‘You’ve Got Nothing to Be Depressed About’ 

 The Arrogance of Dismissing Human Suffering… 

One of my patients came to see me last week, an intelligent, well-educated woman who’s been struggling with depression. When I asked her what help she had got from her GP she told me that her doctor was a woman in her forties, and when she had heard of her mental health issues she was told; 

 “You’ve got nothing to be depressed about — you don’t have kids.” 

I had to sit without speaking for a minute.  

Not because I didn’t want to swear, and not because I didn’t trust myself to speak. But because I was rendered speechless. 

The sheer obtuseness of that statement would be funny if it weren’t so cruel. It’s the sort of casual dismissal that tells a person that their feelings are invalid because they don’t fit someone else’s moral hierarchy of suffering. 

Apparently, depression only counts if you’ve earned it by having children. If you’re single, child-free, and employed, you’re expected to walk around beaming with gratitude. 

Could not this ‘heath care worker’ [read that with air-quotes, obviously] imagine that someone could be depressed because they didn’t have children? Or because their mother had died, had lost their job, or their husband had left them? 

This may be one careless GP, but it seems to me that even though we meet many dedicated health care workers who are empathetic in many areas of medicine, it’s symptomatic of a wider rot in the way mainstream medicine often approaches mental health. A mixture of arrogance, time pressure, and a deep discomfort with the messy, human parts of illness.  

Depression is not a contest. You don’t have to qualify for it by meeting a certain quota of life stressors. You can be clinically depressed even if your Instagram feed looks idyllic. That’s because depression isn’t about your circumstances, it’s about your brain chemistry, your stress physiology, your trauma load, your gut health, your endocrine system, your inflammatory pathways, your life story. 

Another patient told me that after explaining how anxiety was wrecking her life, the doctor just shrugged and said;

‘what do you want me to do about it?’ 

These distressing circumstances take time to unpick, and modern medicine has no time. 

The GP may as well have said, ‘Your suffering is inconvenient to me.’ 

When patients come to see me, I do what herbalists are trained to do: I listened.  

Because I am not a doctor with upwards of 30 patients to see a day, I can listen for more than five minutes. We talk about her sleep, digestion, energy levels, diet, and any grief or trauma. We talked about how we can pretend to everyone at work that she’s fine. 

This is not rocket science. It’s basic human care. But it’s astonishing how radical it feels to a patient who’s been dismissed or rushed out of the consulting room. 

And here’s the maddening thing: GPs, could do this too. The medical system doesn’t stop them from being kind. The culture does. It rewards efficiency, not empathy. It’s all about moving the patient along. The fifteen-minute consultation has become a conveyor belt of unmet needs. 

Of course, as herbalists, we’re the heretics in this system.  

And as such, we are warned against. 

Another patient was told quite firmly, not to come and see me or take herbal medicine, so now she has lost the potential benefit of what herbs could have done. 

The main assumption is that herbs interfere with their drugs, which is why we are trained to take a full drug history and double check so that doesn’t happen. 

The irony is, I have had to query a prescription given by my husband’s consultant neurologist because I know that it is contraindicated in his condition, twice… 

There’s robust evidence for herbal support in mild to moderate depression. St John’s wort, for instance, performs comparably to SSRIs in clinical trials with fewer side-effects, provided it’s prescribed by someone who knows what they’re doing. Rhodiola has good evidence for fatigue and low motivation. Saffron extract improves mood and sleep. Lemon balm, lavender, passionflower; all have been studied for their effects on the nervous system. 

But because the plants come in bottles rather than blister packs, they’re somehow seen as amateurish. 

Meanwhile, the same doctors who scoff at herbs are prescribing antidepressants with dismal efficacy in some groups and then blaming the patient or circumstances when they don’t work. ‘You’re treatment-resistant’, they say. Or query if they are taking the right dose at the right time. 

I often wonder what would happen if medicine rediscovered care as a legitimate therapeutic intervention. Listening isn’t ‘alternative’. It’s ancient. It’s the first thing we do when someone is in distress. The herbs, the nutrition, the sleep restoration — they all work better when people feel heard and safe.