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THE STUDY AND TREATMENT of depressions from a psychological point of view has not been a matter of major concern in recent years. This is difficult to explain in view of the frequency of depression and its profound difficulty as a therapeutic problem. There has been some speculation that depressive illness constitutes a lesser burden on the individual and on available mental health facilities than does schizophrenia. Such an assumption is highly debatable in the light of the misery, chronicity and ubiquity of depressive disorders. The fact remains that there is a continuous search for new antidepressive medications and that all present methods of intervention have distinct limitations and a fairly high degree of failures. It is my belief that psychiatrically effective forms of treatment must not only be safe for the patient, but they must also take into account the human dignity of both the patient as well as his psychiatrist. As time goes on, we will undoubtedly discover physiologically and humanly more appropriate forms of somatic treatment than those which are available to us today.
This brings me to the general concept of psychiatric illness as seen within an ecologic or interdependent frame of reference. The modern tendency is to approach mental disease from a biological, psychological and social point of view. These three aspects constitute elementary components and we cannot omit any one aspect without