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We spend some of our discussion time in class on Monday debating the degree to which the study of depression and the treatment of depression should focus upon psychopharmacology and upon neurobiology, whether it is appropriate that the majority of time and resources devoted to researching the disorder are spent in those areas.  To me personally it’s a difficult question both because of my personal inclination, which is towards interest in those biological and pharmalogical areas, those are the areas that I myself am most interested in understanding and so my own curiosity is best satisfied by the current biological focus and because in the long term I do believe neurobiology holds the greatest potential of the areas of depression research while at the same time I recognize that non-pharmacological depression treatment has been proven to be very effective in many cases and merits further investigation. 

I think the streetlight metaphor might have been a little belabored by the end of our discussion but in those terms I tend to think that there is good and bad in the logic that the area best illuminated is the area that it makes the most sense to continue to investigate.  If we’re speculating as to where the keys that we’re looking for are my guess is that they’re eventually going to be in the direction of that light, ultimately everything involving the brain is a chemical process and if those processes could be perfectly understood than what exactly causes depression would be understood as well.  Practically it is certainly also true that neurobiological and neurobehavioral research is an easy sell for funding currently, allowing for research into the biological side of depression to be logistically easier than behavioral research.  On the other hand at present it’s not clear that in the short term that medical treatments of depression or of other mental disorders is more effective than behavioral treatments, and I am sure that there are many who would be far more comfortable receiving behavioral treatments than pharmacological treatments. 

And all of this is of course assuming that depression is something that needs to be treated, that the thinking of depressed individuals is problematic and needs to be corrected.  There’s no doubt that there are a great many people suffering from depression, or from other mental disorders, who would like to be treated, and to no longer experience their disorder.  There are others, however, and whole categorizations that are the product of a behavior that is non-culturally normative, but not necessarily unpleasant, or something for which many want to be treated.  There has been a great deal of discussion regarding the Gender Identity Disorder and its place in future versions of the DSM, and I imagine that it could very well go the way of some of the other disorders that once described behavior that was considered abnormal but have since been phased out as culture has changed and as those behaviors have been recognized as not “disordered”.  Whether some of the less obviously contentious disorders, like mood disorders, will eventually meet the same fate is hard to say, but imposed treatment is a very grey area in psychology both because it can be argued that the nature of disordered thinking may preclude a patient from acting in their own interests and because the nature of the idea of disordered thinking makes the idea of forced treatment a very uncomfortable one.