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Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
Close to 10% of men and women in America are now taking drugs to combat depression. At one time this was a rare condition, but now it's become so common. I subscribe to "Scientific American Mind" magazine and I was reading this article on depression. It was saying that in the past three generations, increasing numbers of Americans have been prescribed antidepressants. In many cases, such prescriptions are the only mental health care the patients receive. One cause of the rise in antidepressant use is that many doctors combine conventional sadness as from the loss of a loved one or a life changing event such as a divorce with the more serious condition of clinical depression. Also, a second contributing factor, is a change in the standard diagnostic guide which caused many milder mental ailments to fall under "disorder" which I think would be considered kind of a neutral label. That could be anything. It was saying that a clinically depressed person may not be able to drag her/himself out of bed. I just wonder why it has gotten so bad, and how does medication really stop this problem?
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This is an interesting topic, cheerfulgreek. SoEnchanting's opinion is that the rise in the incidence of depression is a result of a combination of things - people are more willing to talk about it and doctors have a plethora of good antidepressants to throw at you than in generations past.
