‘Depression’ is a word that anyone can use, whether clinically trained or not. It therefore tends to be over-used.

It needs to be differentiated from ‘sadness’, which is the normal feeling associated with unfortunate events.

The deliberately complex term ‘involutional melancholia’ helps to identify a clinical state in which we turn in on ourselves, even when there is nothing particularly distressing in our current lives.

Laymen would be unlikely to use this term.

But, if they were to do so, their doctors would hopefully learn to avoid the automatic prescribing of an antidepressant.

By recognising that an involutional
melancholia comes from within, doctors and patients alike may separate this from sadness caused by external circumstances.

They may also come to see that an involutional melancholia is the precursor of addictive behaviour.

In effect, the states of ‘depression’ and ‘addiction’ are the same thing, before and after ‘treatment’ with a mood-altering substance or process.

This explains why ‘antidepressants’ are addictive.

Antidepressants are a curse in modern Medicine.

Sufferers from ‘depression’ have fearful difficulties in trying to come off antidepressants because they revert to their involutional melancholia.

This would be more appropriately treated with the Twelve Step programme.

They are vastly over-prescribed, they are ineffective and addictive. That’s a triple whammy if ever there was one!

Getting through the vicissitudes of coronavirus incarceration or illness will certainly not be assisted by antidepressants. At best they put people into limbo land.