And another thing about depression

What is the most burdensome disease in the world today? According to the World Health Organization,  the disease that robs the most adults of the most years of productive life is not AIDS, not heart disease, not cancer. It is depression.

In this post from the New York Times' "Opinionator" online column, Tina Rosenberg addresses mental health treatment in the poorer parts of the planet, which often means looking into whether it exists at all. I don't post this in ignorance of the long-standing debate about whether western psychology holds the keys to the world's problems (hint: it can't possibly), but rather to point out that mental illnesses, like physical illnesses, are to be found just about everywhere. How we talk about them and what treatment we provide will likely be different; the need to provide something, however, seems pretty clear. As a researcher quoted in Rosenberg's post puts it: 

“There’s an assumption that after you bury five of your kids you get used to it, and it doesn’t hurt as much...People don’t realize you don’t get used to it. You just give up.”

In a time when changing climates and trade patterns result in more and more people being uprooted from their homes and ways of life, this issue is only going to increase. So yes, let's mitigate the social and environmental and geopolitical situations that so often leave people vulnerable to disease of all kinds, but let's acknowledge that once these diseases do exist, people need treatment--whatever that might be for them. And let's not lose sight of the fact that there is also a broad gap in access to effective treatment within our own country.