On World Mental Health Day (October 10), the World Health Organization (WHO) let it be known that more than 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression. But, they say, a stigma is still attached to the condition, leading people to keep their struggles quiet rather than reaching out for help. The WHO says the stigma must be dropped so that depressed individuals can have access to treatment, including therapy and Big Pharma medications.
There is no doubt that many people are depressed and there is little doubt that these people need help. Depression, after all, can lead to serious health conditions and can drive some people to suicide. The stigmas associated with depression certainly don’t help anyone. But pushing pharmaceuticals as the most viable treatment method is a travesty, particularly when it comes from a body as esteemed and large as the WHO.
“We have some highly effective treatments for depression,” said Dr. Shekhar Saxena, the Director of the Department for Mental Health and Substance Abuse. “Unfortunately, fewer than half the people who have depression receive the care they need. In fact, in many countries, this is less than 10%. This is why WHO is supporting countries in fighting stigma as a key activity to increasing access to treatment.”
Anti-depressant medications are the most frequently used of all drugs in the United States for people between the ages of 18 and 44, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In their Data Brief (pdf) published last year, the CDC says between the years of 2005 to 2008, antidepressant use grew 400%. This is astounding and an issue that must be addressed—not with more medication, but with a closer look at what’s causing it and alternative, natural treatments. Interestingly, arteries thicken 400% more than aging from antidepressant use, upping the risk of heart disease and stroke.
We all deserve to be happy, but we are quite literally being spoon-fed a diet that leads to depression. Study after study has linked depression to modern diet failures like fast food and junk food, BPA, and MSG. Because not only are you filling yourself with manmade chemicals when you eat the standard American diet (SAD), you are likely deficient in the healing compounds present in natural food sources.
Some experts say that the “chemical imbalance” frequently cited as the cause of depression doesn’t exist at all, that there is zero evidence to back this imbalance and that depression is something that doesn’t need to be managed with a chemical cocktail of Big Pharma remedies.
Perhaps eliminating the stigma associated with depression could begin by eliminating the false ideas we have about the disease. By honestly looking at what’s causing this pervasive sadness in our communities, we may just find the solution is much simpler than even a pill. We may find that, like most other preventable diseases, the right diet of whole, natural foods could stop the frightening growth of depression and related prescription drug use. Unfortunately, at least for now, you won’t hear calls for this radically simple solution coming from the WHO.
Maybe we should look into " Colloidal Gold ",.. like Colloidal Silver,.. silver for the Body,.. Gold for the Mind,… stop taking all those pills after you've been introduced to this but continue both till you're sure,.. this is not medical advise,.. just an alternative,..
Sounds expensive, Randy M. Diet is the cause of every illness. Most people are starving, even if we're over weight. Most products are have just fillers and taste enhanchers like auger and salt.
I applaud this article only in that it exposes the lethal drugs of the mental death profession (biological psychiatry that is anything but "logical). But, this article also is part of the problem in that it falsely and dangerously labels psychiatry's bogus stigma of so called depression in its junk science DSM as a DISEASE!! Unreal!!
The term, "depression," has been hijacked by the mental death profession in bed with BIG PHARMA to push lethal poison drugs that not only don't help with so called depression or life problems, they make the problems far worse in addition to many horrible, deadly side effects like suicide, violence, mania, insomnia, heart, eye, brain and other horrible damage to every organ in the body. As with Ritalin for the bogus ADHD label, the misnamed SSRI antidepressants serve as a gateway to an even worse fraud, VOTED IN stigma of bipolar due to the iatrogenic effects of the first lethal drugs to push an even more lethal cocktail of poison drugs for life after destroying that person's life with stigma and poison, causing early death by about 25 years!
"Depression" is not a "disease" any more than life or childhood is a disease though the mental death profession has succeeded in brainwashing the uninformed public that humans should never be upset or down about normal life crises, abuse, losses, injustice, oppression, job loss, divorce, illness and other NORMAL but sad human events and if they do have such sad feelings, they are "mentally ill."
The psychopaths of psychiatry and BIG PHARMA with corrupt government hacks have succeeded in medicalizing normality to push the most useless, lethal drugs with life destroying stigmas on a brainwashed planet for their latest eugenics/euthanasia assaults they used to perpetrate the German Holocaust after psychiatry practiced by gassing those they stimatized as "mentally ill" to death due to their supposed bad genes, the so called science of eugenics, and using these same methods in concentration camps BEFORE AND AFTER Hitler came to power.
So called "mental illness" sure is deadly, but only because of the psychopaths of psychiatry and BIG PHARMA promoting this evil fraud and plague/crimes against humanity as usual! The evil eugenics theories of psychopathic psychiatry continue to be alive and well today and they murder millions more people from cradle to grave in the guise of help and medicine!! WAKE UP PEOPLE! Time for new Nuremburg Trials rather than more bogus psych drug trials!
I hope this backfires when everyone sees how sad everyone else is and starts to question why!! I was sad for 20 years with mania, chronic asthma, anxiety, depression, insomnia, bad skin, fatness and more – all gone now I eat FOOD (organic) instead of POISONED FOOD (whether sprayed on crops, fed/injected into animals, at processing, preserving or packaging it all counts)!! Doctors said I would take medication for LIFE and psychologists said it was all in my head, but it was poison in my food!! There is only FOOD (organic) or contaminated food and they should have to put POISON SYMBOLS on all food that has been contaminated!! Dont make the good organic farmers work for licencing and labelling – make the poisoners and mutators do it the hard way!! I love this music clip he says it best – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Kx-79cAxc
Eat real food and be happy again <3
Agreed. Pharmas are in it to win it. The big money that is. And there is a LOT of it (money) to be made in the pharma game. However do NOT blow by the fact that there absolutely is a need for medication in some cases. It does fill a need definitely in the short term; perhaps in the long term.