"Various shades of depression are often par for the course with cancer, and can affect patients as well as close family members both directly and indirectly. There are various types and degrees of clinical depression, each requiring individual evaluation and appropriate treatment. Depression can also be an understandable and realistic reaction to cancer, and to other of life’s more morbid events and developments. Such so-called "reactive depressions" with known triggering events, should be distinguished from major and recurrent mood disorders with organic, metabolic, or unknown causes.

Antidepressant medications, properly prescribed and monitored, can alleviate symptoms and prevent suicides. Like antibiotics, however, psychiatric medications can be overly-prescribed as a convenient and impersonal way to avoid delving into intimate emotional problems. In today’s medical market place, the easiest and cheapest way to treat mood disorders, whether or not they have a manifest situational cause, is to prescribe a pill. For busy doctors, prescribing pills seems less intrusive than probing into personal matters. Quick prescriptions for common medications are white-coat polite, and seemingly more cost-efficient and "scientific" than psychotherapies and counseling. Unlike prolonged psychotherapy, a prescription pad implies that we are quite sure we know what we are doing.

Because depressive symptoms are so frequently encountered among GIST patients, many of whom already take other pills besides Gleevec, adding yet another long-term medication may simply increase untoward side effects while the patient waits in vain for a therapeutic response. The following "vent" by Tom Overley is both a rational and emotional objection by a serious and thoughtful GIST patient to contemporary and cumulative medical temptations toward pill-slinging, much abetted, may we add, by pharmaceutical marketing practices including widespread, direct advertising campaigns to the lay public. GISTmate Tom is no slouch… He is a song-writer, poet, guitarist, a man of faith, a helpful humorist on the List, and a practicing attorney. He writes compassionately in response to a fellow GIST patient.