DR BECK'S DOGS AND DEPRESSION

I genuinely planned on having this piece on my blog for the past two weeks in order to honor 11October as National Depression Screening Day-- however life intervened.
Nonetheless, depression is. Every day. So I am adding some background and cetera to the statistical and cetera on my web site.
First, the very word depression derives from the French word d’espere, meaning without hope, or espere, in French. The very power of someone’s being without hope qualified it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins in the early Church. The Sin was called Sloth, and meant an apathy so great that someone experiencing it would actually take his or her own life, rather than feel for a single moment longer that profound hopelessness.
It is toward preventing that possibility of a life taken by its owner, that so many mental health professionals commit themselves—including Dr Beck.
A decade or two ago, Aaron Temkin Beck, MD—please go to his web site to see all he is still doing / involved in, including being Director of the Center for the Treatment and Prevention of Suicide at the University of Pennsylvania--conducted an experiment with dogs in order to re-create the human response to helplessness / hopelessness.
Following is what I remember from my graduate school readings of Beck’s experiment, because it affected me so profoundly in having a glimmer of what deeply depressed people experience that might lead them to a helplessness so great they would take their own lives.
Beck’s experiment began with dogs in containers. The dogs were administered electric shocks on a frequent basis. When the dogs endeavored to escape, by lunging at the container doors, they fell back, as the doors locked. Over time, the dogs stopped trying to escape the shocks, stopped trying to get out the doors, and lay down in the corners of the boxes, behaving listlessly, with no interest in food or movement or people.
In the second part of Beck’s experiment, he brought in a control group of dogs, along with the dogs in the original experiment. As before, electric shocks were administered. However, this time, the doors on the boxes were unlocked.
The control group dogs, upon receiving the first shock, knocked open the doors of their boxes and escaped.
And the dogs who had previously been unable to escape locked doors did not even attempt to break out through unlocked doors, but rather retired to their corners as listlessly as before.
As I remember, Beck and his team hypothesized that the original dogs’ observable helplessness to escape, and their non-active behavior exemplified human depression, with its self-described apathy, inactivity, and sense of hopelessness.
Clients over the years have described their severe depression as a “paralysis” making the simplest every day tasks, such as showering, combing hair, brushing teeth, getting out of bed as impossible.
I encourage anyone feeling depressed to go online and take the Beck Depression Inventory, as well as the Mayo Clinic Depression Inventory. Please, if according to the inventories, you believe you are depressed, I encourage you to first seek a licensed Psychologist or licensed master’s level clinician—Social Worker or Marriage Family Therapist for counseling. If you and your therapist decide it would be beneficial, then make an appointment with a Psychiatrist for medication management.
Research over the past decade reports that treatment with both therapy and medication is more effective than either therapy or medication alone for those with depression severe enough to benefit from medication.
I will be writing more on depression next week.