Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Analysis Too Much Medicine

Medicalising unhappiness: new classification of depression risks more patients being put on drug treatment from which they will not benefit

BMJ 2013; 347 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f7140 (Published 09 December 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;347:f7140

Rapid Response:

Re: Medicalising unhappiness: new classification of depression risks more patients being put on drug treatment from which they will not benefit

There is a frightening lack of ways of speaking about distress, suffering and pain outside the medical discourse. In recent years, writers who speak of feeling low and suicidal, and who critique the construct of depression, have been attacked in the press. These attacks have often arisen because alternative accounts are seen as against the legitimacy of depression as an illness. Doctors have a responsibility to acknowledge that suffering and treatments such as antidepressants and psychotherapy can help for life problems without necessary resorting to a medical illness explanation. Communicating that life events and contexts can hurt allow patients to explore the routes of their problems outside a genetic disposition, helping patients to see social and relational causes as something that might need to be changed to reduce suffering. Speaking of distress in a way that includes such psychological and sociological explanations can give the question ‘why you, why now’ back to the patient reducing the impression the answer to suffering lies solely in the repeat prescription of a box of pills.

Competing interests: No competing interests

15 December 2013
Dr Jay Watts
Clinical Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Queen Mary, University of London
Unit for Social Psychiatry, Newham Centre for Mental Health, London E13 8SP