During my career operating a consulting firm, I rarely
had this week off. City officials, bless their hearts, can and do procrastinate.
I thought "it" all quit running downhill when I left the military. Guess what. It
got worse. I most often worked between Christmas and New Year’s Day completing
last minute requests.
Once, 13 years ago, I seemed to have all the tasks completed
when the worst family tragedy we ever experienced shattered the holiday season.
Going into the details would only cause undue pain, let’s just say it created a
lesson from which we can all benefit: Depression (I'll capitalize it herein) is a serious, serious illness
and the word should not be tossed around lightly. In fact, the experience
caused me to omit such casual usage in my life as:
“Oh, I’m so depressed today. It’s Monday.”
“That movie was so depressing.”
“I’ve just been so depressed since we got back off vacation.”
“Talking to that person just depresses me to no end.”
I may have “the blues," nostalgia, or what Ernest Hemingway called
“the black-ass” but, thanks to “whatever gods may be,” I have never, never,
ever suffered clinical depression.
Get the picture?” We trivialize an illness that not
only destroys individuals, but also can inflict lasting damage on entire
families, even institutions.
Depression is a silent and non-visual sickness. We’re just
beginning to understand its true horrors for those affected. Being a malady with
hard-to-detect symptoms, Depression creates for the medical world a diametrically
opposed difficulty. Some, who see a benefit to blaming failure on something
other than the results of person choices, claim the illness falsely. This can create cynicism in the minds of others. At the
same time some who truly suffer from it hide it from those about them for fear
of shame and bigotry. We know that problem existed only when it manifests its last horrifying communication.
What can we fortunate ones do? I think, first of all, we
must recognize that Depression is truly a reality for many people. Then we must educate
ourselves to recognize signs, symptoms, and the necessity for treatment. We must learn
the do’s and do-nots of personal interaction, and those can be
counter-intuitive.
Our charitable instincts, in fact, may be a detriment. I
read somewhere that we may have a small genetic trigger, left over from our
distant evolutionary kin, that promoted survival on the savannah. It seems this
trigger promotes awareness and diverts complacency. When everything seems most safe,
the trigger springs and announces that “no, things aren’t safe, better shift into
defensive mode.”
While our charitable side may want to say “Everything is
going to be okay,” that may not be the best treatment. Again, we must educate
our own selves first.
When I was a young child, my Sainted Mother would, periodically
place me on the kitchen table lying on my back with my head hanging over the edge.
The inability to raise one’s head in this posture was supposed to be an early
sign of polio. Today’s young folks can only imagine the horror that this test entailed.
A man named Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that eliminated the
need for such terror. Interestingly enough, he never patented it, believing
that more children being saved was more important than money, a strange concept
for the times in which we presently live.
Today, education is under attack at all levels. Funds that
could be used for research are being diverted first to war, which is perhaps
the greatest contributor to Depression ever envisaged. Other funds are being diverted
to enrich the lives of those who would seem to have little reason to suffer
Depression. But what will happen when so many of these realize that “having it
all” will never be enough?
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