Birddog over at Maggie's carries an article on brain scans and depression. As I no longer need precise information on the subject, I was only mildly annoyed that there is no link to the study itself, but there are enough internal clues that it should be possible to find for younger people and those that have loved (or hey, even unloved) ones with depression. These results may not hold up strictly, but this is what many clinicians have always suspected, and indeed treated on the basis of: what we call one thing is actually many things, and we are only now just sorting it out. Autism, ADHD, OCD and various Anxiety disorders also seem to overlap and differentiate in unexpected ways, and as the science of "You have Depression 3 and Anxiety 2 and 4" starts to become an understandable concept, medical and non-medical treatments will return, at least for a while, to being an art. Medications have side effects, costs and time might matter, balancing one thing against another will involve guesswork and refinement.
So it might not be six types of depression, it might be four or nine, and as the kaleidoscope turns with life events treatments and interactions might change as well.
Freud set us back 100 years, and we have only been crawling out of that hole since the 70s or 80s.
1 comment:
If one of us could Rip-Van-Winkle to 2525 we'd probably see the first half of the 20th Century viewed the way we do the Bronze Age Collapse. WTH happened?
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