Default Depression – How we now interpret human distress as mental illness by Anthony Smith
15 November 2023, Health, RRP $34.95, PB, ISBN 9781923042001
In Default Depression, author Anthony Smith examines the medicalisation of common human experience. Regardless of the context and cause, distress is increasingly interpreted and diagnosed as a mental illness – commonly clinical depression, Default Depression. This phenomenon has grown to the point that it now pervades all sectors of our community through formalised policies and practices such as workplace mental health.
Distressed people are directed onto a restrictive pathway of a formal medical diagnosis and treated with potentially harmful antidepressants while the causes of their distress are disregarded, including crucial social determinants of psychological and emotional wellbeing.
The suffering is real, but the costs for society and the individual of blaming biology, while not considering and addressing the causes of distress, is huge. Default Depression builds a compelling case for an extensive shift in how we support people in psychological and emotional distress – away from the damaging tendency to medicalise and medicate, towards a more nuanced and evidence-based approach.
The suffering is real, but the costs for society and the individual of blaming biology, while not considering and addressing the causes of distress, is huge. Default Depression builds a compelling case for an extensive shift in how we support people in psychological and emotional distress – away from the damaging tendency to medicalise and medicate, towards a more nuanced and evidence-based approach.
This new book can be purchased here from Wakefield Press.
Anthony Smith, former board member of Suicide Prevention Australia, is at the forefront of a movement that aims to change the way we consider mental health and suicide prevention. He is co-author of papers and reports promoting the Situational Approach, a concept that offers a fresh way of considering mental health by taking situational factors (such as economic and social disadvantage, and workplace stress) into account when diagnosing and treating depression and anxiety disorders.
For more than two decades Anthony has worked across Australia with networks such as primary health, the life insurance industry, men’s sheds and human resources, and at the community level in suicide prevention and research, built on collaborative work with a regional coroner’s office.
