The Royal College of Psychiatrists has issued a warning that women are at risk for mental health breakdowns if they have an abortion. The Times of London reports that this professional and educational body for psychiatrists in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland has recommended that abortion information that’s distributed should be updated to include details of the risks of depression. “Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information,” the group said.

Meanwhile, the British Parliament will soon vote on a proposed reduction on the number of weeks into a pregnancy a woman can have an abortion from 24 to 20 weeks.

Stateside, Planned Parenthood’s eugenic and racist roots are showing in Idaho, thanks to a UCLA pro-life student magazine, The Advocate.

A recent study of “new generation” anti-depressants, like Prozac and Zoloft, concluded that they have little clinical effect on the majority of depressed patients. The conclusion suggests that since only the severely depressed really benefited from the drugs, their effect may be largely psychological and most people can get better without them.

The advent of the new-generation drugs in the late 80’s saw the rate of depression diagnoses increase 500 to 1000-fold. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 118 million of the 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in 2005 were antidepressants, making them the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US.

While some hail depression diagnosis and treatment as forward progress in combating a serious social-health issue, others argue that the increase in diagnoses is directly correlated to the effective marketing of pharmaceutical companies, and the doctors who are sitting pretty in their hip pockets.

There are doubtless people who suffer from crippling, life-threatening depression, and for them, medicine may be the best answer. But just because science enables us to understand what chemicals or genes cause depression, the solution does not lie perforce in drug remedies that dull the effects of those processes.

Clinical psychologist Michael Yapko has argued that the modern social and medical perspective on depression, as merely a brain disease, is too “one-dimensional.” “Striving to convince people they’re diseased doesn’t empower them to actively change their lives in meaningful ways,” wrote Yapko in a September 5, 2007 opinion piece in The Courier Mail. “We can teach better relationship skills, better problem-solving skills and better ways to cope with an increasingly complex world.”

The good news is that many people who think they are clinically depressed are, in fact, not. The question remains as to whether or not people are willing to undertake the work necessary to cope with their sadness instead of just popping “happy pills.” As one doctor put it, “we now have the expectation that we should never experience unhappiness.” If this is true, it might prove a boon for drug companies and doctors alike who profit from our institutionalized aversion to feeling sad.

Have you ever been really sad?  Were you confused about whether or not you were just sad or actually, clinically depressed?  Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute reviews a book that feels your pain: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield.

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Each week, Wilma Runia visits a 99-year-old woman who can no longer hold her own Bible. The woman has no children and she’s outlived two husbands.

From a worldly perspective, she, like many elderly people, has reason to be depressed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults 65 years and older have a higher risk of suicide than any other age group. Reasons for depression include the loss of loved ones and increased physical limitations. But Ms. Runia, a resource person on aging in the Christian Reformed Church, told WoW that elderly people also start reviewing their lives: “They start asking, ‘Why am I here? What’s my purpose now that I’m older?’ If you get in that state, it can go from bad to worse in a very short time.’”

Each week Runia makes home visits as part of a nine-person team that supports the elderly and dying: “They say, ‘It takes a village to raise a child. Well, it takes a village to care for an elderly person.”

Runia also speaks to clergy about how to better involve seniors in their congregations – in both intergenerational and senior activities. She recommends each church have a trained team committed to visiting the home-bound on a weekly basis, so the church can recognize suicidal thinking and remind individuals of their value in God’s eyes.

“I’m not looking at wrinkly old ladies but children of God. We have to look beyond the wrinkles and physical limitations,” Runia said.