 |
About Us
The REAL cause of our Current Depression?
The REAL Cause of our Current Depression?
By Monte Farber
When I was seven years old my mother started acting very strangely. She stopped cleaning our house and herself and it scared me a lot, once it got so bad that I noticed. I remember waiting with her for the ambulance to come – she voluntarily committed herself, probably to get a mini-vacation from taking care of Karen and me, but also to keep from doing us and herself harm – and I asked her what was the matter? “I’m nervous,” she said. “And I’m depressed.”
So, depression is something that I know well and I’ve given it a lot of thought. Before I met Amy, I remember one time when I actually thought I was clinically depressed, but the realization was enough to motivate me to get off my ass and do something about it. It’s hard to be depressed and very busy at the same time. It’s like the way smiling, even when you’re sad, helps to lift you out of feeling down. Taking the action stimulates the reaction and soon you’re on your way to a more normal and manageable level of depression.
Amy is the most positive person I’ve ever known and when I’m with her it’s almost impossible for even me, a genetically predisposed depressive, to be depressed. Last week, the two of us came down with some weird bug and one of the symptoms we both manifested was depression. It was really scary!
As freelance artists who have built our life and business into a seamless affair of the heart, we work as hard as we can every day. Our joke is that we didn’t want to have nine-to-five jobs so now we have ninety-five jobs. That’s what working for yourself is, but I’m not complaining. In fact, I would have to say that I am certainly one of the most fortunate people on the planet right now and have been for some time. Amy and I love each other and everything flows out of that. We have many skills that we get to use creatively. Our bills are paid (for now!) We’re relatively healthy (for now!) And we have great expectations for our future, as far as business goes.
We’re not Pollyannas and we know that the odds are that as we get older, we will suffer and most certainly die. We pray that we go together but we know that’s a lot to ask for. But we do our best and that usually keeps depression, what manic-depressive Winston Churchill called “the black dog,” at bay.
Being sick and so depressed got me thinking and I came to a startling realization:The economic Depression dissolving our fragile illusion of peace and certainty is, to me, yet another outward manifestation of our inner life. As we all struggle with our own personal depression, most of us nobly soldiering on for the sake of those we care about, it is not surprising to me that our global collective consciousness has projected outward a physical manifestation of the daily struggle taking place in our inner landscape.
I am a New Age author and my theory may read like a wild Age of Aquarius variation on standard New Age jargon to the ignorant and the uneducated, but the somatic link between mind and body is well known to doctors both in practice and well documented in research studies. The “placebo effect,” a sugar pill’s ability to affect healing through the power of suggestion’s influence on the subject’s mind, is only one example of the many scientifically proven ways in which our mind can affect our body’s function, general well being, and the specific healing of a targeted malady.
Even to those familiar with the somatic cause of illness, it may seem like a huge if not impossible jump from an individual’s depression causing distress in their mind and body to a global economic melt-down, but please allow me to prove my case. I fear that unless we start taking huge jumps in many areas of daily life our depression and our Depression will only grow in power and consequence.
The inevitability of death is depression’s embryonic fluid. It is not, however, what I believe to be the specific somatic cause of this global Depression. All human activities are to a large extent a reaction to this supreme fact of life. Those that are not directed at ensuring our basic survival needs are variations on the theme of “Whistling past the graveyard,” distractions that keep us circling the landing field of our final destination and why not? The purpose of life is to be happy, isn’t it? And there are so many great people and wondrous discoveries and amazing inventions and a seemingly infinite panoply of opportunities to be happy that it seems like a most special kind of ingratitude on my part to say we are all depressed.
This is a special time in the world’s history, however, and each of us reading this is in the grips of an inner depression that is at least in part a reaction to the overwhelming tidal wave of professionally produced and skillfully crafted words, images and sounds alerting us to each and every one of the worlds miracles and problems.
This stream of real-time suffering and ever-new forms of danger flows to us all day, every day, igniting our body’s fight-or-flight mechanism, bathing us in adrenalin designed to help us fight or run away as fast as we can, but we do nothing because we are told that fighting or running away are both wrong. They are not wrong, they are what we’re supposed to do when we are threatened. We who watch TV, listen to the radio, or get our news from the Internet are living in the mental state of prisoners, slaves, serfs, warriors and those caught up in wars and the like, though we only have had to live with mostly constant threats bombarding their eyes, ears, and psyches and not the even more horrible realities they portend.
MORE TO FOLLOW IN A COUPLE OF DAYS
|
|
|
  |
|
 |
ShareThis
