Source: Good News Network
By Dr. Neel Burton, Psychiatrist at Oxford University
Most people think of depression as a mental disorder, that is, a biological illness of the brain. Here I argue that the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been unhelpfully overextended to include all manner of human suffering, and, more controversially, that ‘depression’ can even be good for us—an idea that I first visited in my book The Meaning of Madness.
Many of the most creative and insightful people in society suffer or suffered from depression or a state that may have been diagnosed as depression. They include the politicians Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; the poets Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Rainer Maria Rilke; the thinkers William James, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer; and the writers Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Leo Tolstoy, and Tennessee Williams, among many others.
Let us begin by thinking very broadly about the concept of depression. In traditional societies human distress is more likely to be seen as an indicator of the need to address important life problems rather than as a mental disorder requiring professional treatment, and for this reason the diagnosis of depression is correspondingly less common.
In modern societies such as the UK and the USA, people talk about depression more readily and more easily. As a result, they are more likely to interpret their distress in terms of depression, and also more likely to seek out a diagnosis of the illness. At the same time, groups with vested interests such as pharmaceutical companies and mental health experts promote the notion of saccharine happiness as a natural, default state, and of human distress as a mental disorder. The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be useful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived and easily interpreted in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.
Another (non-mutually exclusive) explanation for the important geographical variations in the prevalence of depression may lie in the nature of modern societies, which have become increasingly individualistic and divorced from traditional values. For many people living in our society, life can seem both suffocating and far removed, lonely even and especially among the multitudes, and not only meaningless but absurd. By encoding their distress in terms of a mental disorder, our society may be subtly implying that the problem lies not with itself but with them, fragile and failing individuals that they are. Of course, many people prefer to buy into this reductive, physicalist explanation than, presumably, to confront their existential angst. But thinking of unhappiness in terms of an illness or chemical imbalance can be counterproductive, as it can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important psychological or life problems that are at the root of our distress.
All this is not to say that the concept of depression as a mental disorder is bogus, but only that the diagnosis of depression has been over-extended to include far more than just depression the mental disorder. If, like the majority of medical conditions, depression could be defined and diagnosed according to its pathology—that is, according…
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