I imagine a lot of people who suspect they have depression will try some sort of cure. For example: self help books, changes in diet and lifestyle, therapy, meds, right up to ECT therapy. This poll gives a rough idea to what people here have tried:
Pick the answer most suitable for your situation.
sanctioned-suicide.net
Presumably to no or not enough success if people are still suicidal! I suppose there's the argument that if one thing doesn't work- you need to try another and another and so on. But, where does it end? When can it be conceded that a person's depression is treatment resistant?
Also bear in mind that scientists/ doctors don't seem to have a thorough understanding of how the brain works and exactly what these drugs etc. do to it. Some also have negative side effects. So- should people be willing to risk all that? Is that reasonable to expect of someone in the first place?
I imagine a lot of the time, depression doesn't just infect us like a cold. I would think maybe in the majority of cases, depression is partly a hereditary tendency- which presumably can't be cured. Or, it's triggered by some unfortunate life event. So- can we change our circumstances effectively enough to bring us out of our depression even? How much of it is related to the lives we lead and, how much about them can we actually change?
But sure- our overly negative or pessimistic view could indeed be sending us 'false' signals about how awful the world is. I do think people consider that in one way or another though.
I tend to doubt the first morning someone wakes up depressed, they decide they want to kill themselves. Many people here have had problems since childhood. Presumably in those years/ decades since, a lot have done what they could to try to fix their issues. I imagine active ideation takes place after we have tried a whole bunch of things and decided it didn't make enough of a difference.
I'm not convinced that curing depression is like other illnesses. How much of the effort lies with the patient? I imagine quite a bit. Maybe there are dynamite, mind altering drugs out there but- how safe are they? How effective in the long- term? How likely will it be that, during their effectiveness, the patient will pick up the slack and, turn their life around? Or, once that particular drug has lost it's effectiveness, will they just require something else? Some poor members here have been on a whole long list of things.
The problem as I see it is- depression comes with things like a crippling lack of energy- lethargy plus, anhedonia. To cure it presumably requires us to have an interest in life again- which anhedonia kills. Plus, vast amounts of energy to pursue our goals- which the lethargy kills. So- the symptoms massively hamper the cure.
There are obviously other afflictions that demand huge amounts of effort from the patient. Say, learning to walk again after a severe accident. But presumably- the patient does have the deep desire to achieve that. The problem- as I see it is- depression can zap at the desire even to get better. Certainly the desire to put in the vast amounts of effort to try anyway.
So- as I tend to view it- yes, depression may cause ideation. However- how treatable is depression? We tend to concede that if a chronic physical illness is untreatable, it's reasonable that the person would want to CTB. Because their quality of life is low and it's very unlikely they will get better.
How do we make the same judgements with mental health? That's the difficulty I believe, because the whole mental health arena seems far more woolly. How can they know if there's a cure if they don't fully understand the brain and the issue itself to begin with?
So- where does that leave the patient? 'We can't trust you to know you are genuinely suicidal- because you're depressed. So- try these endless amounts of treatments! Maybe we'll eventually concede that we can't cure you.' So what? They're just expected to suffer and fight for years on end?
I think long- term mental illness has already in some cases, and likely will become a legitimate reason to qualify for assisted suicide. But, the person presumably will need to have a medical history as long as your arm- with all the failed treatments on it.
That's what frustrates me about mental healthcare and diagnosis. To me- it seems way behind physical healthcare. I tend to imagine someone with an advanced form of cancer say would be far more quickly diagnosed. I imagine there are certain treatments they wouldn't even bother with because they know they would be ineffective at that late stage. I also imagine it would take less time to ascertain that their situation was incurable and possibly terminal.
Whereas I imagine the person turning up with long- term depression starts at the beginning and works up. With failed drug after failed drug. Right up to electrocuting bits of their brain! It's small wonder they don't still perform labotomies and hook bits out.
Should depressed people be beholden to a 'profession' that seems (to me) to be very unsure of what it's doing? To my mind- they fail in some cases at diagnosis, they (sometimes) fail in prescribing effective drugs, they don't seem to bother with follow ups to see if what they prescribe works (in my experience.) They don't inform you of the side effects always. Why should people put their trust in such an industry?
What even qualifies them to know what kind of depression a person has, whether it is affecting their ability to be rational, whether it's treatable? When they admit that they don't have a full grasp of what's going on in the brain? Would a heart surgeon base their diagnosis based solely on the patients description of their symptoms? Obviously not. They would run ECG's and x-rays before ripping open someone's chest or prescribing powerful drugs. I actually think the diagnosis and 'treatment' of mental illness is crazy. Plus- dangerous in some cases. Some members here have been made worse by psyche drugs. So, to my mind, the very industry that is calling the shots doesn't actually entirely know what it's doing!
