Keywords: Depression, Melancholy, Foucault, Anti-Psychiatry, Global Art Cinema

The Pandemic

A depression pandemic is sweeping the globe and its end appears nowhere in sight. Study after study confirms skyrocketing diagnostic rates: now about ten times more prevalent than it was only a few decades ago, depression has become the world's leading cause of disability. Approximately 350 million people live with a depressive disorder and over 800,000 people commit suicide every year. This startling statistical trend has politicians and public health officials scrambling to mitigate a crisis that deepens with every moment by increasing the resources allotted to public mental health services. However well-intentioned these institutional efforts may be, their attempts to quell the depression outbreak have proven largely inept because they are grounded on the credulous presupposition, which has also now become a hallmark of liberal democratic ideology, that increased access to mental health services will actually translate into improved mental health.

Studies on dominant treatment methods are showing their benefits to be as modest as ever, and broad-based initiatives to administer “evidence based treatments” to the public have yielded underwhelming clinical results. To make matters worse, no curative breakthrough lies on the horizon since the basic research on depression has long resigned itself to the search for topical solutions. Martin Seligman, a depression researcher and former president of the American Psychological Association, has outed the “dirty little secret” that biological psychiatry and clinical psychology have totally abandoned the search for a cure. “The road has come to a dead end at symptom relief,” he writes. “Every single drug on the shelf of the psychopharmacopeia is cosmetic. There are no curative drugs and no drug is in development that I know of that aims at cure” (46). Even after having abandoned the loftier goal of cure to settle for mere symptom suppression, clinicians are witnessing relapse after relapse. Access to first-rate treatment has done little to change the unwavering fact that once someone has been diagnosed with severe depression, it is typical for them to battle with a high risk of relapse for their entire life.