Anxiety & depression statistics, medication & difficult feelings

National Institute of Mental Health:
18.8 million American adults suffer from clinical depression. That is 9.5% of the adult population

2003 National Comorbidity Study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health:
- 35 million Americans (more than 16% of the population) suffer from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at some time in their lives.
- In one given period, 13 to 14 million people experience the illness.

19.1 million Americans 18 to 54 years-old suffer from anxiety disorders. This represents 13.3% of this age group. (source: National Institute of Mental Health)

Many of the people who suffer from depression also suffer from anxiety (and vice versa).

In the same week, both the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine had articles about depression. Both talk about how widespread it is:
- “Every year, 7% of us will be afflicted to some degree (by depression)”, says The NY Times article.
-  “In 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant… In 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totaled $9.6 billion”.

There has been something very freeing about considering depression as “a flaw in chemistry as opposed to a flaw in character”. The positive of this has been to lift the old stigma that there was something morally wrong with you if you were depressed. Adding shame and guilt was just contributing to make depression worse, not helping people come out of it.

Now, medication can be used to help stabilize people to functioning levels where they can more effectively benefit from therapy. And therapy can help people establish new habits, new ways of being and of doing that essentially manifest in new neural pathways - - resulting essentially in a rewiring of the brain. 

So we’re in a better place to deal with depression and its crippling effects. Unfortunately, as the idea that it is possible to regulate moods gets more and more widespread, some misconceptions arise. Some people come to believe that the goal is to eliminate difficult feelings. This is not the case.

Emotions are crucial to our functioning, including difficult ones such as anger, sadness and grief. They perform very useful functions, such as moving us to action, or helping us reach depths of understanding that enrich our ability to deal with a complex world.

The goal is not to suppress feelings, but to contain them. Think about them as wild horses. They can be so wild as to be overwhelming. But the answer is not to kill them. It is to tame them.

See: Proactive psychotherapy

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