Impressions on Depression

The two articles below this one, giving the contrasting opinions on how to treat Depression, provide a valuable commentary on the idea that depression is natural, and that taking drugs to deal with it is also natural and normal.

It's not. Have you seen a depressed dog? Have you seen a lion walk off a cliff because it's so depressed? Oh, but people are different? So because we are a higher intelligence, higher beings, our behaviour is more understandable. Hmmm. Interesting.

I am not being pessimistic or harsh, by saying we are living in a very sick society. The foods we pump into our bodies are full of chemicals, and laden with fat. The airwaves, the information we are fed daily is garbage. A lot of what we are doing and saying is garbage and bullshit. How to get away from the bullshit? Lance Armstrong says it well: Before I got cancer all I did was live. Now I live STRONG.

Yes, I'm also advocating a higher consciousness way of living. Living by being awake. Knock knock Neo.

Depression is a very interesting case. Almost everyone has it, or had it, or knows someone who is struggling with it. It's in my family.
Before I even comment on depression, I just want to expand a bit more on why I say our society is sick. The leading killer of people on earth is not war, or any other intentional form of us killing each other (you'd think it might be eh...) but it's not even disease. It's car accidents. It's us unintentionally killing each other on our way somewhere, where usually one person driving is half asleep or not sure what he or she is doing. Read that again. Now repeat after me: That's the leading killer of people on Earth. It's a lot of carnage, a lot of people dead. And it's a ridiculous.
If we sat down in our classrooms, or collectively sat down in church and took stock, people would burst into tears. But because cars are essential to our lives, and part of our addiction to cheap oil, the death toll is simply absorbed. We should hide or run screaming when we see a car. Instead we panic when one surfer gets eaten by a shark, or go after a dog that bit a little girl. Whacko priorities, zero sensibilties.
Just like you and I know family and friends who have depression, we also know someone who died in a car accident. I was in a serious car wreck that gauged out my knee and thrust my skull into the rear view mirror, breaking it into 3 pieces (the rearview mirror, not my skull).

Cancer is a huge killer, and heart disease, and both of these are largely preventable. In fact all these killers, cars, heart attacks, cancer, are all related to our lifestyles. It's a continuum. It's all connected, and you can't get away from that.
We live in a TV Reality world, where reality seems equitable with beauty or happiness with wealth, but these just deaden and cheapen reality even more, and so we slave after it ever more intimately.
Some of our highest values need to be health, and happiness through sharing, and family, and real, loving relationships between sincere people, whatever they look like. Obviously if you're healthy, you;'re going to have a certain shine, a certain happiness flowing through you. Not just a healthy body, but a healthy mind and spirit.

How do you get this whole package?
Well, here's a clue. If you have depression, or are depressed often, or get depressed, the depression can best be described as a flu of the soul. If you get physically sick, it means your system, your immunity is run down. So you are slowed down even more, and hopefully during convalenscence whatever pattern that created this scenario of sickness, that gets broken and you don't do it again. You get more sleep, you get more rest, you eat less junk. If not, you get sick again until you GET IT. And if you ignore the little red lights that only you can feel, if the stress is spinning through your body like a spiderweb, and you have anger and resentment, and pain, and unhappiness, and you just leave it there, well, I am sorry to say, you may not get the flu from these sicknesses, but after enough years, this stuff will manifest as cancer of some sort.
My opinion is that Lance's testicular cancer was brought about to a large extent by his cocky, aaggressive, angry young man perfectionism. He was wound up, seething, and that ate into his tissue, sprouting where the genes ordered, infesting a beautifully fit body with a rage of cancer.

Now he is calmer, and more powerful. His energy is deeper.

Depression is different to flu or cancer, in that it is a sickness of the mind and soul that simply hangs over the body, and shuts it down. Depressions message is simply this: I can't carry on like this. I need to be someone else, or do something else, because this isn't working. This is killing my spirit.

I agree with Tom Cruise that a chemical imbalance is a stupid term. That's like a fat person saying they have large bones. So what if either is true. To say that stuff basically disempowers you to do anything about it. If you have fat bones, are you going to drink hydrochloric acid to dissolve them as a strategy to get thinner? Of course not? If you have a chemical imbalance (which has come about through endless cycles and patterns of you ignoring your inner voice, your inner child), it's because you like to:

Make little things bother you. Don't just let them, MAKE them.

Lose your perspective on things and keep it lost: don't put first things first.

Get yourself a good worry, one about which you cannot do anything.

Be a perfectionist, which means not that you work hard to do your best, but that you condemn yourself and others for not achieving perfection.

Be right. Be always right. Be the only one who is always right, and be rigid in your rightness.

This is the easy road, where you eat easy food, spend time in the past, trying to resolve it or understand it, or dream constantly of a happier place that is always beyond now, perhaps Heaven when life is over, or tomorrow, beyond what we can achieve today, where you lose your temper, hold grudges, compare yourself constantly to others, and never interrupt yourself to do some real, decent thinking. Real thinking is strategic, is working out a problem, not working yourself into one, creating one out of your own thoughts, where you just chew on the bone endlessly and uselessly. Stuff like am I attractive, does God exist, how can I make more money, is the world ending, what happens when I die, what can I do about that thing outside of me...

The hard road is where you spend real time by yourself, and fix things. You see the mess you made and fix it. You cook, you clean, you take yourself for a walk. You assess the damage to your own body, and mind, and you purge. You find the people whose feelings you have hurt, and respect them, and those who have hurt you, you forgive, or let them go.
You find some way into the NOW. And practice staying here and now.

Depression is trying to get you to wake up out of your gray, empty, meaningless life. The more you ignore it, the more it persists. You know what is healthy. Your body and soul have a mechanism of showing you, or telling you, if you think you can pretend not to know. If you don't listen to these messages, you can use tricks like medicenes, and these will help you be comfortable in your earthly slumber, more complacent and peaceful in your laziness and lack of will. But you only deepen your weakness, and your darkness.

I see a present world full of a lot of fat people in the world's wealthiest country, outnumbered by starving people. I see a tremendous imbalance. I see an incredible lack of sight. 5 million people and more have died of AIDS in South Africa. That's approaching Holocaust numbers. And increasing. Yet we periodically think about it, then forget about it. The problems in far flung communities, in barren wastes, that we so easily cast aside are soon to visit us in our homes. It is not forever that we can fight the diseases with our lazy approach to antibiotics and medicenes. The virusses out there do not rest. They evolve. Peak Oil is another crisis facing a world filled with sleepwalkers.

My recipe for dealing with depression conincides with a lot nof what Tom Cruise says. I am not a scientologist, but I consider myself a spiritual person, and someone who knows a little about a lot. I believe taking drugs can work for the desperate and the lazy. If someone is suicidal and you can get through to thier madness saying, "Hey, take this pill, and you'll get better," and that prevents them from jumping off a cliff, go for it.
But the desperate and the lazy account for a lot of far less desperate and far more lazy people than those at the very end of their tether. I'm talking about those multitudes who have already given up, and who are our sleepwalking companions, unable to livestrong because the stuff coursing through their veins keeps them deadened, keeps them semi awake, keeps them from having orgasms or any original emotion.
So you have someone who is not on Prozac dealing with a large population of zombies. This is dangerous. It's people who don't really care either way. They're just trying to stay alive, and they'll go with whatever makes them feel better.

To combat depression, who have to acknowledge that the problem, the source of the problem, is you, and how you have been living, and what you have been thinking and doing. You have to interrupt those patterns. You have to wake up.
It's simply about being accountable.
Simple does not mean easy.
Simple means healthy, and healthy means exercise.
Exercise is one of the ways we push ourselves into doing something simple. It's how we practise for the real thing, pushing ourselves, motivating ourselves to go somewhere, to speak to someone, to try something new at work.

It also means a new pattern of thinking. Positive thinking. Critical thinking.
And it means being conscious. Especially being. Once you focus on being, the consciousness flows, and you're in the Now. The only place that matters, and the only place that really exists.
Depression happens when you first realise that you've been asleep (Ie when you first awaken)and you don't know whether it is best to go back to sleep, or emerge even further into what feels like terrible, cold, uncomfortable reality.

I prefer the word Overburdened to depression. Depression, like God, is a word robbed of the vitality and usefulness of its meaning. If you are overburdened, you need to let go, unburden yourself of thoughts, and activities, and take a new direction. Or you can continue on with steroids and other things that make you feel better, including people who tell you it's alright, that you're alright, that it's natural, and everyone feels the way you do from time to time. And then you pay them and next week they tell you the same thing.
Part of the accountability that Depression asks of you, is you facing yourself. You being true to yourself. That's very hard to do when you are explaining on someone's couch (who agrees with everything you say), and you're rationalising your whole life.

It's when you are by yourself, in nature, or exercising somewhere, that you finally see and you finally say, "That's it. I'm done living that way. Now I'm going this way." That's when you get inspired by life, and can livestrong again.