Prayer vs. Prozac

Are today’s doctors too quick to slap the “clinically depressed” diagnosis on healthy people who are merely unhappy? Yes they are, says Gordon Parker, a psychiatry professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Writing in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal, Parker even goes so far as to call depression a “catch-all” diagnosis driven by marketing. (In the United States, antidepressant pills are doled out more frequently than drugs to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma and even headaches.) Parker might have supported his argument by citing a 2002 study, published in the journal Psychosomatics, showing that moderate levels of prayer and “other types of religious coping” — such as support from fellow church members — helped spouses of cancer victims beat back feelings of hopelessness and depression.