Name: 【TEDx】TEDx馬裡博爾--尼爾-伯頓--《憂鬱的解剖學》。抑鬱症對你有好處嗎？ (【TEDx】TEDxMaribor - Neel Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy: Can depression be good for you?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T04:58:50.000Z
Duration: 17 min 49 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

so you'll forgive me for being completely outside my environment tonight.

That's partly because psychiatrists aren't very funny people.

Freud famously said that there's no such thing as a joke.

my topic tonight doesn't lend itself very well to jokes

and my topic is actually a very serious topic.

as a mental disorder that is a biological illness of the brain.

Today, I'm going to argue that the concept of depression

as a mental disorder has been over extended,

that depression or "depression" as broadly understood,

an idea that I explored, that I developed

in my recent book "The Meaning of Madness."

Now let us begin by thinking very broadly about depression.

There are important geographical variations

And these can in large part be accounted for

by socio-cultural rather than biological factors.

In traditional societies, human distress is more likely to be seen

as an indicator of the need to address important life problems

than as a mental disorder requiring professional treatment.

For this reason, the diagnosis of depression is correspondingly

Some linguistic communities do not have a word,

or even a concept with which to talk or think about depression.

such as fatigue, or headache, or chest pain.

who have recently emigrated to the United Kingdom

to make sure that they haven't developed post-natal depression.

conceived of giving birth as anything but a joyous event

with which to translate the concept of depression into Punjabi.

Now, in modern societies such as the UK and the USA,

people talk about depression very freely,

As a result, they are far more likely to interpret

and also far more likely to seek out a diagnosis of the illness.

At the same time, groups with vested interests,

or indeed, so called mental health experts

promote the notion of "saccharin happiness" as a natural,

default state and of human misery, of human distress

The concept of depression as a mental disorder can be useful

for some of the more severe intractible cases

that are treated by hospital psychiatrists.

But probably not for the vast majority of cases

which are relatively mild and short-lived

and easily understood in terms of life problems,

Another non-mutually exclusive explanation

for the important geographical variations

may lie in the nature of modern societies themselves

which have become increasingly individualistic

For many people living in our society today,

life can seem both suffocating and far removed,

lonely even and especially amongst the multitudes.

By encoding their distress in terms of a mental disorder

that the problem lies not with itself, but with them,

fragile and failing individuals that they are.

Now, of course, many people prefer to buy into this

rather than, I suppose, confront their existential angst.

However, thinking of human distress in terms of

a mental disorder can  be counterproductive

because it can prevent people from identifying

and addressing the important psychological

or life problems that are at the root of their distress.

but only that the diagnosis of depression

to include far more than just depression,

If like the majority of medical conditions

depression could be diagnosed according to its etiology

or pathology, that is, according to its cause or effect,

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【TEDx】TEDx馬裡博爾--尼爾-伯頓--《憂鬱的解剖學》。抑鬱症對你有好處嗎？ (【TEDx】TEDxMaribor - Neel Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy: Can depression be good for you?)

important

people

life

understand