I run into two kinds of depression. There's biological depression, in which the poor person is depressed and sad no matter what is going on in life, because the brain itself is not working right. Then there is situational depression, which happens to all of us at one time or another; crappy experiences happen, and we get depressed. For treating the former, you pretty much need medicines. For the latter, medicines are a last resort, because the depression goes away when you make your life better. It's a lot harder to do that if you're doped up on tranquilizers, so I heavily discourage use of drugs like Xanax or Valium for anything but the worst of cases. The issue does get muddied, though, for people with biological depression, because people with it tend to have problems because of it, which in turn creates situational depression on top of biochemical depression; it becomes difficult knowing where one ends and the other begins.
I just can't wait until we get out of the trial-and-error chemistry days of medicine and get into the nanomolecular days of hacking the code of the brain and reprogramming ourselves. Imagine if you could decide for yourself that you wanted to be a certain way, and then you just WAS that way. Yes, yes, I know it's terribly abusable power. But, is what we're doing today any better? How many millions of lives are getting thrown away because of hardware psychiatric problems like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia going untreated? How many people must live in dire poverty before someone gets the idea that maybe giving us the power to fix our own brains might not be such a bad thing? What if we could render Alzheimer's and multi-infarct dementia obsolete and age confidently, knowing confidently that a healthy retirement awaits? (Or better yet, how about not dying at all? But, that's another futurist biotech issue.)
Ever talk to a person with bipolar disorder? The person knows he or she is surging emotionally and wants it fixed one moment, only to lapse into a ball of undirected emotion the next. They want to live better, but they can't stay off drugs or out of jail. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to fix that?
But, I'm getting off topic. The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. Well, maybe I'm not so far off, afterall. Because, finding the right balance of the two will help us find the fastest way to get from where we are now to where we need to be. The longer we dawdle and take our time as a civilization, the more of our own people we throw away.
