressors, etc. affect depression, but the >point they're missing is that it DOESN'T MATTER what caused >the condition, what you are treating is a biological >illness, and while psychotherapy is enlightening and >productive (this is the testimony of a long time psych >nurse AND the recipient of more years of therapy than I >care to divulge), the cure involves medication. Depression >IS NOT comparable to diarrhea. It is insane not to treat it >when we have the cure... i agree wholeheartedly with you where medication is indicated, there are too many cases where the depressee is under-medicated or non-medicated i think the point the article is making is that in some few cases, medication isn't indicated, or just doesn't work viz the case of the would-be musician: >> The psychiatrists at the clinic treated her with a >> variety of antidepressant medications and with >> psychotherapy. Nothing helped... dr nesse seems to be stretching or expanding the view of cd: "depression is [not] only a matter of disordered brain chemicals" and is also not limited to genetics or brain chemical imbalances however, when the article mentions 'low mood', 'anxiety', 'fear', and 'depression' i get the impression that these emotional states are all considered of a similar psychological impact, which which concept i heartily disagree; viz the case of albert the biochemist; "who frequently became depressed when a research strategy he was pursuing went nowhere. When the feelings of despair passed, he said, he saw "an entirely different way to tackle the problem..." this just ain't cd in my book! which this reminds me of another old saw from the other end of the teeter-totter this time; "being clinically depressed is not a matter of feeling sad or being in a bad mood" i think a couple of different issues are being muddled up here: 1. equating clinical depression to sadness is like equating a malignant melanoma skin cancer to a freckle 2. there may be more causes to depression than we are aware of now there may be more types of depression than we are aware of now there may be more ways of curing depression than we are aware of now scott peck describes factors which may "prolong a normal healthy depression into a chronic pathologic depression" i've often thought that the symptoms of cd are partly a yelp for help a holler from my subconscious to let me know without a doubt that 'things ain't right' i'm also reminded of the success of cognitive therapy in treating depression - in some cases it is equally effective as and sometimes even more effective than medication and/or classic therapy them's my two canuck cents worth of mud all clear now? janet janet paterson 52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset a new voice: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/ 613 256 8340 PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario Canada K0A 1A0