Well, I think before criticizing the "angry mob" of people with depression who have a problem with this article, it would be useful to try to understand why they are so angry. My visceral reaction to the headline and the summary (which I'm guessing were not actually chosen by the author) was similar. My husband nearly died from a suicide attempt that followed a choice to discontinue anti-depressant medications after his parents gave him yet another one of those "lift yourself up by your bootstraps"/"life is tough for all of us get over it" speeches. Most of us have heard this crap over and over again and have seen the trail of misery it has created. Articles like this one have been used to shame us and our loved ones. I'm personally counting down the minutes until my mother-in-law e-mails this very article to me.

That being said, there is a lot of value in the article. I also work as a therapist (just an intern at the moment, though), and in my experience with my clients, anti-depressants are sometimes extremely useful and sometimes really not necessary and occasionally harmful. But as was pointed out above, by the time someone gets to a therapist, they've usually had to run the insurance gauntlet for precious weeks and months, during which the only choice they have is anti-depressants. Exercise and diet can help, yes, but few people can exercise their way out of a real, clinical depression. I have known exactly one person in all my life who did that. This problem is systemic, and there are powerful interests mobilized to keep non-pharmaceutical options off the table.

Moreover, the stigma against mental health treatment serves only to blur the line between depression, on the one hand, and normal sadness, on the other. Critics who are pointing this out are doing so because that confusion is harmful to people on both sides - those who are depressed but keep being told they're just sad, and those who are just sad but think they must be in need of dramatic mental health intervention. The result is fear and ignorance on both sides, and that helps no one. So an article that is talking about the mistreatment of real sadness really needs to bring some clarity to that distinction. Otherwise it is going to be read through the projective lenses of everyone who encounters it, and nothing will be learned by anyone. All it will do is confirm pre-existing biases. You really need more than a toss-off caveat here and there effectively communicate about this issue.

And to counter pro-pharma propaganda, one must be careful not to produce articles that will simply become propaganda for the other side. No good inquiry comes out of that. All the author needs to do is situate his work in relation to the larger issue of mental health stigma (and work with editors who do not wish to sensationalize the issue at the expense of clarity and suffering). That's not so hard to do.

Lady spent years writing about her adolescent and lying to him about it. That type of behavior from a parent can seriously screw with a kid's sense of reality. Not to mention the fact that it is passive-aggressive in the extreme. The son had every reason to want to spend his adolescence stoned.

I think the quote from the son about how the parents have a voice where he does not is quite telling. It might not be 100% true of his situation as an adult, but when he was a teen and his mother was actively encouraging the entire readership of her column to invade his privacy, and denying all the while that she was doing it, what power did he have to be heard? Seriously, major power trip for the mom. Ick.

This article was brilliant, and it's even more brilliant that comments seem so far to be absent of anyone who catches its satirical tone.