Comment on James S. Gordon: When Depression is Treated as a Disease

James S. Gordon: When Depression is Treated as a Disease

Memoirs of depression like Daphne Merkin's in The Sunday Times (May 10, 2009), and for that matter like William Styron's Darkness Visible, make me sad. Of course I feel sadness for the writers' dense and burdened suffering, set off so strikingly against their lucid, often spritely prose. But more importantly and far more troubling, I feel sad for the inadequacy of the therapeutic approaches they use, for the lack of understanding their suffering yields them and, especially, for the fact that inadequate approaches and limited understanding are offered to readers as "state of the art." Daphne Merkin and her doctors seem to have concluded that depression is a disease characterized by inadequacies in brain chemistry that are best treated by drugs that raise the levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and/or norepinephrine.

 

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