Depression

If you are experiencing anxiety, depression, relationship problems or other types of emotional concerns you can learn to cope, improve and overcome your life or your situations through the support of our society, for example family, friends or support groups, yet most importantly through professional help such as counselling, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy.

Through counselling and hypnotherapy for example, we can tackle the deep rooted beliefs located in the subconscious/unconscious part of our mind that might be responsible for our hurt, sadness, anxiety, depression and other emotional obstacles.

Drugs can and do help yet mostly to relieve or camouflage the symptoms of emotions such as anxiety or depression. Please note that drugs do not teach you the skills to overcome whatever is not working for you in your life, yet the following article seems to suggest that drug manufacturers and their supporters may want people to be more dependent on drugs. How else could one explain the reasoning behind calling two weeks of grief, an emotional disorder?

Depressed after 2 weeks: Fears that drug companies will target the grieving

The grieving process is in danger of being branded a medical condition if a mourner feels sad for two weeks and consults a GP, according to an international authority on death and dying. At present mourners must be feeling sad for two months before potentially being told they have a mental disorder, says Professor Dale Larson. Decades ago, a diagnosis could be made after a year.

Mental illness is being redesigned. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will be updated this year, meaning what counts as a psychiatric disorder will change. In a keynote address at an Australian Psychological Society conference in Melbourne in February 2013, Professor Larson expressed his anger at the new guidelines.

First published in 1952, the manual was initially a 130-page collection of disorders. Today, it runs to nearly 900 pages and it is estimated it could earn its owner, the American Psychiatric Association, $US100 million.

Seemingly small changes to the DSM, often referred to as the psychiatrists' bible, can have a massive impact on patients the world over, because access to treatment depends on its definitions. Drug companies depend on the DSM too: if criteria for a disorder are loosened, vastly more people become candidates for medication.

The new version of the manual, to be published in May, allows a diagnosis of depression after two weeks of grieving. According to Professor Larson, the manual undermines the legitimate feelings of the mourner and the help available from family, support groups, clerics and professional counsellors. "We are essentially labelling grief a disorder. Now it becomes a target for drug development."

Nearly 70 per cent of the DSM-5 taskforce have declared they have ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Allen Frances, one of the architects of DSM-4, says the changes being proposed by the DSM-5 task force will see people throughout the world waking up with a mental disorder. When his taskforce reduced the number of symptoms needed to qualify a person as having ADHD, they thought the prevalence of the disorder might increase by 15 per cent among children. Instead, it increased by 200 per cent. At the same time, autism diagnoses increased by 2000 per cent.

Now Professor Larson, head of Counselling Psychology at Santa Clara University in the US, is concerned GPs will be dishing out prescriptions for anti-depressants. "Almost all bereaved people believe they are depressed. But grief is a normal healing process and it resolves itself in most cases. Bereavement-related depression is different from other kinds of depression," he told AAP on Friday. Medication, not psychotherapy, will be the major treatment because most people see their GP when they have an issue."

In Australia, about 85 per cent of prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written by GPs, and less than 10 per cent by psychiatrists. Professor Larson said the focus should be on "helping the mourner figure out grief's questions: 'What's happening to me and how long will it last?' It's a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. The GP prescribes anti-depressants and the bereaved feel better, largely because of placebo effects. The truth is that people are resilient and they would have got better on their own."

"If they do struggle, and many do, talk therapy should be the first line of support."

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