The App will see you now

Okay why not run a Google search for “apps for depression”? I can assure you, you will get more than 1 million hits. This is just a part of the current medical trend towards drug-only therapy for depression which is un-coupling therapists from their patients. How has this happened?

A super-complex disorder, depression affects over a third of humankind at some time. The disorder has shifted its definition from a socio-behavioural disorder to that of a correctable “serotonin deficiency”. This shift has provided hope for patients, doctors and society alike. At the same time, the discovery of relatively safe and highly effective SSRIs in the 1980s has almost completely phased out often dangerous combinations of drugs and electroconvulsant therapy of the past.

Today, the change is even more advanced as multi-million drug industry is pushing evidence that prescribing SSRIs without ever speaking to your patient but rather running a 9 or 19 point questionnaire (take your pick) is now enough for diagnosis and they are ready to provide patients with treatment. The drugs are so good, they tell us, they’re even more effective than CBT delivered by specialized carers.

Meanwhile government health policy makers, dismayed at the demand placed on services by an increasingly common disorder, are pleased to see the internet and drugs as a solution.

All this is pushing depressed patients to direct their personal questions to online sources perhaps constructed by the very same drug companies hoping to net patients into a diagnose-drug-purchase sequence unsupervised and unsupported by trained therapists.

How convenient for everyone