On another mental health/social control note, Four Corners tonight looks interesting.

I think Steve made a very important point when he mentioned the lack of situations (environment) being considered when assessing someones psychological status. In the biopsychosocial model allfacets should be considered and this most defiately includes the psychosocial factors impinging on an individual at that present time. To ignore this is to the detriment of the patient in my opinion.

I’m a bit tired tonight so I might respond at greater length tomorrow but one quick observation is that the downside of most anti-depressants is that there’s little upside - they flatten out your moods rather than make you happy so you don’t feel despair but you don’t feel joy either!

An aquaintance of mine was working in a job where he didn’t get on very well with his co-workers and was under a lot of pressure. Unsuprisingly he became depressed and eventually approached a psychiatrist who subscribed a course of anti-depressents. It helped a bit, but he still wasn’t really happy. Eventually he got another job offer to somewhere else and went. He got on well with others here, it was less stressful etc, and found he no longer needed the pills (unsuprisingly). I find the idea that you treat someone with drugs who is depressed merely because of their situation rather than addressing the cause and how they need to change their situation quite incredible.

Of course the medical establishment is not the entire driver of this. Friends of mine regularly complain with frustrations about patients who really just need to eat better diets and exercise more being dissatisfied with this advice as they come to a doctor to get some kind of pill. Many of these people go to alternative medicine where they get much the same advice and now following it, because after all this is an alternate treatment not pills, miraculously feel better.

The argument about Curtin was no doubt based on John Edwards’ recent bio - one of my last Troppo posts talked about that point. And C.L. made some similar points about political leaders last year, but his blog lacks a search button and I couldn’t easily find them in the archives.