Think About It 106: DOROTHY ROWE

 

Whenever we puzzle over why something happened we rarely say, 'No one knows,' and leave it at that.  Rather we make up some theory — a guess — about the cause of that event.  This happens all the time in medicine and psychiatry, but unfortunately these guesses are often presented to patients as known facts.  Many depressed people have been told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and few doctors have gone on to explain that this is a theory, not a fact, because no one knows what a chemically unbalanced brain is.  Some doctors will also say that antidepressants put the chemical imbalance right.  This clearly cannot be the case for, as the scientist Susan Greenfield has often explained, antidepressant drugs have an immediate effect on the functioning of the brain, yet any antidepressant effect is not felt for ten days or so.  Clearly something else is taking place, but as yet no one knows what that is.  Some doctors tell patients that antidepressant drugs, especially the latest drugs, the SSRIs, target certain parts of the brain, but scientists who study the brain say that this is not so.  Drugs which affect the brain affect all of the brain.

 

Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (1983)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the The Real Causes of Depression, an essay by Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE in which she argues that depression is not the product of 'a chemical imbalance in the brain' as is widely touted by the medical profession and drug companies — a hypothesis now accepted (though not publicly) by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Institute of Psychiatry:

 

https://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/item/192-the-real-causes-of-depression-february-2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

Think About It 080: DOROTHY ROWE

 

 

Think About It 054: DOROTHY ROWE 

 

 

Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE

  

Think About It 080: DOROTHY ROWE

 

You would agree that we all should be sensitive.  So many people are not.  They are completely hard and uncaring.  Not you.  You feel sometimes that your awareness of another person's suffering is especially keen.  You do not just know how the other person feels, you feel it yourself, right inside you.  It is not just the suffering of the people around you that distresses you, but the suffering of every person in the world… Being a sensitive person also makes you very vulnerable to the rudeness and bad temper of other people.  Some people, hard, uncaring people, are never upset if someone is rude or angry with them.  They can just shrug it off.  But you cannot.  You get hurt, and the hurt stays, and as often as not this makes you feel very depressed… Unfortunately, some people who get depressed argue to themselves that, 'My sensitivity shows that I could be a great artist but my sensitivity makes me too depressed to create.'  Thus one can have a sense of being special without having to prove it.  It is much better to think of oneself as someone who could have been a great artist if only I was not such a caring person/I had a chance/the world had not been against me, etc, etc, than to have tried and — worse than to have failed — to discover that one was merely ordinary.

 

Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (1983)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the The Real Causes of Depression, an essay by Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE in which she argues that depression is not the product of 'a chemical imbalance in the brain' as is widely touted by the medical profession and drug companies — a hypothesis now accepted (though not publicly) by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Institute of Psychiatry:

 

https://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/item/192-the-real-causes-of-depression-february-2007

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE

 

Think About It 021: ROLLO MAY

 

Think About It 043: KAREN HORNEY 

 

Think About It 054: DOROTHY ROWE

When reality becomes too much to bear we can comfort ourselves with fantasies, which is wise provided we remember that the stories we tell ourselves are fantasies.  If we fail to do this, if we think that our fantasies are real and true, we join the forces of unreason.  In the ranks of therapists there are some who do just this.  They develop a logic which conveniently ignores those constructions which do not fit their theories and thus they collude with the forces of unreason...
        Such collusion seems on many occasions to go beyond a mere failure of nerve. It seems instead to be an inability to understand and accept the peculiarity of our existence.
        This peculiarity is that, while the world we live in seems to be solid and real and shared with others, what we each experience is our individual construction.  We can imagine events which occur without any relationship to us, but what we have is not knowledge about such events but theories about such events.  In fact, everything we know is a theory, a construction, and this construction is inside our head...[and] our construction can come from nowhere other than our past experience, and no two people, not even identical twins, have the same experience.

The Comforts of Unreason (1997)


 

Use the link below to read the full 1997 article The Comforts of Unreason posted on the website of Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE:

 

http://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/book-introductions/item/321-chapter-8-the-comforts-of-unreason-in-living-together-ed-david-kennard-and-neil-small-quartet-books-1997

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE

 
Think About It 023: CHARMIAN CLIFT

 
Think About It 043: KAREN HORNEY

 

Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE

The different experiences which psychiatrists call mental illness or mental disorder begin with an overwhelming fear and a feeling that your very self is shattering, even disappearing.  This happens when you discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is.  Mental illnesses are not illnesses but defences to hold the person together when he feels that he is falling apart.  These desperate defences are terrible to endure but, if we are willing to learn, they can teach us that we need to change the way we live our life.  It isn't always easy to change how we see ourselves and our world but, as the testimonies of many people show, it is in our power to do so.

The Real Causes of Depression [February 2007]


 

Use the link below to read the full article The Real Causes of Depression by Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE in which she argues that depression is not the product of 'a chemical imbalance in the brain' as is widely touted by the medical profession and drug companies — a hypothesis now accepted (though not publicly) by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Institute of Psychiatry:

 

https://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/item/192-the-real-causes-of-depression-february-2007

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Think About It 001: ROLLO MAY

 
Think About It 009: LIZ JENSEN

 
Think About It 011: LEE NUTTER