It's very easy to maintain the binary view that people are crazy and get "sectioned" or they're sane and so aren't. But life ain't like that.

Under the Soviet regime anyone who refused to conform was mentally ill and needed treatment. Of course, that was different from Uncle Joe's solution but it was barbarism all the same.

another view might be that if you are not harming yourself or others then, so long as you have the self-medication of choice, be it alcohol or anti-depressants then so be it. But who measures harm ? And who is to decide that intervention may not create greater happiness and who measures that ? There are indeed depressed people who hate the cosh that keeps them sane, that keeps them from the blinding light that, in their view, makes everything else bearable and that, without that, there is no hope of happiness.

And there is my friend, who knows the Black Dog only too well; who came to fear its onset, would came to chart her friendships, her work, her every action in terms of how they kept it at bay, living her morbid twilight forever circling that patrolling sharp-clawed abyss. And even then, too often, she would succumb. Her cure was too end up in a relationship that was so fraught that she had no mental energy to focus internally. Drained by the misery of the real she had no energy to feed her phantoms. Her saying was "I'm too unhappy to be depressed". And as her friend, I was happy for her.

keep to the Fen Causeway