An epilogue

Abstract

It is increasingly recognized that people who are depressed can be helped by psychosocial means to resolve this crisis of their existence. Sadly, this optimism seems to be restricted to the margins of the clinical population we might call severe depression. As I noted in the Introduction, a curious inverse relationship exists between the degree of distress and the complexity of the intervention offered. People who are assigned, albeit unsympathetically, to the ‘worried well’ category may be offered individual counselling, participation in self-help groups, adjunct antidepressant therapy, couple or family therapy, and telephone ‘hotlines’. Those assigned to the more severe categories of depression, especially the ‘psychotic’ types, are offered the vaguest forms of support, either in hospital or the community, built around a monolithic drug therapy programme and the assumption that they are ‘inhabited’ by a disorder which is highly resistive to any treatment. This book is based on an alternative assumption: that complex problems require complex solutions. Personal complexity demands therapeutic eclecticism.

I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields; Reflection, you may come tomorrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.

(Shelley, 1921)