Is Grief Always Depression?
The word “unhappy” has been virtually abolished from the English language. For every person who says “I’m unhappy” there must now be a thousand who say “I’m depressed.” The change in semantics is important: the person who says he is unhappy knows that there is something wrong with his life that he should try to alter if he can; whereas the person who says “I’m depressed” is ill, and it is therefore the responsibility of someone else — the doctor — to make him better.
It cannot be said that doctors are altogether unwilling to shoulder this heavy and important burden — quite the contrary. An editorial in the May 17 New England Journal of Medicine by a psychiatrist at Cornell points out that the new Diagnostic and Statistician Manual of the American Psychiatric Association proposes that people who are grieving after the death of a loved one should quickly be diagnosed as suffering from depression.
The symptoms of grief and depression are similar, of course. Apart from depressed mood, they include loss of appetite, poor concentration, insomnia, tiredness, slowed movements or agitation, loss of purpose, and ruminations on death or thoughts of suicide. The APA proposes that if these last longer than two weeks, the person who has four or more of the above in addition to depressed mood — that is to say sadness or misery — should be considered seriously depressed, whether or not they have been bereaved shortly before.
Has no one in the APA read Hamlet? Can no one there recall his first soliloquy?
… and yet with a month –
Let me not think on’t — Frailty, thy name is woman! –
A little month; or ere those shoes were cold
With which she followed my poor father’s body
Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she –
O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer …
Frailty, thy name is doctor!
For the psychiatrists of the APA, the healthy thing after someone’s death is for his close relatives or friends simply to “move on” and to resume normal life as if nothing much had happened.
One may legitimately wonder what kind of human relationships the APA expects people to have: certainly not very deep ones. Indeed, the APA probably would count having deep and lasting relationships as pathological, as a risk factor for “depression” later on when the objects of these morbid relationships die. Better to keep everything on an even, superficial level; then there will be no cause for grief. Sorry: depression.
The APA seems to view loving relationships as the British working class used to view teeth: better not to have any, since they only give you trouble in the end. In response to criticism, however, the APA has — according to the editorial — conceded the following:
A footnote will be added [to its criteria for the diagnosis of depression] indicating that sadness with some mild depressive symptoms in the face of loss should not necessarily be viewed as major depression.
The tone of regret in this concession, of having been wrung unwillingly from those who have made it, would be comical were there not just a hint of tragedy about it. Psychiatrists, after all, spend their lives observing people: it obviously takes years of study, training, thought, discussion, reading, and reflection to know so little about them. Such ignorance does not come naturally:
O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have known better!
When I finished reading the editorial, I felt thoroughly depressed — or do I mean unhappy? At any rate, one thing is certain: I need help.
Cheer up, Dr. Dalrymple, help is available. After all, one cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.
Shrinks of all professional designations have encountered harder times of late, an unavoidable cost of the Great Recession (don’t say Depression!) that started in 2008.
No surprise, then, that the new Diagnostic and Statistician Manual lowers the bar yet again. Soon, we’ll all be diagnosed as depressed all the time. What finer way for practitioners to make the BMW payments?
It seems the only thing that graduate degrees confer upon their recipients is a great desire to be paid a lot to do nothing. Every “scientific” discovery one hears today must be suspect, especially when it enriches the ones making the claim.
This is what comes from teaching ethics to people with no morals. It becomes a study of how to skirt those same ethics with a clear conscience, instead of learning to live by the moral laws they represent.
With so much depression you would expect the barometer to bottom out. There is an abundance of pseudoscience inherent in psychiatry/psychology where diagnoses are often determined by consensus rather than fact. Psychologic jargon is rife with phraseology accessible only to the initiated; less polite society refers to that as mumbo jumbo. Yes, by all means let us expand the already vast pool of the clinically depressed so that we can ramp up the number of anti-depressants prescibed, which, amusingly, list an increased risk of suicide as one possible adverse effect. This will require careful fine tuning so as not to inadvertently kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
“. . . any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.” – Eudora Welty
And, a little musical accompaniment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKIQSo7JbKQ
My knowledge of psychology stems from a long ago Psych 101 course.
Back then I had the impression that much of the non-physical “illnesses” were, like much of autism today, inflated to benefit the profession and the pharmaceuticals. I’ve been justified in that belief by more than a half century of observations in the press of how one after another of the “mental” illnesses have been moved to the physical column while the profession grabbed at new and wonderful ones from the air — those also, in time, being physicalized by the harder sciences.
Not to say mental illness does not exist nor that professional psychologists/psychiatrists are not needed to treat them. Just that these for the most part self-defining and self-regulating professions need to be shaken up a bunch.
Overdiagnosed depression has drugged feminized America for decades. You, Theodore, as a true professional of this soft science, have done a wonderful job of taking that hobgoblin down a peg or two. Let’s hear some others!
…inflated to benefit the profession and the pharmaceuticals
A particular complaint of mine.
A few years ago, I read that over 90% of Ritalin prescriptions written in the world were written in the United States.
Hyperactivity is a subjective diagnosis & rampant medicalizing is a crime against children.
Psychotropic drugs (e.g. Prozac), are very easily obtained and, from my amateur observation, can serve to inhibit or even thwart natural processes like grieving.
A few years ago, I read that a hot topic at the annual APA convention was how to keep up declining patient rolls.
Color me cynical.
I worked in a state hospital and in the psych area of a prison for over ten years and realized most psychologists needed a psychiatrist and, even they need a psychiatrist. I have lost two husbands, one after 38 years and one after 9 years and yes, I grieved. But, I poured myself into work and that is healing. Stop doting on your grief. Get busy.
There was a famous Saturday Review article many years ago that spoke to your point called “Wounded Healers.”
The Siberia Bill didn’t work out for psych-communists, so now they collude with fascist governments making acerbic clocks out of people. Chaps should try their own medicine—it would finish them.
…the new Diagnostic and Statistician Manual of the American Psychiatric Association proposes that people who are grieving after the death of a loved one should quickly be diagnosed as suffering from depression.
The DSM and its successive iterations spelling out increasing categories of mental illness is, itself, rather depressing.
All this cannot be unrelated to getting insurance coverage for new categories of “illness”.
For the psychiatrists of the APA, the healthy thing after someone’s death is for his close relatives or friends simply to “move on” and to resume normal life as if nothing much had happened…. Psychiatrists, after all, spend their lives observing people: it obviously takes years of study, training, thought, discussion, reading, and reflection to know so little about them.
I would do my best to stay out of their clutches and away from their recommendations.
#8 All this cannot be unrelated to getting insurance coverage for new categories of “illness”.
This was my first thought on reading the article.
I would suggest that anyone suffering from grief consult his or her pastor.
In an era where instant gratification, the senseless coddling of the ego for the sake of preserving the “integrity” of self esteem are central themes in our society (and others), I am not at all surprised to hear this. Long gone are the days where coping with life’s harsh realities was expected. Now, it’s not a good thing to compete, keep score, etc. so natch, we’re not supposed to endure the pain inflicted by the loss of a loved one. Such bullcrap.
That’s a good point. I’m very hard on the doctors, but patients are the other side of this. They practically scream “give me a pill or I’ll kill myself, then my family will sue you…” What else can they do?
Just anectdotal evidence here, but I can say from personal experience that mourning and depression are two different things. To me, depression is a disease affecting the brain chemistry, with flareups that don’t need to be triggered by external circumstances. Mine happen out of the blue. On the other hand, while I’ve experienced many losses – people, jobs, money, etc. – and felt bad about them, they’ve never brought on a depressive episode. I handle them pretty well, in fact.
I can feel the difference between depression and sadness. I take medications to help with the depression. I do not take medications to “get me through” episodes of sadness or mourning. In my opinion, if the DSM is now equating depression and sadness, it’s wrong.
Thank you for writing this, Dr. Dalyrymple.
I think Gibran had it just about right when he wrote that “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” To label grief as an illness is an insult to the human heart. It is the price we pay for loving and “not all life’s pleasures are worth love’s pain.”
The snap out of it crowd are utter fools to think that by somehow short-circuiting its process, they are creating anything less than “An Appointment in Samarra.”
The mental health sector, to whom society should be able to look for leadership, seems to have succumbed to the hollow blandishments of what Norman Shealy calls “The PharmacoMafia.” But the issues of life demand far more from us than anything a temporary chemical fix can offer.
I believe the potential for the greatest helpfulness resides within the area Glaser and others pioneered as reality therapy, now known as cognitive therapy. As Lincoln, himself no stranger to grief, observed long ago, “A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.”
A zillion years ago I went through Transcendental Meditation training. It’s simple, you’re given a Sanskrit word to use as the mechanism, a device to return to when the mind starts spinning off into worldly worries. You could probably come up with your own device, train yourself.
It was cheap then, not so cheap today. I didn’t practice with any regularity in the intervening decades.
This recent article in the Daily Mail interested me, for what it’s worth.
Mindfulness improves brain wiring in just a month
Long-term committed relationships display dangerous “co-dependency,” of course.
Our only hope is a pharmaceutical treatment for “monagamy disorder.” Of course, it’s going to be expensive and we’ll all need to have the government provide it. And they WILL provide it, because that will occur during the Sandra Fluke presidency. (“Vote Slut Party!”)
They think grief is a sickness to be treated. They think carbon is dangerous. What other ordinary things can the crazy left tag as threats?
I think Libruls are suffering from oxygenic necrosis. The EPA and U.N. really oughta do something about that.
Back in 1973 or so the APA decided that homosexuality was not abnormal. This is despite it being abnormal since the beginning of the human race. What’s next? Child molestation is good therapy for perverts? Gimme a break!
Now grief is depression. These people are educated fools! I suppose if a shrink had 3 kids & his pregnant wife killed by a mass murderer, after being tortured to death, they would just want to “move on.” Now THAT is sick!
And did they ever provide any remark of a scientific flavor to explain why it WASN’T a disorder? I mean other than “we don’t want to be bullied about it anymore.”
One of my greatest irritants in trying to deal with misbehaving or poor-performing employees was supervisors’ insistence on declaring that “there must be something wrong with him” and going on to speculate about some trauma, psychological condition, or substance abuse. Well, congratulations, you’ve just perceived that employee to be disabled, qualified him/her for Americans with Disabilities Act coverage, and eliminated all possiblity of disciplining or dismissing him/her for the foreseeable future.
On the home and school front, probably 90% of the boys I grew up with in the 50s and 60s would be drugged to insensibility today rather than subjected to strict discipline as we were. Left to our own devices we were little more civilized than a pack of wild dogs, but we knew how to behave in the presence of any credible adult threat. Today, there is rarely any credible threat of adult control either at home or school. The appropriate diagnosis for all those kids, especially boys, labelled ADD, ADHD, or even most of those labelled as autistic or one of autism’s deriviatives is BRAT; the kids are simply feral because modern mommies won’t discipline them and won’t let a man discipline them. Consequently, a huge percentage of children today are essentially feral, but they have to be given some diagnosis and treatment rather than offending their lousy parents by telling them they’re lousy parents.
Art,
I still blame Dr. Spock. His poison has now reached its third and fourth generations. My Sainted Mom predicted in the ’60s that it would be the end of us.
She also said Motor Voter would destroy the vote, by encouraging cheating.
My Mom was pretty sharp.
As was mine. She used to refer to children as “little animals who had to be civilized.” On the subject of boys, to her it was a matter that “they have to be kept very busy all the time” in order to keep them out of trouble. She preferred the physical type of busy, doing chores. Hard to try that on for size these days with all the nannies, video games, housemaids & yard services.
Oh, Dr. Spock’s poison is still out there, but there are other far more virulent poisons in our civilization’s bloodstream too. What is that stupid “parenting” method where the stupid woman essentially wears the baby 25/7 and the children sleep with the parents, or at least the mom; can’t imagine any man I know sleeping with a stupid woman and a baby and certainly not a toddler, but it’s the oh-so fashionable way these days. There’s also the fact that young couples often live far from parents and older relatives so there is none of the wisdom of age and experience available to them – and often little willingness to accept advice from people that years of government school education have taught them are ignorant and brutish. This is the greatest toll the Gramsci acolytes have extracted on The West: they’ve destroyed our ability to raise our children and inculcate Western/American values in them. Interestingly, I find it worse over time with my girls than my boys; after a rough time in adolescence, the boys now look to me and their mother a lot, neither my bio daugher nor my step-daugher will listen to my wife at all and the step-daughter thinks I’m the face of evil when it comes to dealing with her feral kids and even my bio daughter has been in Seattle long enough that having a former Republican appointee for a father is rather embarrassing if her friends find out.
This sleeping-with-the-kid bit is among the worst things I have yet to hear of coming from the smorgasboard of trendy parenting styles that should be completely ignored. And you just know there is a percentage of bed wetters among this group. What a nice way to start off a really bad approach to rearing one’s children.
They are just plain wrong. Dangerously so. It takes courage, not medication to grieve.
Isn’t the desire to treat grief the same as the desire to treat physical pain?
Physical pain is natural, and some is necessary. (Hot stove + pain = burn avoidance). Too much pain is misery. Too much pain pain killer is also a problem. (Don’t treat a simple headache with morphine)
So again, don’t we want to do the same with grief?
If the person is wracked with pain, grief and mourning, and this person wants some relief, why wouldn’t a psychiatrist/psychologist want to help?
I mean, I don’t want a government shrink assigned to every funeral, mandating every mourner be dosed with the government assigned dosage of prozac/lithium/valium whatever.
But if someone goes goes to his doctor/therapist/shrink and says “doc, my mother died last month and the pain is killing me. I’m dying inside and I don’t think I can go on… Can you help me with this burden?”, well, why wouldn’t the shrink want to do something?
What’s wrong with that?
The guy isn’t asking for happy pills that make him go skipping with happiness at his mothers funeral. He just wants something to take the edge off of the pain.
There’s everything right with wanting to give solace to someone in pain – especially over the loss of a loved one.
That role used to be played by friends and family, but maybe people are too busy to do that nowadays. Or they feel they aren’t “licensed” or “trained” to do that. Isn’t that sad.
Big difference between receiving solace and comfort from a therapist, and that therapist “diagnosing” the griever with the “illness” of depression.
I was rather fortunate in finding something within me that served to take the edge off my pain of losing Mom: Her own words. I would imagine what she would say to me in response to my anguish. “Oh honey, none of us can stay here forever. The times comes that we all must move on………”
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
In Shakespeare’s day, and for centuries after until Freud, people had absolutely no trouble identifying melancholy as a personality disorder based in biochemistry. Hamlet is a complex play, but it’s perfectly reasonable to read it as a portrait of someone who is not just grief-stricken but of a deeply melancholy temperament or, as we would say today, clinically depressed. Anyone who has actually suffered from depression can tell the difference between it and grief. And there’s nothing conservative about blaming depression on child-rearing practices. That’s dumbed-down Freud.
“Shakespeare’s day … biochemistry” …???
I wonder … when Hamlet realized that his beloved father was murdered by his uncle — and that his mother was either involved … and, in any case, didn’t care … and then she wound up in the bed of his uncle …
when Hamlet realized all this … had he “taken it in his stride” and remained in a happy, pleasant mood …
Would that have been normal????
(What would a “therapist” have suggested he do/think? Would some Xanex have helped?)
(He couldn’t exactly go to the “authorities” — his family were the “authorities.”)
Pathological circumstances caused a seeming pathological reaction/response … but was it pathological? Did the atrocity drive him crazy? “Should” he have been cooler … more “rational” and less emotional about it. That’s the question!
Wasn’t that part of Hamlet’s struggle? He was trying to decide.
Whether to take action against an atrocity, suffer … and take the consequences — or to pretend everything was okay and “get along?”
Which is more human?
Your response demonstrates the confusion between unhappiness and depression. One can be cheerful and depressed. One can be unhappy and not depressed. One of the common effects of depression is inertia. Another is suicidal thoughts. (“To be or not to be…”) Neither is the usual effect of grief alone. Interpreting Hamlet as depressed far less absurd than interpreting him as having an Oedipus complex, which is how Laurence Olivier did it. (Hamlet is also feigning madness through much of the play, which further complicates interpretations.)
My reference to biochemistry was an allusion, of course, to the theory of humors. The idea that temperament is grounded in something biological is not a new one.
Should be “is” far less absurd.
Virginia —
I guess we could discuss this on and on … and we don’t really want to do that … but …
I agree — that’s what this discussion is all about — the confusion between unhappiness and depression. And thanks — I understand now what you meant referring to “humors” back in time. That’s correct.
We don’t know much about Hamlet’s prior life — but it seems that, although a complex person, he was pretty okay … engaged … basically trusting of the world around him … remembering all the joy the Court Jester Yorick brought him in the good times of his boyhood.
Inertia and thoughts of suicide …
These were extremely extreme circumstances. Adultery of his mother and uncle and their murder of his father.
Once he realized this, his life … any quality life … was over. Some situations in life … some rare ones … are just not fixable. There is no “adjustment” — no making peace with it and “acceptance.” No happy ending.
His inertia was about trying to decide what to do about it.
To take action, a vile and agonizing action, which would wind up leading either to his death — or not take action, and live a death-like and cowardly life, ignoring his responsibility as the son of the murdered King, and ignoring the unpunished guilt of his mother and uncle. The ultimate Catch-22.
He thought of suicide as a possible escape from having to make that choice — because anything he chose would be abominable — and because he was, still, at that point, unable to make a decision about it.
Instead, he finally made his dreadful choice. Facing what he was facing … the horror of it all … his response to the inner torture of it … made his behavior … erratic.
Fortunately, few of our lives are presented with such dilemmas.
I think Shakespeare wanted us to contemplate the effect on an otherwise normal (though sensitive and complex) young man, of having to make a choice in a horrific situation when all choices are ghastly. Having to decide.
I don’t think Hamlet was a depressive. You may disagree. I think he was bereft and despondent — unhappy in the extreme. But, of course, actors and directors will often want to dig deeper and find alternate, more interesting and subtle additions to their interpretations.
I wonder what a therapist might have suggested Hamlet do? Take a pill? Learn to live with it all and still find happiness? (As I said, no way to “go to the ‘Authorities.’”) Abdicate his Princehood and go to live in a foreign country — and try to forget — while leaving his mother and uncle unpunished and prospering from their crime (the murder of his father!)?
I don’t see “sick” (depressive) — I see driven to distraction (driven “mad” if you will, in a non-diagnostic sense) — harmed and affected — by inescapable, abysmal circumstances not of his making.
“(Hamlet is also feigning madness through much of the play, which further complicates interpretations.)”
At the risk of being pelted with rotten tomatoes, I thought Mel Gibson conveyed this idea quite well. It has been years since I saw his version, though, so maybe time has improved his performance.
“Psychiatrists, after all, spend their lives observing people: it obviously takes years of study, training, thought, discussion, reading, and reflection to know so little about them. Such ignorance does not come naturally.”
This confirms yet again the truth of Saul Bellow’s observation: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Psychiatrists have been trained how to diagnose people experiencing negative emotions as “sick”; slap a suitable ACRONYM on their “disease” and prescribe a DRUG. See you again, next week, next month, depending on your insurance ;. “…Oh, your insurance coverage lapsed? Well, sorry… I can no longer “treat” you or your “disease”…”
Take a walk.
Send in the next appointment. Most psychiatrists are pill dispensers and they cure NO “disease” or mental issues They do string their patients along until their insurance runs out; If their patients are wealthy they treat them for a lifetime. i.e. The Stern character who has a radio show. According to him he has been seeing a psychiatrist several times a week for his adult life to deal with parental issues. Pathetic on both the part of the patient and psychiatrist. Secondary gains for each.
See Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (the old word for depression): related BUT NOT THE SAME. It see3ms like the Psychiatric profession is now going to be a case study for new jokes: the model being:
“What does a proctologist always find during an examination?”
“Two boat payments”
I think I stick with what I learned reading the Bible.
“Jesus wept.”
“One may legitimately wonder what kind of human relationships the APA expects people to have: certainly not very deep ones.”
Wasn’t there a movement by British psychiatrists a couple years back to ban children from having a best friend? Something about how having one best friend is too intense, and it would encourage them to keep secrets from others, and it would be too painful if there were a falling out, stuff like that. Am I hallucinating news stories again, or does anyone else remember this?
oh, here it is:
http://nation.foxnews.com/weird-news/2012/03/22/uk-schools-ban-children-making-best-friends
These people must think ” Brave New World” s a how-to manual, not a dystopian novel.
No, I remember that, too. How disgusting.
My daughter went through a very difficult time with some friends, a mean girl, etc. It was awful to see her in so much pain, but having/losing/regaining friends is a normal part of growing up. Trying to protect her from that would just make it harder for her to cope with it when she’s out on her own.
Years ago in medical school one of our psychiatry professors was an expert in the female personality (hysteric personality, actually). These were women who could not logically navigate their relationships, but stayed with men who were inappropriate and used their feelings to guide them, often with disastrous results. I think we now know this is actually normal female personality.
Anyhow, he also published a paper showing that women like to be hugged.
Well, this raised eyebrows, and earned Dr. Hollander the sobriquet of “Cuddles Hollander.”
One of my medical school friends commented:
“You know, people have known for years that women like to be hugged. I think that it is good that the psychiatrists have found out, too.”
Is there such a thing as situational depression, and is it different than clinical depression?
Yes. Situational depression is brought on by a significant negative event, like the death of a loved one, a divorce, a serious physical injury, etc. Once the person adjusts (with or without treatment), the depression lifts and usually does not return. For example, when my sister’s marriage broke up, she experienced situational depression. She couldn’t sleep or eat, she cried almost incessantly, couldn’t think straight, etc. She went to her family doc, who prescribed an anti-depressant AND daily exercise. She followed his instructions religiously. Within a couple of months, she had adjusted to the new normal in her life and moved on.
I, on the other hand, have had clinical depression for nearly 40 years. In the early 1970s, little was known about childhood depression. My family didn’t understand my problem, and I certainly didn’t. So I was never treated for it and just stumbled along as best as I could. I finally got treated for it about 15 years ago, and it changed my life for the better. Exponentially.
Remember how you felt when you lost a loved one–the intense pain, the feeling of distance/detachment from your life, the sleeplessness, etc. With clinical depression, those same emotions and symptoms are present–for no reason at all. It sucks to be in perpetual mourning.
Also, clinical depression comes along with sleep disorders. (Not even the experts can figure out which causes which.) Can you imagine having nightmares every night, then waking up to feel more exhausted then when you went to bed? That was my experience for years. I didn’t know what a good night’s sleep was until I was treated.
Is grief depression? No. Grief is natural. Depression is not. Grief can trigger depression in people who are susceptible to depression. Indeed, my depressive symptoms roared back when my father died, when my husband lost his job and we had to move cross-country, etc. But like anyone with a chronic illness, I sought to manage it, just as a diabetic does when her blood sugar goes out of whack.
Do I feel resentful that I have to take a medication and lean on therapy for the rest of my life? Hell, no! These things have made my life 100% better. I am grateful beyond words. (In case you’re wondering, anti-depressants aren’t “happy pills.” They’re NORMAL pills.)
And as to the pain of grief…the pain is the measure of your love for that person. Love and pain are natural parts of life, and should be accepted, endured, and celebrated. My father has been gone 6 years now. I felt pretty sad about not being able to call and wish him happy Father’s Day yesterday. However, I am grateful to have had such a great dad that his absence hurts.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Grieving the loss of a loved one is a long and grueling process. We should grieve our own way and in our own time. No amount of medication will give us what we want—we want our old life back. We want the person or pet that died back with us again.
Even if we believe in Heaven and a reunion in the afterlife, the hardest part is adjusting to life here without them. Is there a wonder drug for that?
Two weeks and you’re supposed to be over it? On this Father’s Day I enjoy my living children but, if I dwell on it, can easily feel some of the grief for the one I buried 20 years ago. This is not an illness, it’s being human.
I suspect whoever drafted those guidelines has not buried a loved one.
Maybe they are too afraid to love someone as much as you have loved your children. It is sad to think there are people in this world that have never known that kind of love. Happy Father’s Day to you and God bless you.
Two weeks? Clearly these people have never lost a loved one.
In hte 1960s, Congress added “disabled” widows as eligible for “widow’s” benefits on their deceased husband’s Social Security. With disability, one must have something causing inability to do any work for 12 months or have something expected to end in death. There was trouble. Too many claims came in disabled with “depression.” Would that last 12 months? Medical Policy stopped work on those until the problem of grieving vs. depression could be worked out. It took a while. Death of a spouse was handled as event-related loss which would not be expected to last 12 months and would not be disabling. I remember seeing one case allowed on depression several years later on “re-examination.” Her “death depression” resolved inside of 12 months and then for something to do she became an unpaid volunteer in a local welfare office, and at age 62 she also took time off to re-shingle her roof. Applying the criteria is sort of like an art.
Keep in mind that the complete mental and social service needs of a modern country are something like 3 to 11 times the Gross Domestic Product.
I used to suffer badly from depression, pain all over, tired all the time, etc. A friend I haden’t seen for a few years came along and told me I was feeling sorry for myself, my reply wass of course thats not what the doctor say. But of course she was right and my doctor wasn’t telling the truth. It took awhile but I started recognizing the woe is me telltales and the “woe is me” is a thing of the past. Thank you Jesus.
Sadness and depression are linked, but they are not the same thing. It is my belief that the APA wants to banish the distinction because then it will be acceptable to drug anyone who does not cheerfully accept their fate. Psychiatry has always been a tool of the left. Brave New World, here we come!
Good for Dr. Dalrymple! Ever since the Beltway (starting with the Dems) embraced Victimism along with Identity-Politics (and the Radical-Feminist version of Gramsci’s gameplan to undermine functioning Western democracies in the name of eliminating “oppression, hegemony, and marginalization”) the Beltway has created for itself a two-fer: a) pandering to every conceivably defined ‘victimization’ and thus buying the votes of client-demographics as in ancient Rome) and b) increasing the centralized federal power. Thus Leviatha from the far Left brings back Leviathan from the far Right.
And with Victimism goes ‘Therapism’ (if I may). And with Therapism goes more (government-funded and thus taxpayer-funded) cash for an ever-increasing pandemonium of ‘therapists’.
Once upon a time you had to develop ‘character’ (or ‘Character’) in order to deal with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; in the Victimist New Order you get yourself some drugs to make you feel better. Phooey and baloney.
In a remarkable example of consequences that the Beltway doesn’t want to admit, we now have the Navy (http://hamptonroads.com/2012/06/navy-takes-steps-combat-poor-personal-choices ).
You might recall that for the past 20 years at least the Navy has accepted whole-hog the insistence that the Beltway Gender New Order can be incorporated – with all its Orwellian Correctness and Newspeak – without any negative effect or consequence. Huge changes were made but nobody but nobody could say out loud that the new Emperor (Empress?) had no clothes. The Navy became an ongoing instance of Klink and Schulz stopping themselves in mid-sentence and asking fearfully: Whaaaaat ammmm I sayyyyink? With the fear of a visit from Gestapo Major Hochstetter and a transfer to the Russian Front suddenly clear before their horrified eyes.
I recall the mantra when it was new-hatched: The Navy has too many standards and not enough women! (So, of course, stop thinking ‘standards’; you had better ‘get it’ or you most certainly will get-it, right in the career.)
Now the Navy reports – as if by inadvertence – that it has a ‘character problem’ and is planning to pay plenty for therapist-experts to be hired to run a series of day-long character-building workshops. Apparently i) officers and senior NCOs don’t have enough ‘character’ and wind up making ‘poor decisions and choices’; and – I would add – ii) young recruits are coming from a civilian society and culture that also ‘devalorizes’ such macho abstractions as ‘character’.
Therapists will resolve the character-problem in a series of stand-down workshops and with the threat of career consequences if you don’t learn to at least mimic ‘character’ most chop-chop. (But be advised: there will also be quick and unhappy consequences if you speculate out loud on the causes of this whole problem.)
Onward and downward!
Good for Dr. Dalrymple! Ever since the Beltway (starting with the Dems) embraced Victimism along with Identity-Politics (and the Radical-Feminist version of Gramsci’s gameplan to undermine functioning Western democracies in the name of eliminating “oppression, hegemony, and marginalization”) the Beltway has created for itself a two-fer: a) pandering to every conceivably defined ‘victimization’ and thus buying the votes of client-demographics as in ancient Rome) and b) increasing the centralized federal power. Thus Leviatha from the far Left brings back Leviathan from the far Right.
Just want to point out that Theodore Dalrymple is not American. He is a British doctor working for the NHS. In other words The Government. It is odd that he complains, given that he is a psychiatrist. It’s a little like an oncologist complaining that everyone who turns up at his surgery claims that they have cancer.
Oh and by the way, he didn’t work in a slum either.
He’s about as believable as that Dave Pelzer guy.