According to medical textbooks, depression is defined on the one hand as a number of symptoms: seeing the future bleak, having profound feelings of guilt and hopelessness, appetite and sleep disturbances etc. On the other hand, it\u2019s looked upon as a hormonal or brain transmitter disorder.<\/p>\n
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So we have the symptoms and we have the cause of this \u2018disease\u2019\u2026 Wait a minute! Are we not forgetting something here?<\/p>\n
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Yes. We\u2019re forgetting the \u2018soul\u2019. How is this possible? We\u2019re so used to looking at depression as a medical disease and to looking at medicine as certainly and extremely not soul-related, that we\u2019re just all-in-one even forgetting the possibility.<\/p>\n
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But look at some terms that come to us from many centuries of wisdom. A depressed person feels \u2018dispirited\u2019. He has troubles being \u2018motivated\u2019 by something\u2026 anything. There is \u2018no fire burning inside\u2019. He may have a \u2018burn out\u2019. Nothing \u2018really speaks to him\u2019. Nothing \u2018profoundly touches him\u2019. Nothing seems \u2018attractive\u2019.<\/p>\n
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So: what is this \u2018spirit\u2019 (as in \u2018dispirited\u2019), or \u2018fire inside\u2019? What is not \u2018motivated\u2019 (Latin for \u2018moved\u2019)? What is not \u2018profoundly spoken to\u2019 or \u2018touched\u2019? Always the same: not some superficial layer but indeed the \u2018deeper side\u2019 of a person. That what one may call \u2018deeper self\u2019 or \u2018soul\u2019 in religious terms.<\/p>\n
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A \u2018soul\u2019 of course does not disappear. It\u2019s there all right, but the contact<\/em> with it is lost. This loss of contact, and the suffering from it, provokes the symptoms.<\/p>\n \u25ca\u25ca\u25ca<\/p>\n This translates itself in what can be seen and investigated physiologically and biochemically, of which we at present surely still know hardly anything.<\/p>\n \u25ca\u25ca\u25ca<\/p>\n Therefore a depressed person is before anything else a person in need of his lost (contact with) soul. He should in the first place be treated as such, shouldn\u2019t he? According to me, in order to renew this contact, a whole person is needed, namely: the depressed person himself. He can be helped quite a lot in this journey towards inner \u2018healing\u2019 (this is: becoming whole again, re-connecting to the soul again), but it cannot be done for him. Therefore, he needs to be involved and supported as much and as to-the-point as possible. Every person who is not<\/em> supported this way is a disgrace to the society he or she lives in<\/p>\n \u25ca\u25ca\u25ca<\/p>\n A further question can be raised: if someone suffers from loss of soul and is \u2018cured\u2019 by taking away the suffering itself, is that person then really \u2018cured,\u2019 even if he feels better? Or is the \u2018real disease\u2019 rather the loss of (contact with) soul itself? And: how do you call someone who has a \u2018loss of soul\u2019 and lives on without suffering from this, such as through being numbed by medication? I\u2019m afraid I call such a person a zombie.<\/p>\n \u25ca\u25ca\u25ca<\/p>\n This is really, really, really deep stuff.<\/p>\n \u25ca\u25ca\u25ca<\/p>\n \n