In Part I of Take a Hike, Not a Pill, Mary Rose explores how our unbalanced, over-stimulating society may be a major cause of depression. But are most of us are too caught up in the chaos to pay attention?
Depression is epidemic these days. Many experts contend that depression is an illness of the mind — that it stems from a chemical imbalance in the brain. But what causes the imbalance?
Depression is primarily experienced in the mind, but this does not necessarily mean that it originates there. A chemical imbalance within the human brain might be caused by the brain itself, but what if these internal imbalances are actually externally motivated?
In the Western world, our hyper-stimulating, all-you-can-eat, immediately-gratifying environment promises easier, faster, bigger and better everything. In what we call developed countries, we take for granted what we might have once called luxuries. We consider it normal to have all types of technology at our fingertips, and upgrades are always right around the corner.
At this point, dear reader, imagine yourself sitting under a tree on a warm summer day, poking at your 4 gig iPad which magically transforms into an 16 gig maxi iPad (for those heavier days), totally oblivious to the fact that the tree you’re sitting under is about to fall on top of you and there’s no one around to hear it. The point of that imaginary scenario is this: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of the almost viral growth of the human species on this planet, the environment we inhabit is indeed reacting in an equal and opposite manner. In an attempt to maintain balance or equilibrium, Mother Nature is postmarking all our ugly actions as “‘return to sender”.
Ironically, it is we who are making ourselves sick, but not because there is anything wrong with our brains. Simply put, depression is the result of a healthy brain entrenched in and responding to a deeply chaotic, unbalanced, unnatural and unhealthy environment.
Every living biological organism emits electrical, thermal, biochemical and bio-photonic energy, and in a closed interdependent system such as the Earth, every organism affects the others within that system. Like the ripple effect when a stone is thrown into a body of water, everything in the body of water will be affected by the ripples.
The human mind is no different. It is possible that every aberration of the mind is not indicative of an internal “illness”, but is instead symptomatic of an external global one.
A large portion of us have been affected by a massive outbreak of some sort a collective dis-ease. Perhaps in the interests of self-protection, it seems some of our best minds have succumbed to depression and, as a result, have decided to hit the sleep command.
We are not really using our enormous cache of RAM anymore — and the more we don’t use it, the more we are going to lose it.
Photo Credit
“as she walked on that cold day, the metaphor became fact” pfv. @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. One Right Reserved.
>”Many experts contend that depression is an illness of the mind — that it stems from a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
We have actually known since the 70’s that the chemical imbalance theory of depression is incorrect. We have measured metabolites of serotonin in the CSF of depressed patients, and found absolutely no significant difference in levels.
ABSOLUTELY! Thank you for your comment Chris.