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Everyone is depressed these days – or, at the very least, knows someone who is depressed. Libraries of books have been published on the subject, ranging from hard-core science through alternative therapies and self-help manuals. But why has depression become such a standard of mental health, when only a generation ago it was scarcely talked about? What has created this sudden increase in the disease? Is it a disease at all, or is it an illness? Or is it just self-indulgence 5 for the rich and bored? A problem with depression is that the only way to have it is to say that you have it. If you have a cold, people can hear you cough and sneeze; you have a virus in your system. You have both symptoms and the disease. But with depression the symptoms are the virus. You cannot be depressed and have no symptoms. But the very essence of depression - the lack of pleasure in 10 life, the despair which each day brings – no one except the sufferer can measure. Two measuring scales are used by doctors, but both rely on the patient’s reported emotion. So the fact that depression seems to be hugely on the increase is not based so much on doctors telling their patients that they are depressed, but to a great extent, patients telling their doctors that they are depressed. 15 Most people want drugs for their illnesses, but maybe our highly medicalised way of handling depression has made the illness seem worse than it is, and also more prevalent. If we return to the pre-anti-depressant drugs way of thinking, and simply accept depression as an illness in the way we accept asthma or colds, and medicate in order to improve the symptoms and not cure them; using a combination of anti-depressants, therapy, acupuncture, or bungee-jumping 20 - any remedy that works for the sufferer - would we feel better? We would certainly feel more in control. And according to the latest evidence, being in control plays a big part in determining whether or not we become depressed. Those who control their environments seem to get depressed less frequently than those who are in environments which control them. We can accept that some things have no cure but with careful management can be improved – or at least made 25 bearable, for the duration.

1. The word “it” in line 4 refers to - (1) generation (2) health (3) standard (4) depression

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