in which I find myself yelling at the computer screen

[kaberett]

fuck you, BBC, fuck you

you know, for most of this article, you do a pretty good job of describing the ways in which prescribing self-help books on the NHS might be useful for people with mild to moderate depression

... IT'S A PITY YOU LEAVE OUT THE MILD TO MODERATE, ISN'T IT

AND INSTEAD

END

ON A FUCKING SELF-CONGRATULATORY BULLSHIT MESSAGE OF "PEOPLE SHOULD BOOTSTRAP THEMSELVES OUT OF DEPRESSION"

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

I was diagnosed with severe depression when I was 21. I had been in and out of counselling since I was 15. And you think it's appropriate to suggest I need to "make an effort" to get better?

Don't you fucking dare tell me I should have been able to ~think myself happy~. Don't. You. Dare.

Comments

[merryway]

Indeed.

Fuck this six ways from sunday - especially that final fucking sting at the end, because that's just what we need to hear, and that the people around us need to hear to improve things for us, isn't it.

Fuckers.

[jamfish]

Oh, lovely.

[hairyears]

The news I take away from this 'news' article is that the BBC has fired or overruled everyone who has a medical or scientific education.

In short, the BBC is the broadcast media science service of the Daily Mail.

So there's no point questioning the facts, or the presentation of deliberate distortion - take it as a given and ask the only question that remains:

"Who profits from the propaganda?"

You could phrase that as: "What's the agenda?" but it's better to look at underlying causes with a fair amount of cynicism.

Existing private-sector health providers won't profit all that much: the Priory Group provide excellent in-patient care but their market in depressive illness is tiny, as only single-digit percentages of clinically-depressed people have access to the funding.

There is no evidence of commercial human warehousing providers extending their existing market in 'residential care' for the severely-disabled and local-authority residential youth services into low-cost mental health services; and prison profiteers don't touch mentally-ill 'service users'.

In sort: there is no profit in depressed people.

So my guess is this is propaganda intended to harden public attitudes to the mentally-ill in general, ensuring that there is no public outcry at their destitution and death in the absence of both welfare support and long-term NHS treatment.

I worry that the visible consequences of these policies will be met with public expressions of approval.

Note that this isn't about the public purse: getting people well is always cost-effective for the wider economy (in my case, a decade of non- and underproductivity due to depressive illness cost the Exchequer a cool million, and could've been fixed for an outlay of anout £15,000. It's about diverting funds from the productive economy to politically-privileged profiteers who 'monetise' human beings they refer to as 'the stock' in activities that an economist refers to as 'tax farming' and the rest of us - taxpayers and 'service users' alike - would refer to as exploitation.

And its up to us to spread that word, because the BBC most certainly will not.

[naath]

Oh fuck that noise.

Sure, it's good to have a wide variety of options on the NHS so that people can (with appropriate medical advice and assistance) select their preferred options, since no one treatment is "one size fits all" and people have different preferences and react in different ways to different treatments...

But it is in NO WAY good to suggest that this option is an option that will suit all (or even most) people with depression, especially severe depression for which there are many better treatments!

[kaberett]

On the Book of Face (where I posted a slightly more coherent version of this set of thoughts...) someone helpfully adds:

From the PLoS article, on the study group: "Patients with active suicidal intent (scoring 2 or more on the BDI-II suicidal thoughts item) were excluded as such patients need more than GCBT-SH or TAU. Also excluded were those who were unable to use the materials because of impaired concentration and motivation (scoring 7 or more on the combined BDI-II items for energy, concentration difficulty and tiredness – items 15, 19 and 20) as they would experience difficulty in using the written materials effectively."

[marnanel]

Thank you for saying this.

I despair of the BBC's science and medical coverage generally, but this is egregious.

[bjh21.me.uk]

My statistics is basically non-existent, but I don't think the study made any serious attempt to filter by severity of depression. In particular, the mean baseline BDI-II score of subjects seems to have been about 29, which the authors claim is the moderate/severe boundary. Is there something in the depths of the results that indicates that only the mildy and moderately depressed subjects showed any improvement?

On the other hand, that last quotation is just terrible. I mean, even I can see that and (as can be seen above) I'm about as insensitive as it's possible to be.