Unfortunately, the advice to repeat the mistakes that were made last century will not go very far and are ill informed.

To indicate what I mean, I give only one example among many. Notice the first boldfaced title, Fighting Evil, in this article sets the tone of the advice: in working with depression or suicide there is the suggestion to consider yourself “fighting an enemy”, “fighting ills”, which are then compared to a form of “military activism”. William James was not alone in viewing Mental Health as warfare (see: https://medium.com/@Simplicus/part-iii-mental-heath-care-as-mental-warfare-c13abf49ecb7)

This trick of turning suicide and depression into an enemy was first made into a sort of therapy by early psychologists and psychiatrists of the last century before they recognized that their patients actually became worse. Though some may have experienced a certain initial “cheerfulness” and empowerment by considering their illness as an enemy, in the end, if the patient had a depression now they were left with a form of paranoia fighting against an invisible enemy. Or if this invisible ‘enemy’ should become ‘me’, then the step from depression to suicide is not far away.

The use of a psychosis to cure a depression is familiar to anyone who has a minimum of psychiatric training: replacing one illness with a second more official illness that is worse, but more manageable, than the first illness is habitual in medical history. From bloodletting with leeches as a cure for fevers to frontal lobotomy as a cure for mental illness, fighting the first illness by giving the patient a second one, may make the first illness more intelligible, but with most often deadly consequences.

It is a bit like the bombing of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was no infant of the heart, but by making him into public enemy #1 and a monstrous tyrant, it made things so intelligible that Bush could level the country with bombs; thus, leaving it in a state that is worse than it was before.

This paradigm of illness as warfare, psychosis, and paranoia, is an old trick of the failed therapies of the last century. It still saddens me today to read how the lessons of history are never learned in the journalistic accounts.

More effort,

S