Maintaining the theme
of having “global” in the title of every paper it publishes The Lancet produced
a paper in January on discrimination experienced by people with depression
around the world. The authors surveyed 1082 selected people with depression in 35
countries and found that four out of five experienced some form of
discrimination.
The most common areas
where people reported discrimination was by family members, friendships,
marriage or divorce and keeping a job. Three quarters of people wished to
conceal their depression from other people (in the medical profession I would
suspect this figure would be higher).
It’s not entirely
clear what the point of this paper is as the participants were not randomly
selected but were approached by local research staff so the numbers are hard to
generalize and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nor did the authors report
discrimination by country which would have been interesting to see how they
stack up and might have generated ideas about how to address stigma.
Perhaps for
clinicians reading this the take home message is to ask the question “Have you
ever been discriminated against because of your depression or do you anticipate
any discrimination”. I would guess the most likely areas this would apply would
be at work or at the hands of the health system where discrimination against
people with mental illness is rife.
I hope your getting these messages I am not good st this sort of stuff computers
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