When it comes to depression, the British stiff upper lip is alive and well. A recent survey by the charity Turning Point reveals that three quarters of British people experience depression at some point, making it one of the UK’s most common health concerns. Despite its prevalence, a third of sufferers do not seek help due to embarrassment, worries about confidentiality and a feeling that they could cope by themselves.

Turning Point’s findings are depressingly familiar to me. As well as being a journalist, I work part-time as a parents’ helpline adviser at the mental health charity YoungMinds, where depression is the most common theme of the calls – even if the “D” word is never mentioned. Some of these calls are carbon copies of each other – the names, locations and social classes change, but the story remains the same: a young person has dropped out of education or employment, they’ve stopped seeing their friends; they can’t even get out of bed or hold down an undemanding part-time job. Why, ask many parents, won’t they just pull themselves together?

I’m originally from Brazil, where chatting openly about your emotions, problems and, indeed, your psychotherapist (among the middle classes, at least) is de rigueur. But I was brought up in Britain, where depression is rarely out of the news, yet is often treated with a mixture of suspicion, contempt and shame. It’s not just young Neets (not in employment, education or training) who are falling prey to it – although one could be rather superficial and say that, what with today’s job market, they have the most to be miserable about.

Depression is, of course, much more than just status anxiety. From Alexander McQueen’s death to Dolly Parton’s recent revelation that she had been suicidal in the 1980s, every week another gifted and admired public figure is revealed to have suffered from crippling misery. Artists, writers and performers, however, have a get-out clause: they are allowed to express their dark sides, so we don’t have to.

Around 31m prescriptions for antidepressants are doled out every year to the British public. After all, pills – like cognitive behavioural therapy – are cheap, and fit neatly into the idea that a depression is a “chemical imbalance” that can be easily cured. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr John Steiner tells me that the chemical imbalance idea can be “damaging, but it’s partly true. Some people are just more prone to depression than others. But then there’s also an interaction of that person’s genetic make-up with their relationships”. According to Steiner, CBT “can often work in the short term, but it doesn’t affect the underlying problem. It’s a symptom-treatment, like antidepressants”.

Longer-term psychotherapy aims to uncover those underlying problems. But as anyone with depression will know, getting referred on the NHS to anything other than CBT is almost impossible. On the YoungMinds helpline, I’ve even heard of young people being offered electroconvulsive therapy before talking therapy – one would think that it would be the last, not the first or second, resort.

Imagine if you had cancer and you couldn’t get referred to a life-saving treatment. Like cancer, depression kills people and destroys lives – not just of sufferers, but of their families too. Just as there are different types of cancer, there are different types of depression. I suffered a relatively mild version a couple of years ago and I was at pains to disguise it: after all, I had a fantastic job at a newspaper, a wonderful boyfriend and loving, supportive family and friends – what did I have to be miserable about?

A friend of mine has suffered from a more aggressive form of the illness. “It feels walking through treacle,” she said. “Everyday tasks seem exhausting and impossible, people terrifying and hostile, and life an endless desert of weariness and despair.” Unlike me, she’s been through the mill of NHS mental health services, has gulped down the antidepressants and tried CBT, to little or no avail.

“It too often seems like an admittance of weakness, in a way that having a broken arm or gastric flu just doesn’t,” she admits. “I’ve felt very, very patronised by GPs. Being asked questions like, ‘Do you feel worthless?’ or ‘Do you feel suicidal?’ in a form-filling monotone is somewhat dispiriting. It’s hard to be strong and assertive when you’re suffering. And often that’s what you need, when services are very hard to access.”

In short, people who cannot afford private treatment are being locked out by a system that favours cheap, temporary fixes over long-term results. Yes, access to proper treatment for depression – the kind that can actually change one’s life – would be a drain to the economy, but so are all the depressed, under-supported people who make up the majority of incapacity benefit claimants.

Economically, it could make perfect sense, if a more productive, happier Britain was within our grasp.