Je suis un mec simple Jaime la petanque et Lapero Shirt
Second, little existing historiography of depression focused on patient experiences and self-representations. This is not an easy area to research, because a lot of depression treatment takes place in private office practice, a confidential setting, and little documentation is publicly available. I would have liked to do more, but I hope I pushed the field a little in that direction. But I want to add immediately that some historical and other critical studies of psychiatry see patient voices as only a way to criticize psychiatry. It is important to document patient complaints, but some critics of psychiatry go to tortuous lengths to deny any therapeutic benefits. Honoring patient voices also means seeing that many feel helped by treatment.I also wanted to draw attention to the politics of inequality. Like so many other illnesses, depression hits different populations to different extents. Solomon did draw attention to this, but most of the historical work on depression restricts inquiry to the gender ratio, which is an important axis, but not the only one. Class, race, and LGBT status, for example, also matter for depression, and I hope future historians will develop this further.
Je suis un mec simple Jaime la petanque et Lapero Shirt
I do offer some defense of antidepressants against their most severe critics in the book. But I also think we are probably over-reliant on them. I think the benefits of psychotherapy, particularly long-term insight-oriented therapy, have become underrated in the antidepressant era.Still, why some advocates of psychotherapy are so adamantly and categorically opposed to any medication use, or to any suggestion of a biological component to depression, is a mystery to me. I have read many hardline critiques of biological and pharmaceutical psychiatry that are focused on whether the evidence for efficacy is robust, or questioning the philosophical underpinnings of the enterprise, or worried about adverse effects, or indicting the pharmaceutical industry. The thoughtful challenges have reinforced my view that we are over-reliant on drugs, at least for some populations. Other critiques have struck me as dogma masquerading as critique. But even the smartest of them have not convinced me that antidepressants are worthless, a claim several important voices have made.
