Gary Greenberg on “Manufacturing Depression”
This morning I heard Gary Greenberg on Democracy Now discussing his new book Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. He made some interesting points. Greenberg’s premise is that the epidemic of the diagnosis of depression is an economically driven pharmaceutical response to the experience of sadness; i.e., the prevalence of antidepressants has established depression as a medical entity. What gets lost are situational and subjective explanations for why we feel sad. When we rely exclusively on chemical solutions we are less empowered to explore the causes of our feelings and take action to resolve them.
Tags: Depression, healing, Psychotherapy
I think we bring on depression by focusing on those thoughts, feelings, people, and events that we cannot control. If we only focus on what we can control we spend our time doing things we can accomplish rather than in the endless cycle of failure, low self-esteem, and depression brought on by failing in areas over which we could never succeed. The new DSM-V, coming soon, defines depression so far down that it is an exact copy of a definition of situational sadness. This is a bonus for the drug companies, but just another distraction for focusing on something for which we have no control, leading to more depression and more medications.
Yes, and I would add to this that depression is also fostered by having a “fixed” rather than a “growth” mindset, as described by Carol Dweck . I wrote about this in my posting “The Can’t Do Barrier”.
I once had a manager who called us all to a meeting because she was very upset. She told us that we were not failing enough – she wanted to see more failures. Not enough failures told her that we were not being experimental and creative. This was the ‘fixed’ mindset she was trying to break. She said we grow and achieve via failures because it is only when we take ourselves outside our comfort zones and push past our limits that we grow, and this experimentation results in many failure and many successes.
As an aside, this happened in a huge corporation. LOL