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Depression: Mind or matter

Renowned professors go head to head over West’s biggest psychiatric illness


Lewis Wolpert


Raj Persaud
TWO of the country’s leading medical experts locked horns over the best way to treat depression – the Western world’s number one psychological disorder.
Professor Lewis Wolpert of University College London – who once suffered so badly from the condition he felt suicidal – argued with the TV pundit Dr Persaud at Gresham College, in Holborn last Wednesday.
Known as the “black curtain of despair,” the debilitating condition cloaks its victims in insufferable melancholy and can lead to self-harm and suicide. It is growing in all age groups, and is seen most in the young, especially teens.
Experts agree that tackling depression is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. But what is the best way to treat it? Dr Persaud argued only psychiatrists could help.
Prof Wolpert said the condition was a disease that needed to be treated with drugs not counselling.
He said: “One in 10 people who get it end up killing themselves. I was hospitalised. One day I woke up and wanted to kill myself. You don’t hear many people say it but anti-depressants were very helpful.
“One thing I learnt is that partners and carers are not much help – seeing a doctor can be extremely important. Even if they tell you your dog loves you that can be enough. The last thing you want is a psychiatrist making you more depressed by bringing up your childhood or your parents.”
Dr Persaud, the college’s visiting professor of psychiatry, argued it was more important to fight the cause of depression with psychiatry – the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental and emotional disorders – than mask the symptoms with anti-depressants.
He said: “We have to ask why depression is becoming more and more common. Our lives are supposed to be getting better. We are richer and there have been technological advances with fertility and disease but levels of depression are rising.”
Dr Persaud said the National Health Service’s model for treating depression was inadequate. He said: “There is no blood test for depression. The standard of treatment in Britain is brutally simple. The facts show that while first line treatment of depression by anti-depressants may sometimes control the symptoms, it usually does little to give sufferers depression-free lives. We have to ask why people are depressed.”
“Men often get depressed from alcoholism or loss of ambition. In women it is often through a breakdown in relationships.”
But 73-year-old Prof Wolpert, who lives in Belsize Park Gardens, said Dr Persaud didn’t know what he was talking about.
He said: “I think you have never been depressed. It can be about small things. You are confusing depression with sadness. Depression is an extreme form of sadness. There is nothing in literature that adequately describes depression. If you can describe it you haven’t had it.”



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