Editorial: "New thinking means new hope on depression"
ONE OF Vanessa Price's first chronic cases involved a woman we'll call Paula. Paula came to the London Psychiatry Centre, where Price is a registered nurse, after two years of unrelenting depression. First she stopped seeing her friends. Then she stopped getting out of bed. Finally, she began cutting herself. Sessions with a psychiatrist didn't help, nor did medication. In fact, they made it worse. Paula had joined the ranks of people diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression.
The steady rise in this diagnosis over the past two decades reflects a little-known trend. The effectiveness of some antidepressant drugs has been overstated, so much so that some pharmaceutical companies have stopped researching them altogether.
The stubborn nature of these cases of depression has, however, spurred research into new and sometimes unorthodox treatments. Surprising and impressive results suggest that we have fundamentally misunderstood the ...
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