Depression in Wales

There's an item at the Daily Mail on the rate at which antidepressants are being prescribed in a town in Wales called Blaenau Gwent.

There are 10,000 prescriptions being written each month for a community with 60,000 adults.

Now, I'm no expert in this area and if any of my readers are suffering depression I'm not the person to take advice from - consult with someone who knows you well or a professional.

But I can't help but wonder whether liberalism isn't contributing to rates of unhappiness and depression. The article mentions unemployment as a possible contributing factor, but it seems to me that liberalism undermines the sense of identity, connectedness, belonging and purpose that people once had and treats them instead as atomised individuals who exist to work and to consume.

That liberal way of doing things works best when you have a more glamorous, high status job (and when you have the social skills to understand that liberalism is to be ignored in some aspects of your life, such as family and community).

But what if you live in a working-class community where the jobs are gone, where the rate of family breakdown is high, where teenagers get hooked on drugs or booze and where the glamorous consumerist, careerist lifestyle seems out of reach? Where then are your anchors in life?

The residents of Blaenau Gwent need the support of stable family relationships. They need to have a role within the family that fulfils who they are as men and women. They need to have an ideal of manhood and womanhood to give a positive direction and a sense of pride. They need to have a sense that they are contributing in their lives to a larger, ongoing ethnic or national tradition of their own. And it would help too to be supported by a church culture and tradition.