In 2000 the World Health Organisation named depression as the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease and predicted that by 2020 it would rise to second place. I suppose WHO didn't mean it to sound like a target to be aimed for, but we seem to be rising to the challenge in any case.And who is driving this? Could it be the people who are making money from it?
Such reports are worrying. They may draw attention to a rising toll of human suffering, but they pinpoint the imperialising tendency of the mental health sector. Our ills and unhappiness are squeezed into a package labelled "disorder" and an ever-proliferating assortment of supposedly objective diagnostic categories. A cure is somehow promised, though it rarely seems to come, certainly not for everyone or for ever.Because some things don’t have a cure, and some things require effort – beyond the opening of a pill bottle – to effect a cure.
On the subject of women's greater susceptibility, it's just as well to remember that women go to doctors far more than men, for all kinds of ills: indeed the way the stats add up, women's greater incidence of mental ills just about equals their greater number of visits to the doctors.Unfortunately, like the single issue loons who scream ‘discrimination’ on gender pay scales without taking into account the differing attendance patterns, no-one is likely to want to look at the details.
Not when the bare headlines can provide more ammunition for the credulous.
6 comments:
"[WHO] named depression as the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease and predicted that by 2020 it would rise to second place"
I didn't realise that depression was contagious.
Perhaps people should wash their hands more frequently?
Improving medical intervention and food-and-water distribution means that we are born safely earlier, less vulnerable to fewer diseases, living longer and helping vast numbers of children in under-developed countries to survive to adulthood where, formerly, they would have died from dehydration, famine and disease.
'Rising toll of human suffering'? What?
Hey, I've just realised that by being more or less normal in every respect I'm in a minority group. Can I have some funding for something, please?
It's all too easy to stick a mental illness label on people for no good reason other than expediency. Perhaps we need an insanitation department to cleanse the practices of the lazy, pill pushing medical profession and Big Pharmas that fuel the situation.
Doctor's still at heart are little more than Shaman. Trying to use their influence to rule the 'tribe' using their mysteries of so-called powers of 'life and death'. Without Antibiotics they would be back to being barbers cutting things out and hoping the patient gets better and fixing broken bones.
That they have managed to elevate their profession so high in such a short space of time is remarkable.
"I didn't realise that depression was contagious."
Perhaps you catch it from blogs..? ;)
"'Rising toll of human suffering'? What?"
Yeah, but look at it from their point of view - it's like racism, if we ever admit things are improved, all these people will be out of a job.
"Hey, I've just realised that by being more or less normal in every respect I'm in a minority group."
Rarer than giant pandas!
"Perhaps we need an insanitation department..."
Brilliant! :D
"That they have managed to elevate their profession so high in such a short space of time is remarkable."
The power over life and death is a powerful one.
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