Depression, The Secret We Share (Andrew Solomon)

Here is Andrew Solomon’s TED talk, a broad overview of depression:

Link to video

A couple of points I want to highlight that I think he gets dead on:

1) Calling Major Depression “depression” grossly misunderstands the difference “normal depression” and the disabling form that is suffered by folks with chronic depression. The consequence is both poor treatment, and stigma.

2) The idea of a “final cure” might come with time and developing out of this primitive time of psychiatry and psychotherapy (he says he hopes in 50 years people look back at current treatment for depression and are appalled–me too!), but that to not accept one’s own depression as real, as a condition of potential relapse, and as something that needs to be included in one’s purview of oneself and one’s experiences, is to court disaster.

4) Depression is natural like teeth falling out is natural–true, we evolved to experience depression, but we also evolved to have back problems because of the change to walking bipedally. “Natural” does not mean we can’t make fundamental changes.  Solomon also points up, implicitly, that emotions are not depression.  My extension of that would be, we need emotions–sadness, joy, fear, etc.–and we need grief–the emotional process of letting go of that which is already gone–but we don’t need the full-blown condition of depression.  We need it’s functions, but not it’s form.