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From: dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer)
Newsgroups: net.suicide
Subject: Re: Clinical Depression -- (?)
Message-ID: <19431@wivax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Apr-84 00:38:11 EST
Article-I.D.: wivax.19431
Posted: Tue Apr 24 00:38:11 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Apr-84 07:35:20 EST
References: <838@psuvm.UUCP>, <6469@rochester.UUCP>
Organization: Wang Institute, Tyngsboro, Ma.  01879
Lines: 31

I find this attack against the person who suggested that severely depressed
people whose depression is not reactive (i.e. environmentally based) check
with a psychiatrist quite peculiar.  I don't know what friends you hang out
with, and what their specialties are, but it has been pretty clearly shown
in the scientific literature that severe depression has a large biochemical
component.

Drug therapy does not work in all cases, especially if the patients are
suffering from a reactive depression brought on by grief, job problems,
etc.  But, in rebuttal to your glib comment about lithium therapy, drugs
CAN be of enormous help.  In the treatment of manic-depressive episodes,
lithium has an amazingly specific effect, bringing the patient down from his
mania without blunting his affect, and decreasing the severity and frequency
of depressive episodes.  The tricyclic antidepressants are also quite effective
in about 60-70% of non-reactive depressions.  In fact, electro-shock treatment,
which is strictly speaking not a drug but which causes biochemical changes
similar to effective drug therapy, can be literally life-saving when no
other treatments have proved successful.  This last treatment has been a
convenient whipping-boy for the ignorant who take their facts from movies
like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

Naturally, drug therapy may have some side-effects.  The key to quality, non-
dogmatic therapy is to identify those patients whose illnesses match those
which have shown good response to drug therapy, give them the smallest
does which works without side-effects, and then work with them within the
baunds of traditional psychotherapies, if that is deemed necessary.

-- 
/Steve Dyer
decvax!bbncca!sdyer
sdyer@bbncca