For those who knew Abraham Lincoln well, it came as no surprise to find him weeping in private or reciting maudlin poetry to express his many melancholies. Nowadays, we accept the theory that our sixteenth president suffered Major Depressive episodes. Though despite his unwavering personal woes, honest Abe persevered and led our nation through what was perhaps the most trying time in our history. But it wasn’t the civil discord that made him blue—blue as in sad, not blue as in the colors of the Union—it was the fate of his dear children, who died at early ages due to physical illnesses such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever. I present this instance for two reasons. One, to prove that those with depression can still do great things, and two, to point out that Lincoln’s depression primarily stemmed from his children’s uncontrollable deaths. Bearing this in mind, I’d be willing to bet that if Lincoln was in control of allocating medical research funds, he’d give less toward understanding psychiatric disorders such as depression, and more toward understanding the deadly diseases that claimed the lives of his children.
Yes, psychiatric disorders are hard to live with. Yes, learning to prevent them will make the world a better place, not only for the afflicted individuals, but for the individuals’ families and friends. On these facts, I agree with the article from I read from Nature entitled “A Decade for Psychiatric Disorders.” But then the author of the article makes a call to action. He argues that psychiatric disorders deserve a bigger slice of the research funds and that this coming decade is the time to focus more on curing and understanding these mental illnesses. This would be nice, I thought, but is it practical? In light of the millions dying from more-immediate afflictions such as heart disease, Cancer, AIDS, Malaria, and countless other conditions (not to mention tuberculosis and typhoid fever in their day), I am not convinced that now is the time. Yes, snapping a girl’s daddy out of depression would make the world a better place, but I argue that removing Cancer cells from his prostate and saving his life would be even better.
To make-concrete his claim that health-related research is unjustly disproportional, the author manipulates his reader’s sense of logic by drawing a comparison. In Britain, he states, the public donates a staggering £500 million (US$800 million) every year to charities for cancer research alone, but for mental-health research the figure is just a very few million. This would be an affective point, were it not for the fact that the money was publically donated. I believe that the collective concerns of the people should represent the collective aims of our research. Simply put, in our struggling global economy, we have to prioritize. As Newton put it, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Similarly, if we distribute more funds towards researching psychiatric disorders, we would consequently have to pull funds from researching the most serious, life-threatening, and widespread ailments on Earth.
In fact, my psychology book from last semester makes a case that psychiatric disorders (such as depression) may primarily be environmental. It describes growing trends over the years, and suggests that as the world becomes more media-driven and materialistic rates of depression have steadily increased. If this is the case, then the sickness is based within the sufferer’s subjective view of the world. Theoretically, he could suck it up, exercise free will, and change his circumstances. He could quit feeling sorry for himself and adopt a more cheerful view of the world. But easier said than done, right?
I did a little research of my own, and found an article from the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy entitled “Self-Administered Optimism Training: Mechanisms of Change in a Minimally Supervised Psychoeducational Intervention.” The article asserts right off the bad that a “Pessimistic explanatory style is a robust predictor of future depressive symptoms.” It then details an experiment in which 112 college students with a pessimistic explanatory style identified from a larger screening sample were randomly assigned to either Self-Administered Optimism Training or a no-treatment control group. The students who practiced optimism demonstrated a significant drop in pessimism in three separate but related assessments. The article concludes by suggesting that although the tests were preliminary in nature, the findings “demonstrate the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of an inexpensive, prophylactic treatment for depression that utilizes a minimum of therapist contact.” Easier said than done, right? Perhaps so, but it might be easier than people think.
By including this research, I am trying to make several points. One is that there is research being done, and it appears to be doing just fine. The next is that based on this study, improvements can be made by simple methods of self-motivation and a willingness to change, not dishing out millions. And finally, non-psychiatric disorders such as cancer are primarily genetic, not environmental, and cannot be cured simply by administering short sessions of optimism training. Cancer patients possess less control over their fate, and the research needed to understand and ultimately cure the condition is, by nature, more expensive.
I found additional evidence to suggest that depression lies primarily in the eye of the beholder in an article from Science entitled “Can Placebo Be the Cure?” You see, drug companies had eagerly been anticipating a highly-touted product to ward off depression, but when the company sat down and analyzed the data from the clinical trial, it found that patients who had received the dummy pill had done unexpectedly well. Those on the placebo did almost as well, in fact, as those on the actual drug, thereby wiping out the rationale for the new antidepressant. These results offer further proof that depression may not be as hopeless and harmful as is often thought. Neither optimism training, nor a placebo cost very much, so why restrict funding for deadly diseases and give more to those with psychiatric issues? After all, there is no placebo for Cancer.
And maybe I am going a little overboard here, but perhaps if there were less terminally ill people in the world, those prone to depression would have less to be depressed about; sort of a two-birds-with-one-stone type scenario. It’s easy to be passionate about a cause, as I believe the author of the article from Nature is, but it is harder to be logical in considering the consequences. In this case, allocating more funds towards research on psychiatric disorders would remove funding from research being done on deadly diseases. The title of the author’s article is “A Decade for Psychiatric Disorders.” I say, how about a decade for those that may only have a decade, or less, left?
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