Are We A Prozac Nation?

This society is so prone to proclaiming themselves as ‘depressed’ that the word has lost the impact it once had. A person will feel slightly down one day and when asked what is wrong will almost always answer with; ‘Nothing, I just feel a little depressed today’. Depression has become so popularized that we no longer treat it with the seriousness that it is entitled to but instead as a word to describe a mood for a single day. But it should be treated with the importance it deserves.

Ironically today’s culture is the most depressed that it has ever been, with the number of people living with depression in the UK having increased by nearly half a million in three years, according to an analysis of NHS data, while a quarter of this figure belongs to students. Could this simply be due to the flippancy in which we use the word or are we really a very sad nation? And if so what are we doing to combat this problem?

It has been reported that one in four students suffers from depression during their university years, a number that seems exceedingly high if you face the fact that these are the people we see everyday. They don’t look depressed, do they? Yet some of them are. A smile is easy to fake, a laugh is simple to feign and a tear is easy to hide. The student that never a comes on nights out might not just not like clubbing, but in fact struggles to get out of bed in the morning. Being a student is tough enough with the pressures of exams, money worries, exhaustion, loneliness and coursework. The road is riddled with pitfalls, but imagine having to juggle these in combination with suffering from a mental illness? Imagine that you find it hard to get through the day when you have nothing to worry about, let alone when times would be hard even for a healthy, happy individual.

Despite what we are told through leaflets and pamphlets, there appears to be nobody out there who really wants to help. Doctors give out pills as readily as you can say 123, but do these pills work? Because if they did, surely everybody would be cured? The government are so quick to ‘treat the problem’ through medication that nobody is getting to the source of the problem itself. A pill can’t solve everything, a pill can’t grab that feeling of emptiness and make it go away, a pill can’t treat the nation. What we need is therapy that teaches us how to change the way we feel about ourselves, yet the doctors are surprisingly overcautious in giving out this mode of treatment, only allowing it in extreme cases. So instead we have millions of people reliant on anti-depressants, as opposed to being reliant on themselves.

The ‘why don’t you go to to counseling’ advice is equally useless. Who wants to sit in a room with the on-campus counselor and tell their problems to them, a stranger who doesn’t say anything? It has been tried and tested dozens of times and the feedback is the same; awkward and uncomfortable. We need help, not just a friendly ear, and this should be more readily available to students. Depression should be tackled now, when we are forming our adult minds; before we go into work and serious relationships, before we have to deal with the important decisions in life. This is what the government should be focusing on, considering that the statistics are so high, because if we don’t then what will follow will be a ‘Prozac Nation’.