As well intended as it may be, your ‘indiscriminant’ way of describing depression performs a hat trick that is worse than what it is complaining about: stigmatizing people with depression.

At the turn of the century, psychiatrists recognized that by making depression into an enemy, a type of monster with “tentacles” that one could not escape from, that they could substantify it and prepare the ground for reducing it to a mere physical illness like a cold or heart attack. But what they then also recognized, at least the most honest among them, by demonizing and making it a physical illness, they have replaced one illness — depression — with another, paranoid psychosis which is just as bad if not worse than the remedy. Where previously in the name of depression one had perceived hopelessness everywhere, after the diagnosis one is seeing “frightening reality” and “depression tentacles”. Replacing one set of symptoms with another, you are still stigmatizing people, but doing so on a much more vast level: in claiming this depression demon is out to get everybody you are now turning depressives and non-depressives alike into potential paranoiacs.

Further still, in claiming “We cannot immune ourselves from its reach”? this not only de-responsibilizes people from acting to prevent a depression, but misguides them( I work daily on such prevention with others).

In the end, you might want to rethink your manner of proselytizing … psychiatry did over one hundred years ago.

S

Simplicus ………………………………………………Tate Robert

Written by

Researcher in le temps perdu: sex, race, ethics, the clinic, logic, and mathematics. Founder and worker at PLACE www.topoi.net

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