There is a unique kind of pain in losing your mind, not just once, but over and over. Losing your perception of reality, of your emotions, of your closest relationships-both across months and multiple times a day. Knowing deep down that something is wrong but being unable to stop it.
Depression is insidious. For people suffering from depression, joy is elusive. Depression is not only a general feeling of sadness or being down and out. It is a serious condition and needs attention. People suffering from depression cannot just get over it and move on. They need support, healing, and to discover the epicenter of their pain.
Evidence Based Medicine was formalized in the 1990s, largely by Canadian physician David Sackett. Sackett described the goal of EBM is to replace hunches and habits with data and clinical trials. Clinical guidelines were developed involving protocols that tell doctors which drug to prescribe first, what dose to use, when to escalate treatment, and when to refer a patient to a specialist.
If we treat ADHD as binary (you have it or you do not), we are missing the possibility that we all lie somewhere on a continuum with diagnosed ADHD towards one end (and perhaps an ability to focus and concentrate at the other). A diagnosis of ADHD then depends on where the line is drawn. I suggest that this line has been moved in recent years, so that a large group of people have been caught up in the positive ADHD group, who would not have been previously.
Yes, there has been a shocking lack of progress in developing transformative psychiatric medicine (We need new drugs for mental ill-health, 5 February), but this may be because in mental health, drugs are not always the answer (see, for example, Richard P Bentall's Doctoring the Mind). Huge progress has been made in the effectiveness of talking therapies for example, free effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is available to all UK army veterans through the charity PTSD Resolution.