Depression & Suicide
“Can be it prevented?”
22/5/2003
Usually if you ask the wrong question, you get
the wrong answer. In relation to depression and suicide, the right
question is not, ‘can depression be prevented’?’ but ‘why is
it that people are depressed and what is it the real cause
of depression?’
Depression can be prevented as a bird can fly
without wings. I say this because depression is a spiritual
illness rather than a physical one. Nowadays, in our
materialist society where physical welfare [read self-gratification]
is of utmost importance, the intangible, the spirit, is almost
totally neglected.
A depressed person is like a car with a flat
battery – a recharge or a new one is needed for a new start. As I
said depression is a spiritual illness and it is the spiritual side
of the individual that has to be reinvigorated or
cured.
How we do that? There is no secret recipe or
formula for depression. The sufferer needs a spiritual
revitalization through faith in God. It sounds easy, but it
is not. Actually, to reestablish a belief in anything, let alone
faith in God, takes a long time [except in the case of a miracle].
But as the saying goes, ‘a mile
starts with the first step.’
Today the hardest reality for modern man to
comprehend is the spiritual
reality. It is believed that ‘spiritual’ is what you
‘feel’ or think. Nowadays, thanks to the education system and the
controlled media, we have been immersed in psychological propaganda,
to the point that we have become zombie-like, with no spiritual life
in us.
We excluded God from our life long ago [one
hundred years?], with the teaching of evolution as
fact in the school system. Since then Christianity has been replaced
by other beliefs – myself, self-esteem, my feelings…But those
beliefs can be summarized under the name of New Age.
New Age “religion” is now the “religion” of the
20th-21st centuries, the religion of the mind.
“Christianity is over and done with – old hat,” they say. As a
result we have many problems in our society: delinquency, murder,
rape, homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, bestiality, pornography,
child prostitution, promiscuity, drug addiction, divorce, abortion,
euthanasia….what else? Yes, in particular we have
depression and
suicide. All those
problems are the fruit of one-dimensional-life in our daily
existence. What is missing in our life is the spiritual
dimension, which only comes from going back to our roots,
i.e. God.
“Here we go again – we have another bigot in
our midst!” you might say. If I am a bigot by definition,
because I tell the truth, then I am quite happy to be one. “The
exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth’”.
I spent a few years in Madagascar and on the
Africa continent. I lived a decent and joyful life among the people
there. I spoke their language, and shared their daily sorrow and
happiness. However in the nine years I lived there I never met a
depressed person, never heard of suicide. “How come?” you might ask.
The reason is that those people do believe in something. They
do not live in a spiritual vacuum as we do here in Australia.
Regardless that Christianity was introduced to
Madagascar over one hundred and fifty years ago, half of the
population is pagan. They have faith in life though. But life to
them is not as we conceive it here in Australia. Life to them
primarily is the strong bond that links the living to the bygone,
the ancestors – the intangible reality from which life came and
continues in the new generation. Also life for them is everything
that unites, such as the family, clan, tribe and nation, which are
kept together by totems and taboos. When totems and taboos are
broken the family, clan, and tribe pay the consequences by disease,
famine, tragedy, wars, etc.
It is this belief that keeps the person
together within him/herself and within his own culture/society. Once
the fabric of the culture/society [family, clan, etc.] are broken,
the individual is the first to be estranged and damaged physically,
psychologically and spiritually.
Finally, there is nothing in our physical world
that can replace the spiritual indescribable reality within us, but
only God and faith in Him.
But do we really want to be cured from the
scourge of depression? If so, the answer is there for us. As
Alexander Tytler said in History of Man.
From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependency
From dependency back to the bondage.
