I have read two blog posts on depression and anxiety yesterday. So the links I give are not respectively about depression and anxiety. Both of them are about both subjects.
This is from the post titled Some Doctors Are CLUELESS about Depression:
Today, I was talking to someone who was going through a tough time and was considering an anti-depressant. He knew what he needed and discussed it with his doctor. Sadly, the doctors reply was “you don’t look like a person who needs an anti-depressant”. When I heard this, I nearly wrecked my car. Is that guy serious? What is a depressed person supposed to look like? Homeless? Slumped Over? Glazed, Dazed, and Confused? My question for doctor “I can look at you and tell you what you need without assessing you” is “how many of your patients are sitting on the edge of their beds this moring looking at a gun or a bottle of pills becuase you have a licensed for something you are CLUELESS about?”
I can easily tell that the doctor was really clueless about depression. This is not acceptable. Of course there are times that we use the word depression in a different sense in comparison to the psychiatric term depression. However, a doctor has to be more attentive and more alert towards diagnosis on all aspects of a person. He or she may seek consultation if he or she feels inadequate about psychiatric illness.
But of course, in order to seek consultation on that she has to know the basics.
Apart from this, there is still a general ignorance towards psychological illnesses. Majority of the people don't want to see and accept the existence of them. This is why we call so many of our moments as depression. We use it so often that it loses its meaning.
Moreover, I believe that most of the physical illnesses arise from psychological illnesses. Stress is the biggest factor that makes you sick somehow, physically. We still do not see much about this as scientific publications because experiments are done in a very small scale. They are done usually on thousands or tens of thousands of people. If there would be greater field studies including millions of people at once, maybe there would be a different outcome. Or, if medical science could be able to get rid of its naive realism, results would be different.
So, anxiety and depression not only causes social trouble for people but it also manipulates physical health. Fortunately, there are signs of wise attitude on the area of cancer. Many cancer patients are now required to attend talk therapy in various states around U.S. This shows that doctors finally understand the impact of metaphysical on the physical.
I call psychology, especially psychotherapy directly as a metaphysical field because being that discursive would help us all to understand that with our naive realism, we do lose many of our senses.
I hope someday there would be more interdisciplinary study on health, health as a whole.
photo credits: boskizzi
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