Madam, - I'm sure many people were interested to read Gareth O'Callaghan's account of his struggle with depression in Monday's edition, especially his key words: "Expression is the opposite of depression".
As he says, most sufferers of this widespread condition endure in silence or rely exclusively on psychiatric medications (the debilitating effects of which Mr O'Callaghan mentions in his article).
It is worth cautioning, though, that great problems will follow if the person suffering from depression seeks expression through actions, not words; we see this every day in modern Ireland in the phenomena of alcoholism, violence, promiscuity and suicide.
It seems to me as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst with many years' experience in the public health service that Gareth O'Callaghan has discovered for himself the core values of the undervalued "talking therapies": we don't advise or counsel, we just listen with an informed, trained and experienced ear, and thereby provide the depressed person with the opportunity to discover their own long-agonised "I", which has lain unexpressed for so long.
By the expression of the long repressed word, the depressed person can liberate their "I" into a truth and enjoyment, and escape the imprisonment of the pain, ignorance and fear which Gareth O'Callaghan so eloquently described.
What an excellent service you have done your readers by giving expression to one man's experience of this widespread source of misery! - Yours, etc.,
JOHN HUGHES, Harlech Downs, Clonskeagh, Dublin 14.