Is depression a real illness or a moral weakness?

Every time I hear doctors affirm that depression is a brain disease that they can easily treat thanks to loads of anti-depressors, it truly frightens me.  Put yourself in the shoes of an individual who has been feeling down for a while, and who is being told that he or she is suffering of a clinical disease.  What alternative is there besides believing blindly what the doctor says, since the condition is unilaterally diagnosed as a medical issue?  As soon as it becomes a truth inside the mind of the depressed one, a diabolical spiral from which it is extremely difficult to extirpate emerges.  It becomes a conviction that leads to additional sufferings, including a heavy addiction not only to anti-depressors but also to all those pills that are required to offset any side effects that anti-depressors generate.  This is a never-ending vicious cycle, from which only a very few are able to get free.  Interestingly, from the presumably ill’s perspective, this highly altering cycle is not viewed as a destruction of self.  Instead, it is considered as the only process toward a possible recovery.  This is totally insane, because it is founded on a lie.  Lives are being annihilated every single day because of the blindness with which society chooses to function.

I have worked with men and women who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bi-polarity and clinical depression.  And I can ensure you that none of these individuals had a real illness.   Some did have a momentary moral weakness.  Others were so perceptive and aware of their surroundings that they could not handle those thoughts and voices that they were constantly hearing, so they had to shut them off at all costs.  Finally, a few did not know that they were inviting foreign energies most of the time.  Not everything has to make sense.  Not everything has to be tangible and the result of a scientific conclusion.  So before embarking on a life-long addiction to meds, I would strongly suggest that you search within your soul what is really going on, why it is going on, and the reasons that lie behind the fact that you are absolutely refusing to acknowledge what is going on.

::: Do you really need to label yourself to prove that you exist?

There are people who absolutely need to stick themselves with a label that is commonly-accepted or recognizable, so they are able to feel that they belong.  Now if you assume that the label automatically contains a positive connotation, allow me to say that it is not the case.  It can be as absurd as, “All my girlfriends are miserable in their marriages and take pills to cope with the misery, so I’d better be miserable in my relationship too…”  This kind of choice does not have to make any sense to you.  If you try to understand it, then you give yourself no other option but to judge it.  And to judge is utterly counter-productive.  I remember a man in my spinning class who was so proud of sharing with other attendees that he drank twelve beers every day.  In my world, this is self-destruction.  However, from his viewpoint, the choice to embrace the unspoken label “alcoholic” made a lot of sense, regardless of what his motives were.  “I am chronically depressed” is also a label that some individuals adopt as their core identity because, as crazy as it may sound, it provides them with a benefit.  The challenge is to admit truthfully what the benefit is, so change can become a possibility.        

While some folk have a very acute “gaydar,” I have an extremely accurate radar that identifies emotional extortion and passive aggressiveness.  I run away from people who display such demeanor.  They are toxic and their sole target is to alienate everything that you are, including your talents and your happiness.  And yet this behavior is a reflection of a label called “I am a master-manipulator.”  The desire to manipulate encourages some people to create moral weaknesses, which then turn into diagnoses of real illnesses.  How many men and women do you know have entirely constructed their nervous breakdowns, out of the necessity to control their families and friends?  When you identify someone who is weak, don’t you want to cheer him or her up, and allocate some of your time and energy toward helping this person feel better?   Weakness triggers attention.  What if the weakness were in reality a fraud and you were the one to be defrauded of your genuine sentiments? 

Are you currently the subject of a nervous breakdown?  Would you like to be sufficiently honest with yourself, so you can observe without biases the cause of your condition?  Or have you decided that no one or nothing could stop you from spiraling down at the speed of light?  Is it truly because of someone else who is not making you happy?  Is it really about those old demons that have brought so much emotional hardship in your life?  Are you that deeply affected by the state of our economy?  Any answer to those three questions is not receivable.  The fact is that you are the one who has the choice to engage into what you know is best for you in life.  If you refuse to exercise this option, then it would be quite insightful to know why, unless it serves a carefully tailored agenda that you need to push no matter what.             

::: If depression and bi-polarity are not necessarily illnesses, what are they?

Would it sound totally outrageous if I affirmed that depression is in most cases nothing more than just a deliberate choice?  What about bi-polarity?  What if it were the consequence of being so overwhelmingly aware?  This definitely differs from what is written in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and I think that it is very healthy.  Why would there be a medical explanation to everything that seems to affect the physical and/or emotional integrity of a human being?  There are causes that are intangible, and therefore impossible to prove.  Sadly, this society rejects the non-tangible because it is not controllable.  Well, are you ready to be free to think what you know sounds right to you?  You do not have to believe it as an absolute truth.  However the more you open your mind to what you cannot grasp the freer you become.

What if depression and bi-polarity were from time to time the results of an acute sense of awareness?  What if depression were the awareness of not being loved, of not loving oneself, of fighting the decision to fit-in, of knowing that so much more does exist out there while refusing to embrace what it takes to grab it?  I cannot believe that depression is limited to brain chemistry alone.  If that were the case, it would mean that there are millions of individuals who, one day, suddenly went from light to darkness because of a bunch of capricious neurons.  Most people go from light to darkness because they are deeply impacted emotionally by the result of a choice that they have made.  It is the realization of their shortfalls that creates the depression.  It is also the inability to cope with an environment.  I once worked with a gentleman who had developed a depression that then led to a heroin addiction because of his inability to handle his tremendous level of success and popularity.  Until that time I really thought that “coming back to a hotel suite after having performed for two hours in front of over twenty thousand people and feeling like the loneliest person ever” was a myth.  This man was so aware of his surroundings that he could not disconnect from the people who had showed up to his concerts and who were constantly thinking of him.  And yet, he was finding himself all alone inside his hotel room, totally overwhelmed, but all alone.  This paradox triggered the depression and the addiction.  And it had absolutely nothing to do with unwired or wrongly-wired neurons. 

Can bi-polarity be a reflection of the ability that one has “to invite” an external energy?  Can we say the same thing about schizophrenia?  Have you ever felt one way one minute and totally different the next?  What triggered that?  You were happy and joyful and, suddenly, you started to feel constriction and your mood worsened.  You began to hear strange thoughts that did not look like you.  This is a mild version of bi-polarity or schizophrenia.  Personally, I do not believe in the devil.  This is a biblical reference that is intended to control the weak ones through fear.  Could this voice be the presence of an energy that is totally foreign to you?  Is it possible that sometimes, in a non-cognitive way, you welcome other energies?  Does the complete lack of understanding that pertains to the existence of such occurrences make you believe that you are sick?  In reality, what if you were just so much more aware than a great majority of people, and you simply had no clue about it?  To dismiss their power of perception, to shut their awareness off, some folks revert to medications, which ultimately end up alienating them in two ways: they are convinced to be sick if not crazy because they are consuming meds; and they develop an addiction to meds, which in return increases their conviction that they are indeed crazy.

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Depression can be an illness.  Depression is certainly not a moral weakness.  It often times is the intangible proof that the depressed one is in reality very much aware of what is going on at all times.  And since this world is not necessarily too pretty, to be aware becomes quite uncomfortable and sometimes generates drastic mood swings.