As the other comment with his wife and the NICU situation noted, the point here is people should be left to deal with life if they’re going through some shit.
IIRC the bereavement exclusion was six months? This made sense to me, if you had some terrible event in your life and you’re not back to something resembling your baseline mood and function after roughly that time period there’s probably something going on that needs to be looked at.
To me this is the mental health equivalent of “Sorry you sprained your ankle and it hurts a little, here’s a month of OxyContin and what could very well be a lifelong addiction”. We don’t do that anymore - today you’ll get ibuprofen and ice.
Even with more serious injuries you’re more likely to get lifestyle suggestions, physical therapy, etc than opioids.
In many cases we’re throwing pills that change mood and brain chemistry at people suffering from what is basically “life”. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be treated, I’m saying general practitioners throwing SSRIs at someone and diagnosing them with depression after talking to them for literally five minutes doesn’t seem right to me.
But it is easier and faster than hours and hours of therapy.
What comes first? An irresponsibly written anti-depressant prescription because someone said they have depression, or someone says they have depression because someone irresponsibly wrote them a prescription for an anti-depressant?
The point is that it's non-trivial to determine whether someone is simply bereaved. Or depressed, and bereaved. If someone is already depressed, bereavement is one of those things that can push them over the edge into attempting suicide. The exclusion criterion was too simplistic to cover the nuance of the differential diagnosis, so it was removed. It is a non-sequitur to say that the removal from the DSM is an endorsement of diagnosing MDD in all bereaved people. Some doctors might be doing that, but then the problem is that those doctors are doing the wrong thing, and whatever societal pressures might have affected them to do so. There is still disagreement about it in the field, and if the consensus shifts again it could very well end up being added back in, but probably I think it will evolve into a more specific diagnostic procedure to tell the cases apart.
IIRC the bereavement exclusion was six months? This made sense to me, if you had some terrible event in your life and you’re not back to something resembling your baseline mood and function after roughly that time period there’s probably something going on that needs to be looked at.
To me this is the mental health equivalent of “Sorry you sprained your ankle and it hurts a little, here’s a month of OxyContin and what could very well be a lifelong addiction”. We don’t do that anymore - today you’ll get ibuprofen and ice.
Even with more serious injuries you’re more likely to get lifestyle suggestions, physical therapy, etc than opioids.
In many cases we’re throwing pills that change mood and brain chemistry at people suffering from what is basically “life”. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be treated, I’m saying general practitioners throwing SSRIs at someone and diagnosing them with depression after talking to them for literally five minutes doesn’t seem right to me.
But it is easier and faster than hours and hours of therapy.
What comes first? An irresponsibly written anti-depressant prescription because someone said they have depression, or someone says they have depression because someone irresponsibly wrote them a prescription for an anti-depressant?