An attack on Janet Street Porter (roughly analogous to shooting fish in a barrel)
I have just noticed, via a facebook link, an article by Janet Street Porter in The Mail. Her thesis (if such a word can be used in relation to such a person) is that Depression is the new trendy illness. She goes on to attack suffers of the illness, and even takes a swipe at the suicidal. If you feel like getting enraged, a link is at the bottom of this article. While the article doesn’t surprise me, it has annoyed me, and got me thinking about the illness, and how it is perceived by society.
Her suggestion that depression is a ‘new’ illness is ridiculous, is she totally uneducated? Depression has been around for donkey’s years, it was just called melancholy, or despair. Such illnesses appear in the oldest literature. There is an episode in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus sits on a beach crying endlessly, and the subdued Anne de Burgh in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to name two examples off the top of my head.
She makes a claim that people of her mother’s generation did not suffer with depression (apparently they threw themselves into wholesome things like housework!?!?) This is simply untrue. Many people of her mother’s generation were on valium type drugs, or treated with electroconvulsive therapy. I know The Mail is a pretty retarded newspaper, but I’m still shocked that she would be allowed to publish such an un-researched piece, especially on a sensitive topic.
In an attempt at sympathy, she says that she is not attacking people with “clinical” depression. Forgetting of course that there is not a clear dividing line between what she calls ‘real mental illness’ and simple unhappiness. Even very mundane day to day unhappiness changes the brain’s chemistry, so there is no simple pigeonholing of depressive conditions. I recently read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, a very frank account of her own experiences of depression. She states quite plainly, that although her initial unhappiness was based on quite solid events, such as her father abandoning her, by the time she was treated it was very definitely a clinical illness. This is a popular book, easily available, has JSP not even read pieces such as this before writing her article?
It is true that some forms of depression involve negative cycles of thought, which the sufferer indulges, but she doesn’t actually address this, and these people are still vulnerable and in need of compassion. If those thoughts are potentially threatening someone’s life, they need to be taken seriously.
What has changed in recent years, is that depression is less taboo, so more people are talking openly about it. This may be why it looks like a ‘trend’. We don’t say that there has been a pandemic of homosexuality in recently years, because the people who would have hidden their sexuality in the past are now free to come-out. Or we don’t say that there has been a spate of agnosticism, there have always been people who doubted God, they just didn’t talk about it for fear of being burnt to death in a witch-hunt. Historically, it was very hard for people to admit to even mild spells of depression, for fear of being labelled ‘insane’, and being carted off to a madhouse, and having all their basic freedoms and human rights removed. I would suggest that the increase in cases in depression may stem from the fact that we no longer forcibly trepan anyone who shows hints of this illness.
Perhaps I am wrong to respond to the article at all. She is an offensive, reactionary piece of trash, who really needs to be ignored. But what I am really writing about is the fact that someone such as that should not be allowed to write in a mainstream paper, on a delicate topic. Has no one proofread the piece and red-penned all the errors and un-supported claims? This is unprofessional, and highly unethical. Fair enough, The Mail is not a highbrow publication. But surely that makes it all the more important for the writing to have some level of accuracy. Their readers are less-educated, impressionable people, who might actually believe something they read in a newspaper.
Publications such as this work hard to maintain a level of un-enlightenment and misery in society. What I find particularly perverse about this piece is that The Mail is criticising depressives, yet it is probably one of the biggest propagators of unhappiness in the western world.
Enjoy-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html
