Depressing response by medics

Dr Adrian Brady (Letters, Apr 5) takes Niamh Drohan to task as she rumbled the patent prescription of anti-depressants to stressed and anxious students as seemingly de-rigeur among many medical GPs (“Depressing truth about treating depression in the young”, Apr 3).

The nature of Ms Drohan’s investigative modus operandum appears to spook Dr Brady a lot more than the content of her stark revelations, which, by any measure of decency, are both debilitating and damning. Perhaps he, and presumably many other GPs, are unsettled that their lazy convenience in reaching for the prescription pad has been exposed yet again.

The fact that she was able to elicit such a raft of anti-depressant medication posing “as a student from a local college suffering from stress and anxiety problems”, is a disturbing reality which warrants ever much more exposure and reformation. Stress and anxiety are regular, natural and normal responses to significant challenge and acute pressure of circumstance, such as impending college examinations. They require ameliorative choices drawn from a wide range of creative and supportive therapeutic options.

The core question to be asked, is why does any of this at all fall into the remit of “medicalia” in the first place? What is essentially a personal-relational issue should be viewed and illuminated via an essentially supportive sociological lens, encompassing all sorts of therapeutic/counselling options.

These are valid even in acute circumstance. Vested interests, professional-patch empowerments and a stubborn reluctance to think outside the narrow bio-scientific box will, however, perennially protect the incumbent status-quo. One can always live in hope that Dr Brady and colleagues could engage his own advisory that their “future output will show a little more reflection and maturity”, as he has asked of Ms Drohan.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford