It made the news this past week — researchers have found what they believe to be a blood test that may identify depression in teenagers. But some write-ups of the news got the importance of this possible test completely wrong.
Melissa Healy, writing for the LA Times, for instance, suggested in her opening sentence that, “Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult disease to diagnose.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Depression is so easy to diagnose, in fact, that family doctors — who have no special training in psychiatric disorders — feel perfectly qualified to do it every day. You simply ask a person about 9 possible symptoms, and if they agree to 5 or more of them, and have felt that way longer than 2 weeks, they likely have depression.
In fact, it’s so easy to diagnose, we have an online 8 question depression quiz that research has shown can screen for depression nearly as accurately as a professional.
So what’s the real significance of this potential blood test for depression? And what unintended consequences might it have?
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Funny, when I was first diagnosed as a teenager with major depressive disorder, I looked at the doctor and said “Can’t you just give me a blood test to see if I have depression?” Never thought I’d live to see this day. That diagnosis did transform into bipolar fifteen years later, so I hope that technology advances to the point of genetic differentiation between disorders. This is a good thing.
I was always wondering why people insist their depression is biological as opposed to emotional thing. To me it sounds that if you suffer “mere” emotional trouble it is something less that supposedly biological depression.
Suffering is suffering. If my world collapsed because my long term relationship I invested so much in, and I am depressed… is it less genuine that supposedly biological depression? What if person whose world collapsed (and I doubt we want qualify break ups or being fired from job that meant a lot to us as PTSD) and they don’t know how to deal with it would seek help and “fail” the depression test, what happens?
I would prefer if there was more focus on the humane and existential parts of depression then hunting for evidence of biological causation that may or may not be there. It would be much more usefull if depressed young people were given guidance in their life (because being young in today’s uncertain world is pretty damn hard and it is easy to get lost in life) instead of being given prescription for psychotropics and nothing else.
Many troubles young people go through are merely being young… but there were times when family, neighbours, teachers… and other people cared. These days many expect children and teens to raise themselves and then are suprised it doesn’t work out. I think this problem behind many cases of teenage depression today (I am not saying all of them, some may be something serious and more). But it’s much more conventient to blame forces we cannot control.