Re:when do you treat depression?

It seems to me that one treats Newton or Dostoyevsky the same way one treats a regular guy who has the misfortune to suffer from a serious, recurrent, potentially fatal problem. Certainly you wouldn't propose that we withhold treatment from creative individuals and only treat dunderheads.

It sounds as though your concern is that receiving CBT would somehow impair the individual's creativity and deprive them (and society) of future insights. However, I'm not aware of any evidence that undergoing CBT reduces creativity and my experience treating creative artists in several disciplines suggests that this is not a problem. Certainly, none of the clients I've treated has said that they wish they had their depression back because it made their life more creative or productive.

If CBT rendered one incapable of non-rational thought, then loss of creativity might be a problem. However, persons who have undergone CBT are still quite capable of non-rational thought. In fact, if anyone wants to give me a grant, I'll be happy to design a CBT program for increasing creativity which will increase participants' ability to make productive use of non-rational thought processes.

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Re:when do you treat depression?, by Willie Deuel, 04/26/01

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