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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Athlete Offers Uplifting News About Depression

Guy World took another step out of the Stone Age this week. One of its icons - a pro basketball player - publicly sought treatment for clinical depression, emerged with his hope restored and urged others to do likewise.

Whether you’re the one afflicted, or someone you love, you need to know the truth about depression. It could save your career, your marriage, your elderly parents, or the life of your teen-aged son or daughter.

Listen to Kendall Gill. Though he’s a talented guard for the Seattle Sonics, symptoms of untreated depression were wrecking his career. Days without sleep. A racing mind. Excessive squabbles with his coach. It was “very difficult” to seek treatment, he says now. “I didn’t want to do it because of the embarrassment and the shame. But I’m glad I took the step. The therapy I’ve gotten has been a godsend. It’s turned me around.”

It is a tragedy of this disease - yes, it’s a disease, not a moral flaw - that while clinical depression is readily treatable, there are obstacles to treatment: Social stigma. Failure to diagnose. Failure to treat properly.

Society pays a price for this ignorance. Depression strikes one of four women and one of ten men. Two-thirds go undiagnosed, untreated. This disease costs the nation $23.8 billion in absenteeism and lost productivity and immeasurable losses from depressionrelated suicide. You’re twice as likely to suffer depression as you are to suffer heart disease or cancer.

Treatment, as Gill can testify, can take hold rapidly. And treatment can be successful 90 percent of the time, largely thanks to modern medicines with reduced side effects.

But pills are not the whole story. The most effective treatment, long term, combines drugs with professional therapy, according to a major RAND Corp. study published in the January issue of the American Medical Association Journal. Psychiatrists, the study found, are more likely than family doctors to diagnose and treat depression correctly. Depressed patients appear with sleeplessness, headaches, substance abuse and many other symptoms which can lead both patient and clinician astray. Awareness is the answer. With insurance companies pressing for reliance on general practitioners and pills alone, RAND’s findings are pertinent.

Gill’s courageous stand is pertinent, too. You have to seek treatment to escape the clutches of this disease.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board