Depression

Psychiatrist: Judging by your lab results and the circumstances of your life, you must suffer from depression.

Me: How can I be depressed when I feel fine? That is an idee fixe in you, trying to persuade me of that. People get depressed because their lives lack love, meaning, purpose, and beauty. None of those things are missing in my life. Yes, a lot of bullshit and evil to deal with in this world, that gets a man down. That only means I am sane. Please stop trying to brainwash me that I have some psychic disease. You would have more luck getting me to believe in leprechauns. That is a modern superstition, an ideology masking the lack of love, beauty, purpose, meaning - God! - in people's lives. It is a social effect of capitalism and the lives it trashes. I honestly think – logically – your profession is analogous to the witch doctor.

 

Psychiatrist: The levels of substance xyz you have has been empirically correlated with depression. That is an objective fact.

 

Me: The correlation might be a fact. That the levels cause depression as a tornado causes a house to be blown down is not a fact. You see what you have been conditioned to see. “Reality” for you has truly been socially constructed.

 

Psychiatrist: What I do is science.

 

Me: No, you use the scientific method appropriate to a material, mechanical aspect of reality to study an object – the soul – that is not mechanical at all. I am not an organic machine but an embodied soul. True, my diseases take away my energy. But not my love of life, my boys, my books, trees, God, etc. I feel blessed - as long as I can forget what capitalists are doing to my sons, what has happened to my country, Ukraine, the state of the world -  and other more minor bullshit.

 Psychiatrist: I see.

Me: When our spiritual antennas are turned towards particular embodiments of truth, goodness, beauty - God - we are healthy as souls, even when our bodies fail. That is what I believe to be true. "I feel blessed, my life is meaningful, I love and am loved, I have joy over the life of the mind, I love teaching, (etc.) - but I am 'depressed.'" That makes no sense. “Depression” is a myth I have no use for. I think "depression" is a mask for the absence of purpose, beauty, meaning, and above all love - or the hope for love. It is the (despairing) belief that one is unlovable, one's life unworthy. Depression is the absence of hope, a modern mask of despair. Am certain of that as I am of loving our boys.

I don’t doubt that the absence of these things often results from childhood traumas, the absence of love in the family. Of course, these leave measurable traces in the brain – we are not pure spirits but bodily creatures who are also spiritual. But sometimes, it is the effect of a false, materialist belief system. And that materialist belief system encloses those who are victims of adults in a cage. Drugs or "therapy" cannot replace the absence of love (God) - the only "medicine" that helps.