DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

We live on the XXI century and people don't talk about their depression, because they think who's called "normal" may think they are weaky or crazy. It's a "invisble" disease: people feel pain and it's the main cause of suicide in the world.

However, after Prozac's pills and the theories of Freud, Lacan and the Foucault's history of madness, there are still people who believe depression doesn't even exist. Normally, it's said it's a women's diisease. Maybe because it's a emotional one and men are supposed to be into to the reason. Women talk. Men don't. Women can be weaky. Men can't show their feelings. They say these are facts. Maybe. It's a ideology too. People believe in that.

If you "read" a men's magazine - as Playboy -, normally you will find articles about cars and pictures of naked women. If you read a Cosmopolitan or Elle, probablly it will be easier to find an article about depression. For example, an old article was published on Elle's United Kingdom - August 1993:

"Depression is not 'all in the mind', or a sign of weak character. Sufferers can go from what doctors describe as the cognitive stage, where the bleakness of their felling seems impossible to shake, to the biological stage (...)." (p. 141)

Jan Scott, still on the article, said that "in cases of depression with biological symptons, it is unlikely that these can be simply willed away. The symptoms arise from imbalance (which is the function of the tablets) is necessary to recovery the process." (p. 142) On other words, psycotherapy would not be enough to help a person.

There are two serious problems about it. One, the patients normally don't like to talk about their depression. Two, family and friends think it does not really exists, because they don't suffer "that kind of feeling". That's why so many people suicide.

There's not only one solution. Psycotherapy helps. Family and friends can talk to the patients. If there is "a biological stage", it will be necessary the anti-depressants. And, the most important sympton, if the patients talk about suicide, everybody should take it seriouly.