Everybody is Depressed (Except Me and My Monkey) By Mrs Vera West

     Speak to many peole today, and they will say that they are sad. Speak to our writers and they will go to the next level of spiritual discontentment in the face of a cultural dissolution. But, what about clinical depression? Interestingly enough, the following article makes the case that  depression is being over-diagnosed, and we have Big Pharma to thank for this:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-07-25-doctors-are-trained-to-mass-diagnose-nearly-everyone-with-depression.html
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4528690/Doctors-diagnosing-depression.html

“Doctors are over diagnosing depression because they rely on a ‘basic’ questionnaire designed by a drugs company that also manufactures antidepressants, campaigners have warned. GPs use a nine-question Patient Health Questionnaire, developed through funding from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, to diagnose people with the illness. But critics told theTelegraph that the questionnaire, which has been used by GPs for 20 years, sets the ‘bar too low’ for depression. They say doctors do not have the time to conduct proper psychiatric interviews and are over reliant on the questionnaire, meaning patients whose symptoms may be the result of unusually stressful episodes in their lives are being labelled clinically depressed. Critics have warned that a similar tool used for detecting anxiety which was also developed by Pfizer-funded research, also sets the bar for diagnosis too low. Pfizer, which is based in the US, manufactures of some of the most commonly prescribed drugs for depression and anxiety in the UK, such as Venlafaxine and Sertraline. Dr James Davies, researcher at the University of Roehampton and co-founder of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, told the Telegraph: ‘GPs are very busy and they often don’t have time to do a full interview.”

     Busy/ Fiddlesticks! Busy making money, that is. But, it is the doctor’s duty to get things right for the patients, not to get through as many people as possible in the minimum time, so that the new BMW can be got, or the next overseas holiday set up. There is a very comfortable relationship between doctors and Big Pharma, which is alarming:
  https://www.taxjustice.net/2015/04/28/pharma-companies-extracting-wealth-from-every-angle-they-can-find/
  http://theconversation.com/what-big-pharma-pays-your-doctor-99431 
  https://ethicalnag.org/2009/11/09/nejm-editor/

     This  book by Professor Marcia Angell is  important reading about this subject:
  https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp/0375760946/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

     Oh, the title of this article? I just came to me, as a silly response to a serious situation, inspired by the song, “Everybody has Something to Hide, Except Me and My Monkey”:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XpZ8mKlS-c

     We are, of course, being treated as the monkeys.