I agree with most of this. My quibbles are the following: sometimes the cause for distress is in the past, while the person has to deal with its aftermath in the present. This isn’t always true though. Sometimes talk therapy can help us identify the causes of ongoing stress which, once identified, can lead to a course of action designed to tackle the root of the problem, be it removing that stress from your life, modifying your life around it, or any other possible alternative that can be enacted to tackle it head on.
From personal experience, my depression has always been heavily correlated with periods of unemployment or a highly stressful job. The unemployment part is hard to tackle, since the best thing one can do is continue to fill out job applications until your financial situation improves. With highly stressful jobs, sometimes burn out sneaks up on you and manifests itself in ways that you may not be consciously aware of until talk therapy helps you identify those symptoms and leads you to identify your current job as the underlying cause of your current erratic behaviors.
Medicine sometimes helps, and it’s hard to make sweeping statements here since there are so many conditions people face; but in general the best policy ought to always be a form of psychotherapy supplemented by medication (in the extreme cases where such medication is needed).
Your point about sidestepping medication is true to an extent. Preventive approaches ought to be targetted so as to strike at the causes of mental distress before they have a chance to manifest themselves in mental disorders. But our culture isn’t quite there yet. We don’t take the importance of “mental health days” nearly as seriously as we do general sick days. There is much to be learned by seriously engaging with the social science research behind the social determinants of mental health, and I’d like to think our society would be far better off if we invested the kind of money into that type of research that we do on biomedical research. Not only investing in the research, but also taking seriously attempts to implement policies designed around that research by means of legislation and public awareness campaigns.
There’s much to be done. I agree with most of what you say, though I don’t think the situation is hopeless once the condition has manifested itself. It can still be addressed by means other than pharmacological treatment.
