DEPRESSION, DESPAIR, MENTAL HEALTH, AND A TRANSCENDENT PURPOSE

 

 

 

When we exercise too vigorously, we can experience muscle spasms. When we eat more sweets than we should, we might even feel sick. Wisdom invites us to understand our discomforts, including anxiety and depression, which have been escalating for decades, even before the COVID shutdowns began. Therefore, it seems that COVID is being unduly credited for our present woes:

 

·       Many high school students have reported experiencing mental health challenges during the coronavirus outbreak, according to recently published survey findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). High school students who are gay, lesbian or bisexual, as well as girls, were especially likely to say their mental health has suffered during the pandemic.

 

·       Overall, 37% of students at public and private high schools reported that their mental health was not good most or all of the time during the pandemic, according to the CDC’s Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey, which was fielded from January to June 2021.

 

Depression had become a worldwide stalker long before COVID. Several studies have revealed that depression has been on the prowl for a long time:

 

·       The total estimated number of people living with depression worldwide increased by 18.4% between 2005 and 2015 to 322 million, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly half of people living with depression live in the more highly-populated global areas...

 

·       ...depressive illness is the disease with the second heaviest burden on society, with around one in 20 people suffering...[This] burden increased by 37.5% between 1990 and 2010...(The Guardian, 2013)

 

Perhaps the fear of violating political correctness has narrowed our focus away from other factors, like our choices that might be responsible for depression and anxiety.

 

Our lifestyles and beliefs have radically changed from the 50s. One indication of how it has affected us is the research of James Buie that “Depression…for those born after 1950 is as much as twenty times higher than the incidence rate for those born before 1910” (Edward Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, 113).

 

However, we have some clues about an answer. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche had stated that, “If we have a ‘why’ to live for, we can withstand almost any what.’”

 

This might sound extreme, but Nietzsche’s thought has been expressed by many other observers. Depressed people need hope more than anything else. They have been fighting a foe that is greater than they and have despaired of their own efforts. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl had observed that many had struggled and finally acquiesced to the verdict of the National Socialist death camps. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

 

·       The prisoner who had lost his faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay."

 

With the decline of Christianity, we too have lost a meaning and purpose for our lives, apart from self-fulfillment. However, what happens when we no longer can feel fulfilled, and our dreams evaporate? Despair!

 

Consequently, we have to look beyond ourselves, for the answer to our woes, to a God who loves, forgives, and nurtures us and has proved it by dying for our sins.