Anti Depression Quotes

THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

Writing is the best anti-depressant.

Glitter is a form of anti-depressant, because it is impossible to be sad when you twinkle.

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

Sylvie wishes the anti-depressants had been around when she was in her early twenties, not only to rescue her from the dark tunnels that came when her brother first got sick, but also to keep her from fucking all those assholes.

I tell him I take anti-depressants, which leads him on a thirty-minute detour. He tells me sadness is a part of finding out who you are. I tell him getting out of bed is also a part of finding out who you are. We agree to disagree.

I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather. Here are some obvious things about the weather: It's real. You can't change it by wishing it away. If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it. It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row. BUT it will be sunny one day. It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will. One day. It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL. Not one's fault. BUT They will pass: really they will. In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.

There's talk he's become emotionally unhinged.

The irony of taking Anti Depressants: you take them to feel good but they also make you feel bad or worse because you worry about your purse.

If everyone took anti-depressants, Chekhov would have nothing to write about.

Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type. People have dared to call pity a virtue… people have gone even further, making it into the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues, - but of course you always have to keep in mind that this was the perspective of a nihilistic philosophy that inscribed the negation of life on its shield. Schopenhauer was right here: pity negates life, it makes life worthy of negation, - pity is the practice of nihilism. Once more: this depressive and contagious instinct runs counter to the instincts that preserve and enhance the value of life: by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable, pity is one of the main tools used to increase decadence - pity wins people over to nothingness! … You do not say ‘nothingness’ : instead you say ‘the beyond’; or ‘God’; or ‘the true life’; or nirvana, salvation, blessedness … This innocent rhetoric from the realm of religious-moral idiosyncrasy suddenly appears much less innocent when you see precisely which tendencies are wrapped up inside these sublime words: tendencies hostile to life.

When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.

In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.

I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years.

Anti-depressants are just tools, one of many, which we use to try and ease the suffering, numb the pain and disperse the dark clouds in our mind in the hope that maybe, just maybe, a little sunlight will shine through.

Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies. Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages.

Friends are the best anti-depressants; with only positive effects, no side-effects.

She pulled off the highway and quickly changed into the burkha.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

There is no painkiller as effective as love, no anti-depressant as soothing as cheer, no defibrillator as powerful as wisdom.

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity – which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are,

Getting more exercise isn’t only good for your waistline. It's a natural anti-depressant, that leaves you in a great mood.

If pills work for you it doesn't really matter if this is to do with serotonin or another process or anything else.- keep taking them. Hell, if licking wallpaper does it for you, do that. I am not anti pill. I am pro anything that works and I know pill do work for a lot of people.

It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible. It isn’t real.

He had no idea that the world was entering an economic depression, or that hard times bring recriminations and blame. Privately, Harry's parents worried not just about the economy, but about the rising tide of nationalism and anti- Semitism.

The brutality of our daily thought, our disconnection from spirit, would be readily apparent to a medieval or ancient person. For our part, we hardly know what we have lost. Because of this we are imbibing anti-depressants at an astonishing rate. Despite our comparative wealth and comfort we are increasingly unhappy. We are, as one social scientists noted, “coming apart.” On every side the most brutal slogans resound. We are now the creatures of an ideological age. As noted by Carl Jung, we have succumbed to mass-mindedness. “There are no longer any gods we can evoke to help us,” he wrote. We now lead “an ignominious existence among the relics of our past….

If there’s an eighth wonder of the world, I would suggest lavender. Not only is it beautiful to the eye and heavenly to the nose, it also is said to have antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties and research suggests it may be useful in treating anxiety, insomnia, and depression. And it’s a wonderful addition to—ta-da—COOKIES! Mom always kept a large wooden wine barrel filled with lavender next to the back porch so she could grab a handful of lavender flowers whenever the mood struck her. She made lavender sachets to hang in the closets and added lavender to her rose potpourri. We regularly had lavender lemonade or lavender muffins and often some lavender flowers were identifiable in a lamb stew or as a garnish for steaks. All part of our Mediterranean lifestyle.

The world THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. Yet we have no other world to live in. And actually, when we really look closely, the world of stuff and advertising is not really life. Life is the other stuff. Life is what is left when you take all that crap away, or at least ignore it for a while. Life is the people who love you. No one will ever choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach via the iPhone that matter. And once we begin to recover, and to live again, we do so with new eyes. Things become clearer, and we are aware of things we weren’t aware of before.

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each. Nearly 300 watchtowers. Over 250 dog runs. Twenty bunkers. Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails. Over 11,000 armed guards. A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints. 200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime. 96 miles of concrete wall. Not your typical holiday destination. JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this—among other—notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it.

The irony of seeking a shrink: they are successful in shrinking your brain but unfortunately they also make your wallet shrink.

Postmodernism could be interpreted as the dismissal of this possibility. There is no authenticity, only various preferences.

You're like an anti-depressant in human form.

Surely Victoria's mental health suffered because all the men around her expected it to.

Each person's present feelings are determined by a million instant confrontations of previous experineces. A long time period lived under the effects of chemicals, can become ''your true past''. Note that each past was future for it's own past. If you want to leave a stable past to your far distant future, start using the right chemicals in the right way, today.

With approximately 50% of the USA population on prescription drugs and 10% on anti-depressants, it is clear that things are going seriously wrong with human health in the modern world.

Feel like driving your car into the nearest telegraph pole? Therapist Dr Jeremy Hodges can steer you in a better direction. FREE bottle of anti-depressants for the first ten appointments. Or

I daydream - and get paid for it. I recall a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman. At the end of the movie Richard Gere, dressed in his naval whites, goes into a factory, picks up Debra Winger, and carries her out of that depressing place with all of those dirty machines. I wish that would happen to me. Of course the whole time I'd be worried that the guy was trying to guess my weight or something. I realize how truly pathetic I am. Some guy in a uniform drags his woman out of the workplace to stick her in a house to cook and possibly even clip coupons, and I am staring to buy into it, into the anti-female propaganda disguised as romance. As soon as he picks her up, things have to head south from there, because at some point, he has to put her down.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.

After more than twenty years of listening to daughters—and doling out antibiotics, anti-depressants, and stimulants to girls who have gone without a father’s love—I know just how important fathers are.

Also, isolation leads to chronically lowered levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin.  It is one of the bizarre ironies of major depression that being depressed causes people to withdraw from the most powerful antidepressant known - rich and varied social contact.  However therein lies a rich lesson also - in some cases one of the quickest and most effective ways to reverse depression is to socialize.

We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured. Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.

I find it fascinating that the conventional diagnosis of “depression” is so simplistic. It is almost like saying that someone is “sick.” Yes, sick with what or of what? Ah, no, just “sick.” We have anti-sick pills (anti-depressants). One size fits all. Really?

Popular books promise that we can and should learn how to feel good, manage our anxiety, or get rid of our depression—but not so much information about how to learn from our own experiences. Our medications are anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotics, as if the only sensible goal is to subtract them. Our disorders are called “mood disorders” or “thought disorders” or “anxiety disorders”—once again feeding a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful. We’ve got to put aside this unhelpful messaging to create some space to try truly new things.

My parents were forever making lemonade. Neither responded to problems by drinking too much, taking anti-depressants, overeating, or suggesting they were victims. In fact, I can’t recall a single day my parents slept in—the way many of us might when life throws a wrench in our plans. My parents were (are in the case of my mother—my father died in 2008) unfailingly resilient people, capable of waking up each day with a positive attitude, a new resolve to make things better. Part of this was due to their personalities, but it was also because of the generation in which they were raised.

Sometimes, what starts out as a drug's side effect can end up as its main therapeutic purpose. Iproniazid was originally prescribed to treat tuberculosis; when so many patients taking it grew so cheerful that the effect had to be more coincidental, one of the first effective anti-depressants was born.

Apart from the terror, the unsettling and depressing aspect of this first murderous declaration of intent was that it triggered a flood of arguments and discussions all over Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the “Jewish question.” This is a trick the Nazis have since successfully repeated many times on other “questions” and in international affairs. By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist. In this way that right is put in question.

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you’ve decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies,

No matter how flat or sad his or her affect appears, the suicidally depressed adolescent is desperately trying to contain feelings of anger, rage, hatred, and violence. The suicide or the attempt represents the final self-destructive display of this rage. Where previously the rage may have been expressed in anti-social behaviors or directed at parents, school (the "system"), or a girl/boyfriend, now it has been turned inward. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate is much higher among runaways, teens in jail, and juvenile delinquents. Don't fear this anger! Allow the adolescent to express it; mobilize the anger rather than permitting it to remain festering inside, growing increasingly poisonous.

Some have dared to call pity a virtue (in every noble ethic it is considered a weakness); and as if this were not enough, it has been made the virtue, the basis and source of all virtues. To be sure—and one should always keep this in mind—this was done by a philosophy that was nihilistic and had inscribed the negation of life upon its shield. Schopenhauer was consistent enough: pity negates life and renders it more deserving of negation. Pity is the practice of nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to nothingness!

Heaviness is uplifting. Heaviness is strengthening. Heaviness is sustainable. Not the gloomy kind of heaviness that characterizes a state of depression and hopelessness—which we must do our best not to fall into when listening to discouraging facts about climate changes and pollution—but the em- powering kind of heaviness that fills your life with substance, when you engage in meaningful projects

Time went by and there wasn’t even sadness. “You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me.

As we are aware, the effect of the vagus nerve is to slow the level of inflammation and keep it in check. If we are sending repeated messages of inflammation over a long time, we are essentially training the vagus nerve to stop having its positive anti-inflammatory effect. This is why it is most common for people to begin experiencing and receiving diagnoses of these autoimmune conditions in their 30s and 40s. After 30+ years of inflammatory signals, the vagus nerve has been trained to stop functioning as an anti-inflammatory intervention. Between the ages of 35 and 40, the vagus tone has decreased significantly and the anti-inflammatory signals stop being sent out. These conditions often arise following the stress of pregnancy, having children, and lacking sleep during the first years of a child’s life—all of which are stressors that decrease vagus nerve function.

...the only way out consists of using a social mask. This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else. ... If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both psychological and physical. The psychological feeling of being trapped comes afterwards from the need to have social life, and that's when the anti-social personality starts developing furthermore.

But if there is one reason why, in the United States, a left-leaning liberalism emerged from the Great Depression as opposed to a right-wing populist, if not fascist, nationalism as in other polities (and the UAW’s union drive in Detroit took place near the home of the right-wing anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin), it was because of the presence of a left-leaning organized labor in the New Deal’s winning political coalition—and not only its presence but its assertion.107

Chronic long-term fatigue, recurrent infections, recovery from long-term illness and infections, nervous exhaustion, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic disease conditions with depression, low immune function, brain fog, and to accelerate recovery from debilitating conditions. Note: The plant is specific for the kinds of damage that occur during encephalitis infections. It is highly neuroprotective and strongly anti-inflammatory in the brain and CNS. It should be used in all encephalitis infections.

Isaac basically knew just one thing for sure: Many are born, few flourish, all die. If you didn’t die as a sacrifice for God today, you would die of an incomprehensible plague tomorrow, or of undeserved starvation the day after, or of good old-fashioned senseless human slaughter before the next harvest. Life was short in those days and people were grateful for whatever they could get. They didn’t expect wireless video game consoles, fast German cars, dental insurance, anti-depressants, and a pension.

Another core difference that Michael S. W. Lee found between anti-consumers and consumers is a wider 'scope of concern,' or regard for issues bigger than themselves and their personal needs. Anti-consumers are more likely to engage with issues such as climate change, species extinction, racial injustice, and poverty-matters that can be disturbing, depressing, or even frightening. Since engagement with such topics is congruent with their values, however, it makes life meaningful-but perhaps not cheerful.

Medications used to treat psychiatric disorders are commonly referred to as psychotropic drugs. These drugs are commonly described by their major clinical application, for example, antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, anxiolytics, hypnotics, cognitive enhancers, and stimulants. A problem with this approach is that these drugs have multiple indicators. For example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRls) are both antidepressants and anxiolytics, and the serotonin-dopamine antagonists (SDAs) are both anxiolytics and mood stabilizers.

Other times we know perfectly well what to do, but in the face of little or no support – or sometimes actual obstacles placed in our way – it takes a very long time and much suffering to emerge out the other side. I have watched women trying to come off highly addictive anti-depressants as an example of this. They cannot even begin to deal with the original problem (often a depression fully warranted by the circumstances in their lives) until they have dealt with this added, debilitating dependency on the drugs and the side-effects experienced as a result of those drugs.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

Ever since the rise of fear in the hominid psyche, one way or another, the grounds for an ever-active anti-fear mechanism was being prepared in the soft soil of consciousness by the process of natural selection. It is a process that deems survival potential as the only measure for existence. And by this measure, the anti-fear, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant mechanism, which later humans named "God", proved to be extremely effective. It delivered solace to the scared psyche of the early humans in their times of utter distress. In the midst of darkness, this one imaginative idea gave them light and hope.

He was going for those Reagan Democrats,” Joe continues explaining. “Except there aren’t any Reagan Democrats, there’re just cut-and-dried rednecks. Now that I’m down south here, I understand better what it’s all about. It’s all about blacks. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, the Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it’s bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with, barring a massive depression or a boo-boo the size of Watergate. Ollie North doesn’t do it. Reagan being an airhead didn’t do it. Face it: the bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks. That’s the one gut issue we’ve got.

Opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Greeks rejected the conditions attached to the bailout, but wanted to stay in the eurozone. Demonstrations spread throughout Greece advocating a “No” vote. So the Germans and French tried to frame the issue in a narrow way designed to get a “Yes” answer: Did voters want to be part of Europe? The aim was to avoid asking the really important question: Did Greek voters want to impose a decade of depression on themselves, cut public services, impose anti-union labor “reforms,” and sell off the Athenian water supply, its port, their beautiful islands and their gas rights in the Aegean to Germans and other creditors?

If for example you are diagnosed with depression, then your clinician might prescribe therapy to reduce your depression and or recommend anti-depressant medication. As we have discussed previously though, reducing the symptoms of mental illness does not seem to reduce the probability that someone will make a suicide attempt. Two treatments in particular, dialectical behavior therapy DBT and cognitive behavioral therapy for suicide prevention, CBT-SP, have demonstrated the ability to reduce the probability of suicidal behaviors in multiple studies conducted by multiple research teams. Other treatments that share many of the same characteristics and components as these treatments via attempted suicide.

what is the actual role of Anarchism in the Russian revolution? It has become the sign of the common thief and plunderer; a large proportion of the innumerable thefts and acts of plunder of private persons are carried out under the name of 'Anarchist-Communism' - acts which rise up like a troubled wave against the revolution in every period of depression and in every period of temporary defensive. Anarchism has become in the Russian revolution, not the theory of the struggling proletariat, but the ideological sign-board of the counter-revolutionary lumpenproletariat, who, like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution. And therewith the historical career of Anarchism is well-nigh ended.

Novelists encounter a world not only overloaded with information but overloaded with novels, possibly overloaded with novels confronting the overload of information. On an immediate social level, the enormity of published work has the effect of isolating readers. The general dispersal of culture into fragmented and miscellaneous units in the information-age has a more pronounced effect on literature, if only because novels typically take longer to read than films take to watch or albums take to listen to. It takes comparatively more effort to know about the same things, therefore it’s less common. The upshot is that it is more difficult to get the kind of basic social-reinforcement around literature that merges individual interests into a scene or community that people want to belong to, which is one of the main reasons it’s now such a challenge for writers to fix coordinates for their work.

The issues of antidepressant-associated suicide has become front-page news, the result of an analysis suggesting a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, and adults up to age 24 in short term (4 to 16 weeks), placebo-controlled trials of nine newer antidepressant drugs. The data from trials involving more than 4.4(K) patients suggested that the average risk of suicidal thinking or behavior (suicidality) during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants was 4 percent, twice the placebo risk of 2 percent. No suicides occured in these trials. The analysis also showed no increase in suicide risk among the 25 to 65 age group. Antidepressants reduced suicidality among those over age 65. Following public hearings on the subject, in October 2004, the FDA requested the addition of “black box” warnings—the most serious warning placed on the labeling of a prescription medication—to all antidepressant drugs, old and new.

Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor – it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).

Broadly speaking, components of processed foods and animal products, such as saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol, were found to be pro-inflammatory, while constituents of whole plant foods, such as fiber and phytonutrients, were strongly anti-inflammatory.938 No surprise, then, that the Standard American Diet rates as pro-inflammatory and has the elevated disease rates to show for it. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease939 and lower kidney,940 lung,941 and liver function.942 Those eating diets rated as more inflammatory also experienced faster cellular aging.943,944 In the elderly, pro-inflammatory diets are associated with impaired memory945 and increased frailty.946 Inflammatory diets are also associated with worse mental health, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, and impaired well-being.947 Additionally, eating more pro-inflammatory foods has been tied to higher prostate cancer risk in men948,949,950 and higher risks of breast cancer,951,952 endometrial cancer,953 ovarian cancer,954 and miscarriages in women. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are also associated with more risk of esophageal,955 stomach,956 liver,957 pancreatic,958 colorectal,959 kidney,960 and bladder961 cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma.962 Overall, eating a more inflammatory diet was associated with 75 percent increased odds of having cancer and 67 percent increased risk of dying from cancer.963 Not surprisingly, those eating more anti-inflammatory diets appear to live longer lives.964,965,966,967 But how does the Dietary Inflammatory Index impact body weight? Obesity and Inflammation:

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

Marvin stood there. ‘Out of my way little robot,’ growled the tank. ‘I’m afraid,’ said Marvin, ‘that I’ve been left here to stop you.’ The probe extended again for a quick recheck. It withdrew again. ‘You? Stop me?’ roared the tank, ‘Go on!’ ‘No, really I have,’ said Marvin simply. ‘What are you armed with?’ roared the tank in disbelief. ‘Guess,’ said Marvin. The tank’s engines rumbled, its gears ground. Molecule-sized electronic relays deep in its micro-brain flipped backwards and forwards in consternation. ‘Guess?’ said the tank. ‘Yes, go on,’ said Marvin to the huge battle machine, ‘you’ll never guess.’ ‘Errrmmm …’ said the machine, vibrating with unaccustomed thought, ‘laser beams?’ Marvin shook his head solemnly. ‘No,’ muttered the machine in its deep gutteral rumble, ‘Too obvious. Anti-matter ray?’ it hazarded. ‘Far too obvious,’ admonished Marvin. ‘Yes,’ grumbled the machine, somewhat abashed, ‘Er … how about an electron ram?’ This was new to Marvin. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘One of these,’ said the machine with enthusiasm. From its turret emerged a sharp prong which spat a single lethal blaze of light. Behind Marvin a wall roared and collapsed as a heap of dust. The dust billowed briefly, then settled. ‘No,’ said Marvin, ‘not one of those.’ ‘Good though, isn’t it?’ ‘Very good,’ agreed Marvin. ‘I know,’ said the Frogstar battle machine, after another moment’s consideration, ‘you must have one of those new Xanthic Re-Structron Destabilized Zenon Emitters!’ 'Nice, aren’t they?’ agreed Marvin. ‘That’s what you’ve got?’ said the machine in condiderable awe. ‘No,’ said Marvin. ‘Oh,’ said the machine, disappointed, ‘then it must be …’ ‘You’re thinking along the wrong lines,’ said Marvin, ‘You’re failing to take into account something fairly basic in the relationship between men and robots.’ ‘Er, I know,’ said the battle machine, 'is it … ’ it tailed off into thought again. ‘Just think,’ urged Marvin, ‘they left me, an ordinary, menial robot, to stop you, a gigantic heavy-duty battle machine, whilst they ran off to save themselves. What do you think they would leave me with?’ ‘Oooh er,’ muttered the machine in alarm, ‘something pretty damn devastating I should expect.’ ‘Expect!’ said Marvin. ‘Oh yes, expect. I’ll tell you what they gave me to protect myself with shall I?’ ‘Yes, alright,’ said the battle machine, bracing itself. ‘Nothing,’ said Marvin. There was a dangerous pause. 'Nothing?’ roared the battle machine. ‘Nothing at all,’ intoned Marvin dismally, ‘not an electronic sausage.’ The machine heaved about with fury. ‘Well doesn’t that just take the biscuit!’ it roared, ‘Nothing, eh?’ Just don’t think, do they?’ ‘And me,’ said Marvin in a soft low voice, ‘with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.’ ‘Makes you spit, doesn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Marvin with feeling. ‘Hell that makes me angry,’ bellowed the machine, ‘think I’ll smash that wall down!’ The electron ram stabbed out another searing blaze of light and took out the wall next to the machine. ‘How do you think I feel?’ said Marvin bitterly. ‘Just ran off and left you did they?’ the Machine thundered. ‘Yes,’ said Marvin. ‘I think I’ll shoot down their bloody ceiling as well!’ raged the tank. It took out the ceiling of the bridge. ‘That’s very impressive,’ murmured Marvin. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ promised the machine, ‘I can take out this floor too, no trouble!’ It took out the floor too. ‘Hells bells!’ the machine roared as it plummeted fifteen storeys and smashed itself to bits on the ground below. ‘What a depressingly stupid machine,’ said Marvin and trudged away.

Medicate less and meditate more.

adult women tacitly told to strive for a pre-pubertal body is a goal that spawns a myriad of linked acts of slow violence: low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and for some, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harming and disordered eating behaviour.

The Stress-Busting Effects of Exercise The anti-inflammatory effect is one way that exercise protects us from depression, but exercise does something else to protect us, and it comes back to how we react to everyday stressors. Remember the sixth sense, the vagus nerve? Well, the vagus nerve does more than give us a gut instinct. It’s also part of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) that determines our reactivity to stressors. Although 80 percent of the messages from the vagus nerve go from the body to the brain, giving rise to the sixth sense, the other 20 percent go from the brain to the body to neutralize stress. It’s the yin to the sympathetic yang. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) dominates during stress; it’s always anxious to speed things up and insists you have one of two options: fight or flight. But the PNS knows how to slow things down (rest, digest), and it is especially good at bringing the body back to its homeostatic happy place after a stressful event.

Benz is short for benzodiazepine. It’s an anti-anxiety and depression med. Small white pills?” “A lovely shade of robin’s-egg blue, actually.” “Huh,” says Charlotte. “So it was a street drug, not a prescription.

YOU must ask for help when anxiety makes you feel out of control. Because we need you. We need you to be well and whole and taking care of yourselves. I know that the prevailing rise of anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our world right now can be unbelievably depressing.

Depressive realism has a very impressive pedigree. The Buddha pronounced that “all life is suffering” about 2,500 years ago, at roughly the time when the original Greek tragedies were composed. The Old Testament writers and prophets bequeathed us the concepts of human evil, sin, and the Fall, all this stemming from about the 5th century BCE when Adam behaved badly and doomed us all to suffering and death. From Paul through Augustine and Aquinas we have inherited the concept of original sin. The idea that we live in a “vale of tears” is probably from a Catholic hymn. Shakespeare put the phrases “to be or not to be” and “shuffle off our mortal coil” in Hamlet’s mouth in 1603. Robert Burton’s monumental The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621 and George Cheyne’s The English Malady in 1733. DR is hardly a wacky modern idea owing its existence to Enlightenment- denying pessimists or to 20th century existentialists.

Exercise is anti-inflammatory and reduces the inflammation that can damage the heart and depress the mood.38 Exercising muscles release specialized cytokines called myokines.39 Like regular cytokines, myokines sound an alarm, but their message is less alarming and more precautionary.

Comparing the Gaza Strip and the Warsaw Ghetto ... Which opens up the whole Mein Kampf-ed, blood-libel, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, rampantly racist full-on-fascism-to-keep-us-safe-from-vermin situation. MAGA Unleashed. By the time you read this, the camps may already be opening.

For more than a century America has occupied a position of scientific leadership and has gradually come to take it for granted. Although neither war nor economic depression nor political conflict has been able to threaten it, I now fear that that is about to change, for something has arisen that may indeed signal a change in our national character. That something is most visible in the debate over evolution, but it extends far beyond the teaching of a single subject in the curriculum of a single scientific discipline. It reveals a deep and profound split in the American psyche, an unease that threatens the way we think of ourselves as a people, the place we hold for science in our lives, and the way in which we will move into the twenty-first century. What is at stake, I am convinced, is nothing less than America’s scientific soul.

For railroads, ownership of coal lands was a way to stabilize an industry levered to economic volatility and weather, with warmer winters depressing demand. The vertical integration of railroads and miners also helped the players control production and shipments. The industry became highly concentrated, with seven railroad companies controlling over 90% of the coal production in the region. This oligopoly occasionally entered into collusive arrangements and tried to manipulate the price of this critical energy source. Despite these advantages, the Reading Railroad’s spending spree eventually led to trouble, as the combination of leverage, competition, and economic volatility caused the company to declare bankruptcy three times between 1880 and 1896.143 The Reading finally experienced financial success in the early 1900s, only to confront a new problem: The federal government was now determined to curb the power of the railroad and its peers. Congress began to enact legislation designed to split anthracite coal producers from railroads. These early attempts were easily circumvented by the anthracite giants. In 1915, however, the Supreme Court started ruling that the railroad companies violated anti-trust law. In 1920, the Court banned the stock control of coal companies outright, which finally forced some of the largest anthracite operators, including the Reading Railroad, to separate their coal and railroad operations.144

Dogs are the best anti depressant.

Sugar is so toxic and potentially deadly that scientists are now advising that there should be health warnings on products containing it. Sugar is highly addictive, it is an anti-nutrient, it disturbs blood sugar levels, it depresses immunity, it depletes magnesium, it creates disease-promoting acid conditions, it stresses the adrenal glands, it promotes candida, and it feeds cancer cells. It also raises levels of ghrelin, the ‘hunger hormone’, leading to over-eating and excess weight.

Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world’s general crappiness: for Katz’s Jewish paternal forebears, who’d been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother’s side, who’d labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn’t an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales.

Credit expansion results in the recurrence of economic crisis and periods of depression. Inflation makes the prices of all commodities and services soar. The attempts to enforce wage rates higher than those the unhampered market would have determined produce mass unemployment prolonged year after year. Price ceilings result in a drop in the supply of commodities affected. The economists have proved these theorems in an irrefutable way. No

One study proved just how powerful exercise can be: Three groups of depressed patients were assigned to different coping strategies—one group took antidepressant medication, one group exercised for 45 minutes three times a week, and one group did a combination of both.33 After four months, all three groups experienced similar improvements in happiness. The very fact that exercise proved just as helpful as anti-depressants is remarkable, but the story doesn’t end here. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent! In short, physical activity is not just an incredibly powerful mood lifter, but a long-lasting one.

spend a lot of the time depressed. Always have, always will. Give me medicine, I get less upset about being depressed, but the fact of it never leaves. Sometimes I am clinically, trouble-getting-out-of-bed depressed. Other times, I am just low-level, drag-myself-through-my-day depressed. Some people might call me pessimistic because I always expect disaster to occur. But looking at my life, I think that’s bull. When I expect doom? That’s what I call reality. Mostly, I ignore the depression. I developed a caustic sense of humor. I discovered mosh pits to vent. I listen to seriously angry music. When that doesn’t work, I soothe the emptiness with terrible food and old jazz. If that doesn’t work and I can afford it, I go in and see someone about getting some medicine for a few weeks. That means making appointments any place I think I might be able to get in, assuming that I’ll be turned down for service, and showing up to them all until I find someone who’s willing to do me a solid and give me a week or two of anti-anxiety medicine. If I can’t find anyone to do that, I just sort of check out for a while. Those

recent groundbreaking research has shown that physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health are even more intricately connected than we previously imagined. Take our diet: we now know that keeping blood sugar low isn’t just good for weight loss; it also makes the brain work faster and prevents brain fog. Meditation or prayer isn’t just for monks or for people who want to find God; it also improves memory, mood, and attention span. Depression isn’t just about low serotonin or dopamine that can be corrected only with prescription medication; it’s also about our brains needing more anti-inflammatory foods and experiences that promote neurogenesis, or the growth of new brain cells and connections. What’s good for the body is also good for the brain—and the soul, too. Unfortunately,

Do you sense a depression in the body of Christ in America, as if something is badly wrong? We’re losing influence within our culture as the anti-Christian sentiment grows, yet you’d never know it in most churches—the smoke, lights, loud music and preaching rolls on as if all is well…Too often people come to the church, are deeply disappointed and as a result are turned off from the gospel. The church promises solutions but only offers lip service. We’ve become excellent at giving people a show on Sunday but lousy at showing them how to actually live…I recently spoke with two businessmen friends about why it’s hard to find a good church. Both are successful financially and are passionate believers. On the surface, they’re what every pastor needs. Yet after being active in a local church, they both became disillusioned with what they saw and how they were treated. As they recounted stories of how pastors felt threatened by their powerful personalities and positions, I felt sorry for my friends (for never experiencing the community they sought) and for the insecure leaders they served. Countless other mature Christians have been so wounded by leadership that they stay home on Sunday and “go to church” by watching Charles Stanley or Jack Hayford. They get a good message, some good music and an opportunity to “tithe” to that ministry. Sometimes this is a transitional period. Too often it’s not. But this isn’t Christian community. Aren’t we supposed to assemble with other believers? Aren’t we supposed to bring a hymn or a Scripture or a prophetic word when we meet? In larger churches this need is met in small groups or in various ministries of the church. There are many examples of healthy churches where this happens. But too often it isn’t…Until this happens, people—like my businessmen friends—will feel as if they’re drifting. They’ll never really find their place in the body of Christ. And sooner or later, they will ‘vote with their feet’ by going somewhere else—or worse still, nowhere.

However, I should also point out, that for mild to moderate cases of depression, drugs don’t perform any better than placebo.  Interestingly, the most effective treatment for mild to moderate depression is also one of the potent anti-agers mentioned earlier - cardiovascular exercise.  In Jump Start - An introduction to the science of exercise therapy for anxiety & depression, Benjamin Kramer says “Study after study has clearly shown that cardiovascular exercise and/or weight training works just as well as antidepressant medication, but with one key advantage - Those subjects who treat their anxiety and depression with exercise tend to stay well, whereas those who treat their depression with medication have a significantly higher relapse rate”.

No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with life.

Later, large numbers worked on the railroads, performing the dangerous tasks that white workers refused to do, working (and dying) in snowslides and landslides. That is how the phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” originated. Although Chinese could not become citizens because a federal law, passed in 1890, reserved naturalized citizenship for “white persons,” there was stoop work for them to do. As times got harder, however, white workers began taking out their frustrations on Chinese workers. In 1860 an estimated forty thousand Chinese miners were driven off their claims by whites. In the wake of the 1873 economic depression, white workers in the West exploded in anti-Chinese uprisings, beating and attacking Chinese laborers and merchants and destroying their homes and businesses. From then on, no Chinese felt safe either in person or property. Confronted with this hostility from whites, Chinese workers in the West left the labor force and headed East, developing means of self-employment along the way. Because laundries and restaurants could be worked by the whole family and required relatively little knowledge of English and an outlay of only a few hundred dollars for equipment, Chinese became laundrymen and restaurateurs. By the mid-1890s “chop suey” had become popular in the United States, and cartoons of Chinese laundrymen saying, “No tickee, no laundry,” were a familiar feature in American newspapers.

Have you lost or gained more than 10 percent of your body weight over the past five years—even though you weren’t intentionally dieting?   3.  Do you have trouble going to sleep or staying asleep?   4.  Does pain in your joints or muscles limit your physical activity or mobility?   5.  Do you commonly feel fatigued for no apparent reason?   6.  Are you frequently depressed or anxious?   7.  Do you have problems with memory?   8.  Is there a consistent ringing in your ears?   9.  Do you feel that you are losing your strength? 10.  Do you take any prescription medications? Do you take more than two? 11.  How about over-the-counter medications? Do you commonly take any of these? a  Anti-inflammatories

Night-time desires, when fully realised, are by definition anti-social, or they leave their pursuer in no fit state for work the following morning. Wherever the work ethic governs so rigidly, the Body of State is only interested in the state of the citizen's body in so far as it is fit for work. The night traveller by day, then, runs the risk of censure, of being condemned by those on their way to work. Inculcated with a sense of social responsibility, they cannot mind their own business. Focussing their reproving gaze through mediated ideals of decency and beauty, they see in the state of a body worn out by desires pursuits a threat to the general well-being. The stink of raw love rubbed into their nostrils alerts them to the traveller's disregard for hygeine, self-abuse marking him as anti the body - an antibody within the State Body. Finding no allies on the Left or Right, the night travelling antibody is an object of disgust. He is forced outside - abjected from the society of the everyday. This wouldn't be so bad! But he is not left alone even after abjection. He is now caught in the trap between his own desires and their prohibitions. The pull of these two polarities is irresistibly downward, tugging him deeper into a paralysing depression. And when he can't get any lower, the abjection others confer on him tightens, making it difficult to breathe. Feverish, he is lit up by an illumination: down here at least I feel something. It might not be much of an escape, but the hole abjection opened up constitutes home, a state in and of itself, within which the antibody is the sole subject - that is, the fully fledged Abject. At base at last, all the frustrations accrued from imposed silences and prohibitions finally explode into expression, blowing away the rock with which others block the Abject's hole and splattering anyone peering curiously down at him with searing purples and cold black splotches of night. The stain is indelible.

New sounds rustled through her anti-depressant haze; a gentle reverberation from the heart of the home... another creek... another thunk... rapid clicking like the wings of a broken cricket. Then, raindrops on metal... the escalating blare of a car horn... the scream of wet tires and the clink clink clink of showering glass.