Depression in the 21rst century

Any reader who has been staying up with the latest information about the human race's ongoing and titanic struggle with the condition known as 'depression' will know that we still have not arrived at the end of the story. And most likely never will.

Depression is a mental/emotional condition shared by more of us than probably any other, with the exception perhaps of its close relative, anxiety. They both seem to reverberate along the same continuum of experience, and both are just about equally unpleasant. The two states are so closely related that there is even a diagnostic category called 'anxious depression'.

And just as many had begun to assume that we could almost certainly point a well informed finger at the brain and its chemical bath as being the culprit, we discover that the target has moved again. There is plentiful recent research calling into question the serotonin hypothesis, and all the major anti-depressants have showed questionable results in several large, recent studies.

This questioning echoes my own observations as a clinician. Thirteen years ago, I wrote this article http://lotuseaters.net/waydepres.shtml, as a way of responding to the hype surrounding the still relatively new Prozac. I personally have never seen Prozac or any other medication cure depression. Most patients have, at best, mixed results with meds, and many more have hosts of side effects they'd prefer to not have.

It is my opinion that in instances of severe, morbid depression, then by all means, patients should be medicated with anti-depressant drugs, and quickly, with much medical supervision. But I have also come to the opinion that most of the 'depression' being treated as such is really nothing more than the suffering most humans do in the course of a lifetime. That suffering has to do with human nature itself, and is as mysterious in its origins as is the transition from animal to self-aware, reflexive consciousness.

As I did thirteen years ago, I still believe that most depression is the suffering that comes with making and knowing our place in the world, securing it, and enduring the buffeting of instinctual life, its hungers, demands and cravings, against the light of consciousness that knows the difference between right and wrong, and what it can and cannot have.