KEY POINTS:
So the "experts" have finally concluded that anti-depressants have no "clinically significant" effect.
Which means that the $28 million spent on 720,000-odd prescriptions for them last year in New Zealand is money largely wasted.
A study, led by the University of Hull in England and one of the
largest into popular drugs including Prozac, showed they increased patients' scores on a 51-point depression scale by an average of only two points. The only surprise in this revelation is that it has taken until now to reach those conclusions. I could have told them that years ago when Prozac and its spin-offs came on the market.
No doubt a huge number of people in this country suffer from what is commonly called "depression". And I'll bet there are far more than 720,000 prescriptions handed out, when you take into account other sorts of tranquillisers and mood-changing drugs that some doctors hand out like sweets.
Then there are the millions spent on alcohol and all the illicit drugs we swallow, sniff, inject or smoke in a forlorn attempt to make life seem the way we want it.
Much easier than accepting life as it is and, if we don't like it, doing something - probably painful - about fixing it.
Considering the sort of lives many of us live, it's not surprising depression is so common. I suspect little of it is caused by chemical imbalances in the body.
Most of it will be simply a chronic dose of the blues, brought on by the pressures of living in a world that seems to insist that the only measure of success is to have lots of money and the property and prestige that goes with it.
It's a world that tells us that the bodies God gave us are not good enough and need to be modified one way or another to make us conform to an ideal constantly paraded before us by the mind-benders of the advertising and entertainment industries.
So some of us pump our bodies full of steroids or silicone or Botox - all of which can have serious, even fatal, side-effects - and others get hooked by bulimia and its sister anorexia nervosa, alcoholism, overeating, sex, gambling, work, drug dependency, or become fitness freaks.
In spite of all the efforts over a lot of years by the people who run the education system to convince us that there is no such thing as winning and losing, society still makes much of success.
It will tolerate mediocrity only because there's so much of it around but holds failure in contempt. Ask the All Blacks or the Black Caps or any of the other Black thingummies we dote on.
You'll know what I mean about mediocrity if you deal with retailers and service industries and most government businesses in the health, welfare, justice, educational and insurance fields, many of whose employees - particularly those who bear the designation "manager" or "team leader" - have developed mediocrity into an art form.
We live in a society in which hysteria is just under the surface and erupts with monotonous, if brief, regularity (the average attention span of the public and the media these days is about 10 seconds).
If it's not child abuse, then it's global warming, or the price of food and petrol, or mortgage rates, or leaky homes, or finance company collapses, or airport sales, all of which bring knee-jerk reactions and often lead to immature, ill-drafted legislation.
We live in a society in which there is again a growing sense of powerlessness as government, national and local, rides roughshod over our wishes. Public opinion seems to count for less and less while national and local politicians behave more and more dictatorially.
Is it any wonder so many of us live in a constant state of unhappiness, which doctors and others in the "helping professions" are only too quick to label depression? And to throw a pill at. Or to direct some counselling at.
Abraham Lincoln had it sussed. "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be," he said.
The failure to deal with depression - except by treating the symptoms with pills and/or "counselling" - is quite plain: it is a disease that affects men and women not just in mind and body, but in spirit.
Science can assist the body with medicines and the mind with psychology but it can't heal a malaise of the spirit. In an age in which God is seen by so many to be a historical fiction, and by a lot more to be of no account even if He exists, men and women who suffer from depression have no place to turn.
I know, because I've been there.
