Praying For Her Last Stroke
by twofiftyorless
I have been frustrated by a thought recently that sent me to the internet to look up a few definitions:
Psychiatry: the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities.
Mental Disorder: a psychological pattern, potentially reflected in behavior, that is generally associated with distress or disability, and which is not considered part of normal development of a person’s culture.
Normal: according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle
Depression could therefore be defined as a mental disorder (or mental illness) presenting with a psychological pattern, potentially reflected in behavior, that is generally associated with distress or disability, and which deviates from the norm, or principle development of a person’s culture.
But when an individual is living in an unstimulating environment, is a recent widow after 52 years of a blissful marriage, has been relegated to a wheelchair after 2 strokes that left her non-ambulatory, has had all of belongings sold from beneath her without her consent by her son (who she trusted with power of attorney), has no other family to count on and needs to page an un-empathetic 19-year-old to help her with all personal needs…I cannot help but wonder:
Wouldn’t she be abnormal if she weren’t depressed?
250 or less 
exactly …….I find this whole notion of ‘treating’ someone for ‘depression’ in the same manner as if they had reactive arthritis or a compound fracture to be at best simplistic and at worse inhumane.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0803/08030301
People need to be understood ……
The ‘end’ stages of any ‘disease’ or ‘illness’, whether it be depression or an orthopaedic condition may be complex in one way to fix but the diagnosis is often fairly easy to ascertain .
The difficulties lie in the vast middle hinterland (and that is where I work) where labels are given. These one word descriptors often hide a narrative of suffering and complex interactions which need befriending rather than Benzodiazapines .