Every man and his (black) dog
Keep hearing about depression in the meeja ...
Via Tim Blair I learn that Barry Dickins has recently had a big-time bout with it. Here's his description of this struggle. Poor bastard was hospitalised, and had to have ECT. Now that's what I call depression.
But sometimes the term seems to lose its meaning. Here's a list of well known people who have suffered from depression. It includes Natalie Imbruglia. Does she seem depressed to you? (I mean, like, really and truly depressed?)
Michael Costa is another well known sufferer. He's just been through a highly tumultuous experience. Yet he's still keeping it together.
I don't mean to trivialise the suffering of Imbruglia and Costa. I don't doubt that it was (or still is) severe. But I reckon it's a safe bet to say they haven't gone through anything as dark and terrible as Dickins has.
My point: It's a catch-all term. And it's so widely and loosely used that it's lost a lot of its meaning. Heaps of people believe they have this problem (and lazy quacks confirm this perception) when they're actually just a bit stressed out and shat off.
Before he completely lost his marbles (and subsequently became a darling of the left) Malcolm Fraser said: "Life wasn't meant to be easy."
Spot on. If it's easy, you don't learn anything.
That's not to say you should be some kind of self-flagellating masochist. But if you're miserable you should ask yourself why and try to address the problem by changing your life, shouldn't you? It's just a cop out to say, "Knock me out, doc!"
We say that self-medication is wrong. So why is being medicated by the state any better?
Really, it's just way too easy to see a quack and get happy pills nowadays. And there have been many cases where those pills have exacerbated the problem, sometimes tragically.
That's why I wince every time I hear or read that word "depression". Often, it's just what we used to call "being alive".
