Good news. They're busting the drug racket. The legal drug racket, that is, of prescribing and over-prescribing "happiness pills" and other antidepressants, which often send people into an even deeper depression.
The moment I heard that Seroxat was being marketed as "the anti-shyness" drug, I knew it was trouble. Firstly, shyness is an attractive quality, not a disability; charming in a world increasingly dominated by brash exhibitionists who go on telly to invade their own privacy. What we need is an increase in bashful people, not a drug to disinhibit those who are so engagingly modest.
Secondly, life is not about reaching for "a pill for every ill", even in the sphere of depression or psychological problems. It's about learning and exploring and accepting difficulties through reflection and thinking and sometimes a little stoicism.
It's scandalous that antidepressants such as Seroxat and Prozac have been so promiscuously overused by GPs (as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence has just ruled) - handed out to young patients who present with the slightest personal setback. Failed an exam? Here, have a Prozac. Broken up with your boyfriend? Have we got the serotonin for you! Unsurprisingly, these drugs have caused violent mood swings in some individuals, and in some cases may have triggered suicide.
Almost as bad as over-prescribing is the attitude that the proper reaction to pain, sorrow or sadness is sedation. When mental pain strikes, drug yourself up. Life sometimes is sad. You will experience grief, melancholy, depression and failure. There isn't a pill to cure the human condition. Sometimes you just have to be brave. And as you grow older, you have to be braver, for there are many more reasons for sadness.
There was a point to the stiff upper lip. It wasn't only Anglo-Saxon "repression". It was a Greek idea about not falling to pieces when the storms of life occur.
Where is the good doctor who will sit down with a patient and say these wise things? Too many, it seems, have been, instead, nobbled by the pharmaceutical salesman with a fistful of ridiculous "happiness pills". But there are no happiness pills. What goes up, must come down. Where there is elation, there will be deflation.
There may be times when a really good doctor might say to a depressed patient: "Oh, cheer up!" All right: this too should not be overused as a strategy, but it can sometimes can be helpful.
Yes, there are people with serious depressive illnesses who benefit from drug therapy. But there are also millions of folk who are handed out antidepressants because they are experiencing a condition known as life.
Everyone needs picking up from time to time, and St John's wort or a gin and tonic with a friend may do it. But the opiate or chemical answer usually worsens the condition in the long run. As the veteran alcoholic says: "I drank to drown my sorrows, but my sorrows learned to swim."
Some say that psycho-therapy or counselling should replace antidepressants. You could try friendship. You could try reading a poem. And you could try the old remedy of Dr Stoic: pull yourself together.
