Is residual depression similar to residual urinary tract infection?!
At a recent medical conference I attended, a Pharma-sponsored speaker was passionately promoting treatments to eradicate residual symptoms of ‘depression’ in afflicted individuals. He was heroically promoting a complex and potentially toxic combination medication regimen to ”erase” the last remnant of “depression”.
The case presentation highlighting this process was summarized in less than three lines and presented a woman who experienced periodic “dysphoria” despite taking two concurrent antidepressants. Comparison was drawn to disease states such as incomplete treatment of a urinary tract infection or poorly controlled diabetes mellitus.
All along I was thinking to myself, “What else might be going on in this person’s life? Is the medical model of a case such as this, although useful in some circumstances, sufficient to decipher her presentation? Do we really want to continue with our treatment decisions solely based on a set of questionnaires we have devised to assess ones state of well being? What happened to the realm of ‘meaning’, ‘angst of existence’, ‘processing of fears of being’, ‘honoring individual variability of temperament’ ,and ’spiritual isolation’?”
Currently, questions such as these are anathema to our prevailing theories of depression, and most of the voices of non-materialist theorists have been quiet lately. I will let you be the judge of our current model!