Antidepressants are about as effective as a placebo and therapy is just as effective as talking to a friend.
hahaha. amazing. The problem with that is a lot of depressed people don't have friends to talk to and need to be re-socialized in order to help with their depression.
You have GOT to be kidding me. Here we are in the year 2015, and people still act as though depression is something that doesn't often need life-saving medication, that it can be fixed simply by socializing with people, that you just need to cheer up and stop being so depressed, and if you don't cheer up, it's your own darn fault you're depressed! I would wager everything I own that this mindset, when inflicted on people suffering from depression, causes more suicide and self-destruction than any of us would like to see.
See, here's the thing: Depression in the medical sense does NOT refer to "the blues" or "feeling down." No, the mental illness named depression is largely rooted in the brain's biology. I must admit that I don't have the background necessary to understand exactly what goes into it all, but then again, neither does any one of the people who spew absolute garbage on the subject, so at least I'm not alone. Suffice it to say that there is a strong scientific consensus that clinical depression is largely due to chemical balances in the brain that are entirely out of any individual's control. Telling someone with depression to just "go do something fun" or "think about cheerful things" is effectively equivalent to telling a woman with terminal breast cancer that she can wish her cancer away by being optimistic, with the implication being that she basically deserves to die of the cancer if she doesn't fix it all by herself.
I know people very close to me that suffer/suffered from both clinical depression and postpartum depression, yet another form of depression that is very much dependent on chemicals outside our control. I know for a fact that at least one of these people did not ever take antidepressants because others convinced them that they didn't need pills, they just needed to have a better attitude about things. I honestly feel sometimes that people who say or think such things should get struck with such an illness so I can tell them to "just be happy."
On a somewhat similar note, I want to talk about plain old insensitivity regarding mental illnesses. Most of you don't know this, but I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) shortly after returning home from my mission. It is something that I have severely struggled with for some time, and it just drives me mad that people joke and giggle about how "OCD" they are and how quirky "OCD" people are. For people that wash their hands so frequently that they turn bloody, for people that are always late because they MUST quadruple check every door, for people that are driven to panic if they don't touch things in a specific order, I'm fairly certain that such jokes are about as funny as AIDS jokes are to those dying of complications from said disease. They certainly aren't funny to me; I suffer from the obsessive side of OCD and not the compulsive, which means in my case that I don't have any such debilitating rituals. What I do have, however, are exceptionally persistent intrusive thoughts of an extremely violent nature. I've had countless occasions where I struggle for literal hours or days with horrifyingly violent thoughts towards those around me.
Would I ever act on such violent thoughts? Of course not. Do I know for a fact they're irrational? Absolutely. Do I do everything in my power NOT to think or dwell on them? Definitely. Do such struggles ever actually drive away such thoughts? Almost never. Most people don't know about this side of OCD, and quite frankly, I'm not sure many people will care even after discovering it.
I hope this post at least causes some people to pause and think about their "advice" to people with depression, or to not deliver a "joke" that may hurt the feelings of those around them. Honestly, just treat mental illnesses the same as physical illnesses; they're just as real, just as harmful, and require just as much loving support from the family and friends of those who suffer from them.
