The Most Depressing News of All It was reported last week that prescriptions for depression last year have gone up astronomically over each of the previous five years. The only prescription more often given out is for high blood pressure. I wonder if the two go together? Maybe the 7.8 million consultations were all for depressed people with high blood pressure? Not likely. Depression is now more prevalent than diabetes, asthma, ear infections, anxiety, respiratory infections and bronchitis. One good thing, though, is that people are recognizing that they are depressed and it’s not simply a bad, bad world out there. It’s estimated by Dr. Pierre Bleau, a psychiatrist at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal that between 10 and 20% of Canadians are clinically depressed. He has found that the stigma is no longer there and that is why the numbers of treatments has shot up. An interesting note is that Canadians spent 11 billion dollars last year on drugs, sold on 291 million prescriptions. And the population of Canada is only 30 million today! That means that many people are taking many drugs, while those like me never seem to have to go to the doctor at all. Sometimes a visit to a doctor is the only way out for some folks. They’re not in the habit of treating themselves and depend on a medical doctor(allopathic) to tell them what to do. They blindly take drugs that may have serious side effects that the doctor doesn't explain. Granted, the newer drugs have fewer side effects, but side effects there are. Long gone is dry mouth, insomnia and some of the other effects. Paxil is the 8th most prescribed drug on the Canadian market at the moment, up by 19% in 2000 from 1999. Doctors are more confident prescribing it. I wonder why mainstream medicine still doesn’t recognize St. John’s Wort for depression. In Europe it is prescribed much more often than drugs and is believed to be just as effective, if not better because there are no appareciable side effects, as long as it’s not taken while on prescription drugs. St. John’s wort can be taken in the form of a tincture in water, leaves in a soothing tea or by capsule. That takes care of almost any medicine-taking problem people might have. St. John’s Wort has also been combined with other herbal brain therapies such as Kava Kava, originally from the South Pacific, a very popular relaxant for hundreds of years. Some doctors now believe that many patients are taking meds that they don’t need. They acknowledge that many people fall through the cracks and become addicted to prescription drugs. We often hear about celebrities checking themselves into drug treatment facilities, and it’s not always for alcohol problems. Doctors need to keep on top of what their patients are taking and for how long. But how long does depression last, and when the course of drug therapy is over, are the patients healed? From what I’ve heard, people go back into the same rut they were in before and then need to be treated all over again months or years later. The suicide rate for depressives is a whopping 20% in Canada. The maintenance treatment must become more integrated into overall evaluation. Exercise must go along with medicine and proper nutrition must be stressed. Our modern lives of stress, fast food, and lack of exercise must all be looked at in conjunction with such high statistics on depression. Wholistic treatment centres are becoming mainstream where naturopathic practitioners and medical doctors are starting to look at the whole body and what can be done to boost health and longevity. Immune systems must be evaluated and improved in order to get all the physical parts working in concert. Depression is not simply a brain deficiency, although that’s where it’s centered. It’s a malaise of our society which doesn’t allow people to lead simple lives with time for fun, exercise, good food, and relaxation. That’s what we must strive for. A visit to a doctor certainly won’t resolve that fundamental North American Syndrome. I often wonder why Europeans have four to five weeks built into their work contracts right off the bat, and we here in good old America start with two weeks max. Maybe the answer to this very serious problem (tongue in cheek, of course) would be to remove the fluoride from the water systems and start adding St. John's Wort instead. The crime rate would go down and we would be a much happier, more relaxed society. Definitely worth thinking about. Back to the Writing Index