I went to Shoppers tonight to get a prescription filled, and while I waited, I read their HealthWATCH pamphlet on Emotional Health. I was flabbergasted by the following excerpt, which I am not making up:

Doctors refer to conditions that affect emotional health as “mood disorders.” They include:

• depression
• anxiety
• stress
• bipolar disorder (manic depression)

Seriously, what the hell? Were people high when they wrote this pamphlet? Since when is stress a mood disorder? Or anxiety, either, but labelling stress a “mood disorder” is particularly stupid, since that would mean that every single person in the entire world has suffered from a mood disorder at one time or another. Sure, stress affects emotional health, but that doesn’t make it a mood disorder. An especially baffling thing about the wacky pamphlet is that there is a section on the Shoppers Drug Mart web site about emotional health, expanding upon what is in the pamphlet, and it doesn’t include a ridiculous statement about stress being a mood disorder, but does include a subsection called More than just stress which contains the line, “Because some signs of depression are similar to those that occur with stress, having some of these signs does not necessarily mean that you have depression.” Which, you know, actually makes sense.

Maybe people realized that whoever was in charge of their Emotional Health stuff was doling out very obvious misinformation and it was a lot simpler to fix the site than to fix the pamphlets?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Labels, Depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.