Tuesday, 4 December 2018

NIMH's Inaccurate Depiction of Depression Treatments

a post by John M. Grohol for the World of Psychology blog

One of my life-long battles is to ensure that people get the most objective, useful information they can about mental illness and its treatment. It’s painful to me when I come across a popular website that misrepresents these illnesses or their treatment.

So you can imagine my surprise when I reviewed the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) page on depression recently. This is a super-important page to get right, because it often appears as the number one or two search result in Google.

It starts off well enough, but then devolves when it gets to a section entitled “Treatment and Therapies.”

Biases can be in your face, such as when a psychiatrist suggests, “Take antidepressants for depression — it’s the only thing that works!” Or biases can be more subtle, even unintended.

Continue reading


No comments: