Treatment for depression is still a largely hit and miss affair...

I wrote yesterday, that an increasing number of people in the UK are suffering from depression, and that the world health organisation predicts that by 2030, depression will be the single leading cause of illness across the world.

And yet treatment for depression is still a largely hit and miss affair, with many GPs lacking sufficient training to deal with psychological problems their patients present with.  Antidepressants seem to work for some, in the short term, but tend to come with a list of possible side affects as long as your arm (including sexual problems) and despite what's claimed, dependence certainly does happen for some patients.  Six session courses of CBT style therapy are being increasingly prescribed, but these focus on managing feelings of anxiety and stress, the CBT model doesn't tend to deal with the underlying causes of the problem, like drugs, it's just condition management really.

Medium to long term counselling to deal with on-going depression, is unlikely to be prescribed (and funded) by the NHS these days, though once it was more common.  And yet WHO acknowledges the increase in depression is probably linked to changes in society over the past 50 years, so the need for something more than a quick fix solution will continue.  Families tend to be smaller than they once were and family members often move away from the communities they grew up in so the old support systems people relied on when they were going through a tough time, are simply not there now.  There is far more focus on satisfying our emotional needs through material objects we can purchase and electronic advances and the internet age gives us all a sense that we are more connected to people, than we actually are.  Chatting on Facebook with someone who lives 300 miles away, is simply not the same as having people physically in your life, able to give you a physical hug (with all the endorphins our brains release when we get physical comfort from another human being.)

This trend, of communicating digitally more and more is likely to continue, the illusion of being close to people, and the psychological demands of life for most of us, are much greater than they were for our grandparents' generation, and so depression looks set to increase for the foreseeable future. 

Neuroscience is one area where advances are starting to be made now, but what studies show us at the moment is how complex the human brain is, and how much we really don't know at this stage, so it comes as no surprise that a little pill or 30 minutes of CBT cannot possibly hope to relieve depression for most people.

I suspect, in the fullness of time, science will reveal our physical interactions with other human beings, specifically at a young age, and particularly in the womb, have a monumental impact on our ability to cope with stress, anxiety and loss in adult life.