Robert Leitch is 21 years old and in the third year of a distance-learning politics degree from the LSE, whilst also working in Parliament for a Conservative MP. He is also a party activist in Orpington.
According to national health statistics held by the House of Commons Library there has been a staggering rise in the amount of medication prescribed to treat clinical depression in the United Kingdom over the past few decades. Needless to say Western society has been increasingly analysed, monitored and recorded in recent years with our patterns of behaviour making fascinating reading for a full range of psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists. Depending on your choice of expert we could be considered to be living in a consumer society, an advanced technological age or even a post-modernist culture. Such over-analysis is seldom all encompassing or exclusive of bias, but the figures charting the rise of depression are worthy of further attention and perhaps, more worrying, even reflective of deeper flaws in our society.
These statistics show that between 1985 and 2007 the number of prescriptions issued for anti-depressant drugs rose from 6,000 to 34,000 per annum, a sixfold increase within a generation. Whilst it is true that the total number of all prescriptions issued has risen since the mid-1980s the rise has not been linear. Year on year the percentage increase in anti-depressants has vastly outstripped the percentage increase of general prescriptions. For example, in 2000 whilst the total number of general prescriptions rose by 3.32%, the total number of anti-depressants increased by 13.17%. Of course, statistics cannot be relied on exclusively but they do at least provide the stimuli for further investigation.
Any such investigation must not, however, belittle the illness. Depression is a hidden and silent ailment and one for which there is no single cause or cure. Its symptoms and consequences differ from one person to another with no timescale for recovery or indeed assurance of it. It can be hormone driven or reactive and as one of the ‘invisible illnesses’ its hold on people can be both frustrating and draining. A lack of understanding and appreciation from the outside world has created a terrible stigma which in turn also adds to the potentially catastrophic impact of depression on the quality of a person’s life.
But why has depression emerged on such a scale in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? After all we are now living longer than before, with healthier diets, more education and, in the developed world at least, an unprecedented provision of welfare conditions surrounding us. Indeed, the rise of depression seems like a rather contradictory process. It suggests that we are unhappier, more disenfranchised, less fulfilled and ultimately less able to cope with life in modern day Britain.
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