I’m wondering if I am losing my eyesight or my mind here, but the United Kingdom appears to be out of control in its use of anti-depressant medication.

The Guardian reports that anti-depressant use is up 25% in the UK, with 43.4 million prescriptions.

Science Daily reports 46 million prescriptions for anti-depressants meds in the UK.

Google Public Data shows the population of the United Kingdom rounding to 63 million.

We have to account for the fact that each person may receive more than one prescription for anti-depressants. Still, these numbers are stupendous.

Dr. Desmond Spence of Barclay Medical Centre, suggests that “we use antidepressants too easily, for too long, and that they are effective for few people (if at all).”

He also argues that the current definition of clinical depression – consisting of two weeks of low mood, even after bereavement – is too loose, causing widespread “medicalisation.”

Interestingly, Dr. Spence also points out that 75% of those who create these loose definitions have links to pharmaceutical companies. Ouch.

The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) does not support the use of anti-depressant medication in mild depression, nor necessarily as first line treatment of moderate depression. Instead, they recommend talk therapy.

The UK does not appear all that interested in talking through their emotional difficulties as a first line of defense against emotional angst. I could be wrong.

Wondering why your appetite for more “things” seems insatiable?

A study to be published in the June 2013 Journal of Consumer Research confirms that people tend to find greater pleasure in wanting things vs. having things.

“Thinking about acquisition provides momentary happiness boosts to materialistic people, and because they tend to think about acquisition a lot, such thoughts have the potential to provide frequent mood boosts. But the positive emotions associated with acquisition are short-lived,” said study author Marsha L. Richins.

She continued, “Materialists are more likely to overspend and have credit problems, possibly because they believe that acquisitions will increase their happiness and change their lives in meaningful ways.”

Let’s talk about how this happens, then move on to the mystery of why people repeatedly convince themselves that they must have something, and then lose interest in it soon after purchase.

Chronic anger is so damaging to your body that it may out rank smoking, obesity and a high-fat diet as a risk factor for chronic disease and early death.

Worse, no one seems to know what to do with it. You shouldn’t suppress anger, say some, as that only enhances the physical damage. You shouldn’t vent it either, say others, as that only enhances the physical damage! Anger is maddening.

While the jury is out deliberating how to deal with it, anger is wreaking havoc among the inhabitants of planet earth. Below I have listed some of the effects of chronic or repressed anger. Most of these are scientifically researched, with references provided.

At the end of this article I briefly discuss the best treatment for anger of all types, in my experience.

What is NLP? NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

According to our friend, Mike Bundrant (who is an NLP practitioner and author of this new blog on the topic), NLP “is a grass roots personal and professional development movement that began in the early 1970′s when a small group of college students in Santa Barbara set out to discover the structure of subjective experience. This group of brilliant and curious souls, led by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, soon discovered a unique way of approaching how the mind works. The NLP models that resulted from exploring subjectivity constitute a singular contribution to the field of psychology and personal development.”

NLP is focused on the three components that comprise human experience — neurology or neuropsychology (the brain) and language, and the interaction between the two (the “programming” part).

Most modern practitioners of NLP simply see it as a pragmatic way of looking at human behavior and emotions.

According to Mike, “The NLP approach to human potential is a departure from convention. To learn to solve problems, NLP students don’t study those who had the problems to learn about what went wrong. They study those who used to have the problems and had since resolved them.

“With a unique process called modeling NLPers systematically deconstructed the mental and behavioral strategies that lead to success and taught those strategies to those in need.”

While there are those who discount the usefulness or underlying tenets of NLP, we take a neutral stance on the practice and keep an open mind. That’s why we’re happy to welcome NLP Discoveries to the Psych Central family, and hope you will too.