Hi, Philip. There's a lot of depression-stress studies that very convincingly show the link (though we have yet to definitely prove it) between depression and stress pathways. From the stress pathways it's easy to connect the biochemical dots to cellular damage to all kinds of things going wrong in the body. Some of these studies are done by people who stand to make a lot of money if a drug company comes up with a CRF antagonist or something similar, but this is America where our public researh funding for mental health is criminally low, which gives researchers no choice but to beg for drug company money.

I'm okay with this to a certain point, namely if a researcher finds something promising, we want a drug company to be figuring a way to make money off of it. And yes, some of the researchers have been corrupted and I can name names.

A different set of studies is far more pure, but they simply show linkage rather than causation. These are the epidemiogical studies that investigate large population cohorts and track them over years and decades. These studies show those who have had depression dropping off like flies to heart disease and what not compared to those with no depression. A link is different than a cause, but the body counts are pretty frightening any way you look at it.

One of these epidemiological studies found a 26 percent higher death rate in a depressed elderly population. I extrapolated these figures with CDC data (very unscientific of me) and came up with just under 600,000 deaths annually in the US that could conceivably be linked to depression, way more than the 30,000 annual death toll from suicide.

So here's the advocacy translation. Instead of dissing big pharma (which is like shooting fish in a barrel), let's do some in-your-face outrage at depression and bipolar's "true" body count. Keep pounding on the numbers, show what a real killer this illness is, make a strong case for the government putting as much research into mood disorders as they do into cancer and AIDS and heart disease, get our health system (such as it is) to put some real resources into prevention and treatment.

If the media is too dumb that's fine with me. It means they will run with our message. If we wind up with a lot more public funding for research as a result, then it means we're less dependent on drug companies for research, with far less corruption in the system. So, paradoxically, by not trashing big pharma this is the best antipharma campaign possible.

Okay, I've laid myself wide open here. Let the discussion begin.