Depressing news

I am writing this letter in response to a recent news story that Oct. 8 was National Depression Screening Day. It appears to me that there is something dangerous going on here.

Screening day started in 1991 with 90 test sites. By last year there were 3,000 sites and 85,000 people were tested for depression. This year, primary care physicians are on board and roughly 4,000 doctors across the country will give the screning test to all of their patients, even if the person came in just for a sore throat. You get a short, ten-question questionnaire to fill out and from that, supposedly, your doctor, not a psychologist or psychiatrist, can tell you if you’re depressed. If you are depressed, he refers you to a doctor who almost invariably prescribes — guess what? — drugs. So now the primary care physician is into you for money, the psychiatrist is into you for money, and the drug company that makes the drug is into you for money.

Somewhere along the line, evidently, depression became something that people don’t realize they have. I could have sworn that people know when they are depressed. Heck, everyone around them knows it, but the medical field is trying to pull a fast one on the public with this one, changing depression into something you can’t tell you have.

They say depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, yet how many times do they actually do any medical testing to find out for sure? Almost never. Instead, they say that because of these vague “symptoms” they can tell you have a chemical imbalance that can be corrected, maybe, with drugs. If your depression is indeed caused only by a chemical imbalance, then shouldn’t the drug alone be enough to cure you? You would think so, but instead, they always tell you that you still need counseling. This way the pyschiatrist still gets his piece of the pie.

The medical profession is there to treat people who are injured or sick, mentally or physically, but its job is not to actively seek out patients and new ways of making profits. The medical field is trying to create a market where there is none, a market in human depression, and in doing so, is telling an entire generation of people that they should be on drugs, because, according to their screening test, almost anyone would qualify as being depressed. All this with a nationally-waged War on Drugs going on. I am shocked at this and plan on writing to Congress to change the laws to make it mandatory to do medical testing to see if there is a chemical imbalance before doctors can prescribe drugs. Please do the same. Cheryl Day Bangor.