Depression in younger people

摘要

Surely the headline of your editorial in March presents a false dichotomy.1 It led me to reflect on the patients between 16 and 20 years of age who, as a psychiatrist working in a rural area of Scotland, I have seen over the past year. The vast majority of these patients were neither ‘clinically depressed’ or ‘moody’. They did have major emotional problems but these problems were completely understandable in the light of horrendous circumstances that they have been brought up in. One could say that if they didn't feel unhappy there would have been something wrong with them. It is just not true to pretend that there is evidence that medical intervention, whether psychotropic medication or psychological therapy, has been shown to be of major benefit to such folk.