In this piece, Dave Traxson discusses the social and cultural factors contributing to the rise of depression among young people in Britain, arguing that the medical model is inadequate to understand this epidemic or its potential solutions.
“So the depressing conclusion is that there are few certainties in the field of depression and how it develops at times of crisis like now. All we know is that there are many contributory factors for each human being, and that humanistic or naturalistic interventions have the chance of being equally as successful as bottles of pills. What many professionals believe is we need to ‘Drop the D’ for mental health disorders as in Depressive Disorder, and rather than rely too heavily on ‘medical model’ notions, that we should better describe the complex needs of an individual young person in a more effective and useful way to trigger a range of supportive interventions.”
