Lose weight by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website
Wilde About Steroids

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Read my Mensa article on Cruelty, Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS: Fighting the System

Read about the cruel treatment I suffered at the Sheffield Dental Hospital: Long In The Toothache

You can contact me by email from my website. The site does not sell anything and has no banners, sponsors or adverts - just helpful information about how salt can cause obesity.


This blog has been exported to a new URL so that readers can leave Comments again. If you want to leave a Comment, please visit my 'new' blog, which has Comments enabled. The 'new' blog is Wilde About Obesity.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when they are merely unhappy, a senior psychiatrist said today.

Depression is over-diagnosed, psychiatrist claims - Guardian

Extract:

"Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when they are merely unhappy, a senior psychiatrist said today.

Normal emotions are sometimes being treated as mental illness because the threshold for clinical depression is too low, according to Professor Gordon Parker.

Prof Parker said depression had become a "catch-all" diagnosis, driven by clever marketing from pharmaceutical companies and leading to the burgeoning prescription of antidepressant drugs.

Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), he said the drugs were being marketed beyond their "true utility" in cases in which people were unhappy rather than clinically depressed.

The psychiatrist, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said the "over-diagnosis" of depression began in the early 80s, when the diagnostic threshold for minor mood disorders was lowered."

Thank goodness Professor Gordon Parker is injecting a bit of sense into this matter! - The mental health charity, MIND, found that a walk in the country works well as an antidepressant - http://www.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2079804,00.html - and it's certainly safer than psychotropic drugs. These pharmaceutical 'therapies' benefit no-one but the drug companies who manufacture and market them with extravagant claims for their efficacy and dubious claims for their safety.

One of the frequent adverse side-effects of antidepressants, especially tricyclics like amitriptyline, is massive weight gain, which is particularly ironic since overweight is associated with depression, and sensible doctors should be aware of this and hold back on their habitual recourse to prescribing tablets instead of trying to help with the problem.

Instead of the nonsensical and clearly unprovable claim made by most doctors that antidepressants save lives, read any of the sensible contributions on the subject by Dr David Healy, one of which is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3675878.stm . And read http://www.socialaudit.org.uk/ for more information about the great harm that the reckless over-prescribing of these drugs is causing.


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.