That grief and depression have the same symptoms isn’t a coincidence. Depression is a form of grief – for your life not going as it should; for your psychological needs not being met. With grief for somebody who has died, we offer love and support to the people who remain. With grief for our lives going wrong, there’s a different solution – one that is lying there, waiting for us. It is a program of deep reconnection with the things that really matter in life.
Australia has the second highest rate of antidepressant use in the world, with nearly one in 10 Australians taking them. Illustration by Getty Images
In the early 2000s, South African psychiatrist Derek Summerfeld went to Cambodia, at a time when antidepressants were being introduced there. He began to explain the concept to the doctors he met. They listened patiently and told him they didn’t need these new antidepressants, because they already had some that worked. He assumed they were talking about a herbal remedy.He asked them to explain, and they told him about a rice farmer they knew whose left leg was blown off by a landmine. He was fitted with a new limb, but he felt constantly anxious about the future, and was filled with despair. The doctors sat with him, and talked through his troubles. They realised that even with his new artificial limb, his old job – working in the rice paddies – was leaving him constantly stressed and in physical pain, and that that was making him want to just stop living.So they had an idea. They believed that if he became a dairy farmer, he could live differently. They bought him a cow. In the months and years that followed, his life changed. His depression, which had been profound, went away. “You see, doctor,” they told him, the cow was an “antidepressant”. To them, finding an antidepressant didn’t mean merely finding a way to change your brain chemistry. It meant finding a way to solve the problem that was causing the depression in the first place.
And that would apply to so much in our ever more complicated lives, find the problem and cure it rather than hiding it.
Reed the whole article: Nearly one in 10 Australians take antidepressants. Are there other solutions?
1 Comments
February 22 2018
Great article. Being an anxiety sufferer, I decided I did not want drugs to help the problem. I felt that a Psychologist was the answer. They helped me come to terms in regards to my anxiety. I still suffer it but I can now can control it and still function as a lighting tech.