Daily Mail: How the wrong drugs could be causing your depression

From The Daily Mail:
By Lucy Elkins

Feeling worn out? Having trouble getting out of bed each day? Finding it hard deciding what to do with your time? Turn up at your GP's surgery with these symptoms and the chances are you will be diagnosed with depression.

Two million people in Britain are taking antidepressants, yet according to a new book, many of these people aren't mentally ill at all but have been misdiagnosed.

In Beating Stress, Anxiety And Depression, Professor Jane Plant, a leading scientist from University College Hospital in London, and Janet Stephenson, a psychologist at a London hospital, claim the medical profession's approach to mental illness and depression in particular is wrong - with medics often mistaking symptoms of a physical condition for depression.

'A study by an American psychiatrist found that more than 10 per cent of patients diagnosed with mental illness are actually suffering from an underlying physical condition, such as a heart murmur or a mineral deficiency such as calcium or magnesium that causes depression-like symptoms,' says Professor Plant.

Thyroid problems can also cause depression.

Another study found that more than 40 per cent of patients diagnosed as depressed at one medical practice were found to have been taking medication that causes depression as a side effect.

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Newsweek again: Happiness: Enough Already

Newsweek reports ...

The push for ever-greater well-being is facing a backlash, fueled by research on the value of sadness.

By Sharon Begley NEWSWEEK

The plural of anecdote is not data, as scientists will tell you, but consider these snapshots of the emerging happiness debate anyway: Lately, Jerome Wakefield's students have been coming up to him after they break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and not because they want him to recommend a therapist. Wakefield, a professor at New York University, coauthored the 2007 book "The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder," which argues that feeling down after your heart is broken—even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression— is normal and even salutary. But students tell him that their parents are pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention—"some Zoloft, dear?"—for their sadness, and the kids want no part of it. "Can you talk to them for me?" they ask Wakefield. Rather than "listening to Prozac," they want to listen to their hearts, not have them chemically silenced.

University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener, who has studied happiness for a quarter century, was in Scotland recently, explaining to members of Parliament and business leaders the value of augmenting traditional measures of a country's wealth with a national index of happiness. Such an index would measure policies known to increase people's sense of well-being, such as democratic freedoms, access to health care and the rule of law. The Scots were all in favor of such things, but not because they make people happier. "They said too much happiness might not be such a good thing," says Diener. "They like being dour, and didn't appreciate being told they should be happier." (For one man's struggle with the pressure to pursue happiness, click here.)

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