withdrawal effects. Doctors are becoming progressively more aware of the addictive nature of anti-depressants, which, paradoxically, is precisely why they now frequently recommend that these drugs should be taken for life. But the elevation of mood will only be temporary, so the dosage will in due course need to be increased, or one drug changed for another, if the effectiveness is to remain the same - just as in any form of drug addiction. Furthermore, variation of mood is precisely what gives life its colour and to homogenise it with anti-depressants is a terrible thing to do to people. A life without colour may be functional but it has surely lost much of its value.

Surgeons may well be anxious to help their patients in any way they can but their methods are sometimes barbaric. Just as the treatment of alcoholism with Antabuse (which has a deterrent effect because it causes nausea when the patient drinks alcohol) and the treatment of drug addiction with Naltrexone (which is an antieuphoriant, taking away the pleasure from the use of the drug) still leave the patients with underlying emotional cravings, similarly the use of surgical treatments such as jaw-wiring, stomach-stapling, intestinal shortening, liposuction and apronectomies, all leave sufferers from eating disorders with their continuing cravings. These treatments are not treatments at all: they merely tidy up the end result of the illness and do nothing whatever for the emotional illness itself. The cravings and the misery continue and the patient feels even more hopeless when yet another "treatment" fails. The surgeon may claim success, pointing to a change in body weight, but even their physician colleagues will point to the secondary effects of some of these procedures, affecting the liver and kidneys and other parts of the body as a result of changes in the absorption of nutrients from the gut. Even the surgeons themselves will become aware that their "treatments" often have to be repeated.