Mark Baxter

But it was outside the realm of kind of talk therapy.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm glad you're asking about this.

And I took some time to think about it because it's one of those kind of catch-all phrases that means so much and kind of means so little as well.

So people often come with like a referral around, you know, depression, anxiety, those kinds of things.

And so it's something that many people have had experiences of or have loved ones or family members, colleagues.

So I think it's important for us to kind of look at this in a little bit more scrutiny, I guess, and put the lens on it.

So I'm glad you asked.

In some ways, I think about depression more as a kind of a syndrome than a diagnosis.

A diagnosis is a specific thing that we know about, we know the history of and how it's caused and why.

Whereas at the moment, a major depressive disorder to diagnosis is kind of like a grab bag of a bunch of different kind of symptoms.

So we've got things like fatigue,

Lack of drive, sleep issues, numbness, cognitive impairment, low mood, sadness doesn't go away, excessive guilt, sometimes anxiety, things like that.

And that in itself is kind of like when we look at what's happening underneath that, there could be a whole range of different kind of causative factors for that.

So one issue with the diagnosis is it doesn't sort of give us that much information.

It just sort of names a bunch of things which the person already knows about.

So I just spent like a minute writing down things just to give your audience just a flavor of kind of like as someone comes into therapy or they might see their GP or someone like, what are we initially looking at?

What are we doing here?

And part of what we're doing is understanding the person's story, but also keeping our eyes open for the things that might be contributing to their situation.

Things like their sleep patterns, substance use, as I said, adverse childhood experiences and trauma, chronic inflammation, bipolar history, low thyroid, low testosterone, elevated cortisol, chronic health conditions.