The Forgotten Healthcare Option: Mental Health Screening

By trade I am a magician. Many people tend to wonder why someone whose vocation is to amuse and make people smile promotes depression awareness. As I bring magic into my audience’s lives, some of those same spectators may not experience or hold on to that happiness as the rest of us can. According to the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), one in five of us suffer from depression. To that one in five happiness is the magic fantasy. One of those one in five touched my life. It was through that person, I witnessed the powerful devastation depression brings not only to the individual affectedbut also to their friends, families, and all relationships that surround them.

Depression steals the magic from every life it touches. Depression awareness can help bring themagic back. As a magician, helping to bring back the magic through awareness has become part of my vocation.

October 5th has been designated National Depression Screening Day. The Screening for Mental Health Inc. (SMH) organization began program in 1991. Since then, over 600,000 screenings are done yearly implementing SMH’s plan. Not everyone can visit or is comfortable attending a public free screening facility. SMH has even gone a step further using the internet to make testing more convenient. Now, a person may go to the organization’s website to use the online program. The address is wwwmentalhealthscreening.org. Now, anyone can have the convenience of being tested discreetly in the privacy of their own home.

While online testing is a positive step forward, it is a mere scratch on the surface. Detection is half the battle. In a publication distributed by NAMI called “Understanding Depression explains that ” eighty to ninety percent of depression may be effectively treated. Information from the American PsychologicalAssociation (APA) website and pamplets support the claim. On the other hand, both associations report that many cases go unrecognized and untreated. NIHM adds that many people seek treatment through the quick fix “give me a pill” method and never follow through with complete therapeutic programs. The organizations agree there are problems with regular medical doctors prescribing :antidepressants without full exams and evaluations or proper monitoring. This leaves the symptoms treated, but doesn’t attend to the causes. I wonder if these same doctors would treat a knife wound without removing the still protruding knife.

The overall “quick fix attitude grows from our developing into a “fast food society.” Basically, we want our world delivered at the drive-thru. Of course that is after we placed our order into some two way speaker system where neither one of the communicants can understand what is being said. You know the aftermath scenario where you find got fries instead of nuggets when you’ve already driven down the block. I have read many breakdowns of the how and why of different antidepressants, their side effects and relationship to various types of depression syndromes. The scenarios are mindboggling. When it comes to depression, any professional who thinks you can cure someone by just taking a pill[ should be placed in solitary confinement. Anyone who thinks a pill showed them the light, should be viewed with extreme caution. Pills not only do not effect a cure, but they might cause some severe problems.

My childhood physician had his own analogy for “pill dependant” treatments. First he would ask, if you hit your head on a low pipe and got a headache would you take aspirin for the headache? Of course I’d say yes. Then he would ask, if headache goes away due to the aspirin, is that a good thing? Again I would say yes. He would finish up with this ponderable, “So, do you think you should take aspirin every morning for when you walk into that low pipe again or should you avoid the pipe?” In translation he was asking if I wanted him to treat the symptoms each time I came back or find the reason for my illness.

There is a conundrum to awareness. Do you just hope the problem passes, pop a pill, or should you tackle the causes? One in five are coping with depression. In the US that is equivalent to over twenty-one million people. The process begins at awareness. We control where the next step takes us. We are ultimately the source of our own happiness.

“Happy people are those who deliberately do things that invariably lead them to happiness.”

- Brian Tracy, Business and Sales Coach