I was immeasurably relieved to see a study last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry that indicated that suicide rates dropped among depressed people soon after they started treatment with antidepressants or psychotherapy.

You might wonder why I say I was relieved instead of just pleased. Mainly because SSRI antidepressants have been taking it on the chin since 2004, especially when it comes to adolescents or children being treated with them. It was in 2004 that studies came out that indicated that younger patients on SSRI antidepressants had a higher rate of suicide. This, combined with a suit by a publicity-seeking state attorney general against GlaxoSmithKline, led the FDA to institute a “black box” warning on all SSRI antidepressants except Prozac.

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I had depression as a child. It went undiagnosed, since I grew up in the seventies and no one knew that children could be clinically depressed. I finally was diagnosed and successfully treated at age 27, but by then my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood had been profoundly affected.

I fervently wish that it had been otherwise. My depression made me a detached, shy and lonely child. I had no interest in anything other than reading and participated in very few activities. All in all, not a great childhood.

Fortunately, things have changed for children with depression to a great extent. However, while we now know that children can be depressed and understand more about how it differs from adult depression, we are unfortunately still not quite where we need to be in terms of diagnosis and treatment.

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I have been playing computer games since the late 1980s. The first computer game I played, Sleuth, was composed of ASCII graphics and text. You were trapped, Agatha Christie style, in a mansion with several other houseguests, one of whom was a killer. It was fun, but you definitely couldn’t say that the graphics were immersive or anything approaching virtual reality. In Sleuth, your viewpoint was an overhead view of a very simple floor plan. But since then, computer games have evolved, and graphically they are now as far from Sleuth as the space shuttle is from a caveman’s wheel.

As I said in a recent blog piece, I have often used computer games to escape from depression in the past. In fact, an increase in my computer game time is often my first indication that I’ve become depressed. So, as you can imagine, I was intrigued when I heard that scientists from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) had done a study utilizing virtual reality technology from a computer game to measure the severity of depression in the study’s subjects.

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