PRISONER EXPRESS

It once was a popular opinion of mine that my parents had no substantial knowledge to contribute to overcoming drug addiction, having never experienced it themselves, and came to realize that they actually had more real and right knowledge than a room full of wild-eyed recovering addicts equipped with enough horror stories to terrify even the most hardened of hearts. So a lack of experience in dealing with overcoming depression is not evidence enough to dismiss this paper outright.

In a rather lengthy article in a prestigious medical psychology magazine a top doctor in his field wrote on the "Economy of Melancholy." His argument was that drug companies have produced a pantheon of prescription medications that are particularly worthless without an actual disease that they can be prescribed for. In order to sell their pills and produce bank accounts worth billions they had to conjure a ghost--a haunting specter they conveniently call "depression." Unable to keep up with the medical language and not agreeing with the doctor's conclusion that even though depression is not something tangible in terms of medical science that can actually be dealt with by medicine, people should go right on filling their prescriptions as a type of Freudian "crutch"; I do not hesitate to depart from the article and psychology and slip into a sociological side of the equation.

With the skyrocketing numbers of these diagnosed with depression, it is an interesting study to look across social lines and back through history. It is no secret that the most affluent societies are those that are most plagued by the ghost of depression, and historically the phenomenon has exploded over the last sixty or so years here in America among middle and upper class circles. It is no secret but it is certainly a paradox that a fallback for prosperity is the need for prescription medications to make it from one day to the next when the poor, or at least the less prosperous, are relatively healthy in relation to psychological problems, particularly the problem of depression. I will not even attempt to untangle what the implications of all this may mean. Whatever the case may be, it is not my argument or opinion that overcoming depression simply involves overcoming our fears of ghost diseases or relinquishing material goods like an Antony or Francis of Asissi, however liberating those steps may be in themselves.

The argument in my mind is much more controversial than those things, and has been for years before my time back when depression actually haunted people under the mysterious name of melancholy. Controversial to the point to where the atheistic thinker Hobart Mower, one time president of the American Psychological Association, who committed suicide in his eighties was castigated among his colleagues for writing "For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from its as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense that is to have the excuses of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. The danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in existentialism, which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of self-hoof and identity, and with neurotics themselves, we find ourselves asking "Who I am, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?" In this sense, the ghost of depression serves to fill the coffers of drug companies to bursting while subduing our own natural sense of meaning and purpose that is inherent to all humans. It is my position that overcoming depression is centered in answering these question 'Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?" And having braved such an adventure and having answered those questions myself would go far to explain why the circumstances surrounding me almost demand a level of depression in my life according to modern psychology, yet still find me free from it's grip. The answers begin and ultimately end with filling that God shaped vacuum in each of our hearts written about by giants among men such as Augustine and Pascal and resound with the words of Bonhoeffer penned while a prisoner in a Nazi prison camp: "Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine."