The problem with that (on a philosophical level) is that we don’t pay any attention to whatever it is that causes the symptom to be ‘alive’ in our experience. The anxiety and stress of the current feelings that we have lead us to only looking for ways to remove the symptoms and to balance out our life’s experience to a more comfortable level, physically and mentally.

In therapy terms, this is called a “top-down” view; in other words, focusing on the top level of experience and then perhaps trying to work back to discover the subconscious or unconscious cause that started off the train of how the “growing into a symptom” occurs.

This is very prevalent in the therapy approaches used to try to heal and cure depression. Of course, if we are in the grip of depression, all we want is for it to GO AWAY! This refers to the immediate experience and feelings of being blue, or ‘having the blues,’ and seems to be uppermost in our mind. Sometimes it’s terribly difficult to break through the ‘top layer’ of experience of depression or a bipolar condition and even bother to think about ‘where it came from.’ And the problem with that is that it produces a two-fold effect.

Firstly, we are so anxious to get rid of the current depression feelings that we will latch on to what is the most expedient and handy cure to relieve our mood and restore balance in our awareness, whether that cure is good for us in the long term or not. In our modern times, this is all-too-often antidepressant medications. And there’s no doubt that antidepressants have a fairly successful history when it comes to some positive change to mood states. But the key realization is that any change is very likely to be temporary, and may not be good for us in the long term.

Secondly, BECAUSE such  a change to feelings can be immediately effective, the tendency is to believe that the change (in this case, antidepressant medication) has brought about a cure, rather than perhaps simply covered up the real subconscious or unconscious cause of the problem. This belief, then, usually goes on to create an attitude whereby we resist any comment that casts doubt on the efficiency or safety of antidepressants, so that we become almost absolute devotees to the drugs and will not tolerate criticism of them, whether that criticism is founded in truth or not.

And of course, this is indeed dangerous territory that we can live in. If we are ONLY interested in symptoms and experiences “at the coal-face,” meaning as they are right now, without even wishing to acknowledge that there may be some subconscious cause or stimulus, then we will hear no criticism of ‘our’ medication.

In Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, we seek to look beyond the ‘top surface’ or depression and take an intelligent look at some of the causes. In my book, I am concerned with those causes that we might call social myths about depression – the stories that we have accepted as true that have been generated by pressures and groups (i.e. pharmaceutical and medical) that are more interested in keeping you absorbed in the ‘top layer’ awareness about depression and to build a reliance on antidepressants to relieve the symptoms, rather than allow you to “go” top-down and examine the real reasons why depression has taken hold of your life and won’t let go.

My concern is for a more helpful look at the state of depression, examine general causes as well as individual causes, and help bring about a cure, rather than a chemical Band-Aid.