Causes Of The Great Depression Quotes

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become.

This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science. The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease. Until the model of reimbursement changes, I don’t expect great changes in medical care or medical education.5

Back in August, I wrote a post about the supposed race to the bottom with ebooks, refuting some nonsense written by an establishment bonehead. This meme won't die. People are still convinced that new ebooks are going to be priced at ten cents, and writers will starve, and this will cause a second Great Depression where banks will close and people will be forced to buy Kindles with food stamps, and then the earth will enter another ice age where all the bunnies will freeze to death.

The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).

Material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty, it actually produces it. This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of our times. It is the riddle that the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization. And which NOT to answer is to be destroyed.

At the top of the page I wrote my full name [...] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur.

After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn’t understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy.

I suspect that people with depression are fixated on the possibility of ambition being rewarded with happiness. Probably more than most people are. That’s because ambition about the future is a way of avoiding looking at a past that’s often pretty bleak or a future that is terrifying. This isn’t to say that getting a better job or a pile of money can’t be really great. They often are. Achievements or windfalls can often wipe out a particular cause of worry or dread, maybe even wipe out that worry forever. But then you get used to that new version of normal, the novelty wears off, and you’re left with the same brain you’ve always had, and that’s when depression emerges from dormancy.

We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all—there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.

The current moral decay perceived in society has often been blamed on the lack of God in the public schools. During the Great Depression God was prominent in the schools, hence She must have caused the depression. Challenge my logic.

We are afraid of what we will do to others, afraid of the rage that lies in wait somewhere deep in our souls. How many human beings go through the world frozen with rage against life! This deeply hidden inner anger may be the product of hurt pride or of real frustration in office, factory, clinic, or home. Whatever may be the cause of our frozen rage (which is the inevitable mother of depression), the great word of hope today is that this rage can be conquered and drained off into creative channels … …What should we do? We should all learn that a certain amount of aggressive energy is normal and certainly manageable in maturity. Most of us can drain off the excess of our angry feelings and destructive impulses in exercise, in competitive games, or in the vigorous battles against the evils of nature and society. We also must realize that no one will punish us for the legitimate expression of self-assertiveness and creative pugnacity as our parents once punished us for our undisciplined temper tantrums. Furthermore, let us remember that we need not totally repress the angry part of our nature. We can always give it an outlet in the safe realm of fantasy. A classic example of such fantasy is given by Max Beerborn, who made a practice of concocting imaginary letters to people he hated. Sometimes he went so far as to actually write the letters and in the very process of releasing his anger it evaporated. As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberties to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the majority within our minds? Do I mean that we should hit out at our enemy whenever the mood strikes us? No, I repeat that I am suggesting quite the reverse—self-control in action based upon (positive coping mechanisms such as) self expression in fantasy.

Narcissistic personality disorder and other personality disorders are different than psychiatric patterns considered more “syndromal,” like major depression. Personality disorders are patterned ways of responding to the world and of responding to one’s inner world. Under times of stress these patterns become even stronger. Because they are patterns, they are also predictable. These patterns reside in the narcissist, not you, but their patterns cause a great deal of disruption in their relationships with everyone around them.

Excessive rural credit was one of the important causes of bank failure during the Great Depression.

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

business cycles and depressions stem from disturbances generated in the market by monetary intervention. The monetary theory holds that money and credit-expansion, launched by the banking system, causes booms and busts.

As long as you can say I’m better than they are, then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you’re not any better off than they are. In fact, you’re worse off ‘cause you’re believin’ a lie.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls espouses them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms.

The One who has done the greatest thing of all for you, must be concerned about you in everything, and though the clouds are thick and you cannot see His face, you know He is there. 'Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.' Now hold on to that. You say that you do not see His smile. I agree that these earth born clouds prevent my seeing Him, but He is there and He will never allow anything finally harmful to take place. Nothing can happen to you but what He allows, I do not care what it may be, some great disappointment, perhaps, or it may be an illness, it may be a tragedy of some sort, I do not know what it is, but you can be certain of this, that God permits that thing to happen to you because it is ultimately for your good. 'Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness...' (Hebrews 12. 11)." (Spiritual Depression Its Causes and Cure, 145)

The way I see it right now, the United States of America has destroyed itself, or is destroying itself from within, thus making it vulnerable to being conquered from without. The United States of America is corrupt, as it has no rule of law, and little or no prudential regulation and supervision. The Global Financial Crisis, make no mistake about it, is a global Depression even worse, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and was caused by the same thing – rampant corruption, and it will result in the same thing – World War.

Exploring Self-Compassion Through Letter Writing PART ONE Everybody has something about themselves that they don’t like; something that causes them to feel shame, to feel insecure or not “good enough.” It is the human condition to be imperfect, and feelings of failure and inadequacy are part of the experience of living. Try thinking about an issue that tends to make you feel inadequate or bad about yourself (physical appearance, work or relationship issues, etc.). How does this aspect of yourself make you feel inside—scared, sad, depressed, insecure, angry? What emotions come up for you when you think about this aspect of yourself? Please try to be as emotionally honest as possible and to avoid repressing any feelings, while at the same time not being melodramatic. Try to just feel your emotions exactly as they are—no more, no less. PART TWO Now think about an imaginary friend who is unconditionally loving, accepting, kind, and compassionate. Imagine that this friend can see all your strengths and all your weaknesses, including the aspect of yourself you have just been thinking about. Reflect upon what this friend feels toward you, and how you are loved and accepted exactly as you are, with all your very human imperfections. This friend recognizes the limits of human nature and is kind and forgiving toward you. In his/her great wisdom this friend understands your life history and the millions of things that have happened in your life to create you as you are in this moment. Your particular inadequacy is connected to so many things you didn’t necessarily choose: your genes, your family history, life circumstances—things that were outside of your control. Write a letter to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend—focusing on the perceived inadequacy you tend to judge yourself for. What would this friend say to you about your “flaw” from the perspective of unlimited compassion? How would this friend convey the deep compassion he/she feels for you, especially for the discomfort you feel when you judge yourself so harshly? What would this friend write in order to remind you that you are only human, that all people have both strengths and weaknesses? And if you think this friend would suggest possible changes you should make, how would these suggestions embody feelings of unconditional understanding and compassion? As you write to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend, try to infuse your letter with a strong sense of the person’s acceptance, kindness, caring, and desire for your health and happiness. After writing the letter, put it down for a little while. Then come back and read it again, really letting the words sink in. Feel the compassion as it pours into you, soothing and comforting you like a cool breeze on a hot day. Love, connection, and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them you need only look within yourself.

In autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered its analysis of the economy’s downturn: “The cause is attributed by some to taxation and alleged federal curbs on industry; by others, to the demoralization of production caused by strikes.” Both the taxes and the strikes were the result of Roosevelt policy; the strikes had been made possible by the Wagner Act the year before. As scholars have long noted, the high wages generated by New Deal legislation helped those workers who earned them. But the inflexibility of those wages also prevented companies from hiring additional workers. Hence the persistent shortage of jobs in the latter part of the 1930s.

Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products. For

They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

the economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz pieced together an extraordinarily detailed history of money in America. They showed that the Fed’s policy of making money scarcer and raising interest rates—that is to say, following the rules of the gold standard—turned what would have been a nasty but ordinary downturn into a cataclysm. The Fed, and the gold standard it managed, caused the Great Depression.

go directly to Him and seek His face, as the little child who is miserable and unhappy because somebody else has taken or broken his toy, runs to its father or its mother. So if you and I find ourselves afflicted by this condition, there is only one thing to do, it is to go to Him, If you seek the Lord Jesus Christ and find Him there is no need to worry about your happiness and your joy. He is our joy and our happiness, even as He is our peace. He is life, He is everything. So avoid the incitements and the temptations of Satan to give feelings this great prominence at the centre. Put at the centre the only One who has a right to be there, the Lord of Glory, Who so loved you that He went to the Cross and bore the punishment and the shame of your sins and died for you. Seek Him, seek His face, and all other things shall be added unto you.

Do you ever feel tired, sad, lonely, depressed, overweight, or anything else that you’d be willing to pay money to not feel anymore? Great, you’re in luck—XYZ drug can help! Warning: may cause side effects such as bloating, constipation, diathermia, dizziness, dry mouth, dandruff, insomnia, narcolepsy, and many other things far worse than what it’s actually supposed to help you with. So, don’t wait—call the number on your screen today!

Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world.

How well our models fit the real world is of great importance. If our models are poor, we will make bad predictions about the future and subsequently bad choices. Poor models of reality may be caused by many things: not having enough information, difficulty with abstract thinking, or the stubborn persistence of wrong assumptions. Such bad assumptions may be so harmful that they lead to psychiatric illnesses such as anxiety and depression.

But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

Back in July 2003, he’d written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: “Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles—or major deflations—on any national scale,” he’d said. “This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%.

After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other.

The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.

Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years.

About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb. Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incomparable head is one whole ruby. Husband of a thousand wives, he has begotten on them ten thousand children. Nothing is mean about him; his urine is white wine; his faeces are always soft gold. However, despite his splendor and his extraordinary attainments, he cannot successfully pronounce the words: electricity, Methodist Episcopal, organization, third cavalry brigade. Avoid them. Infuriated by your demonstration of any accomplishment not his, he may suddenly kill you. Now choose for your friend a paranoiac, and beware of the wolf! His back is to the wall, his implacable enemies are crowding on him. He gets no rest. He finds no starting hole to hide him. Ten times oftener than the Apostle, he has been, through the violence of the unswerving malice which pursues him, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Now that, face to face with him, you simulate innocence and come within his reach, what pity can you expect? You showed him none; he will certainly not show you any. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, 0 Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. Mr. Lecky's maniacs lay in wait to slash a man's head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud. The beastly cunning of their approach, the fantastic capriciousness of their intention could not be very well met or provided for. In his makeshift fort everywhere encircled by darkness, Mr. Lecky did not care to meditate further on the subject.

Mercantilists promote the view that private market activity often drives the economy into difficulties which require government to intervene and set matters back on course. They typically characterize the economy as cyclical, driven to excesses by human emotions of greed and fear, which cause “bubbles” and “crashes” and interrupt steady progress of society. Government, they say, must prevent these cycles, smooth these bubbles and crashes, so as to achieve less volatility and greater stability in economic growth. Then they persuade government to adopt policies which produce cycles, bubbles, crashes, volatility, high taxes and unemployment, and economic instability —and monstrously large, illicit gains for themselves.

In 1934, Daphne’s book Gerald: A Portrait had caused a great furore, since it broke with conventional biography with all its polite limitations, and was instead a frank and honest portrait. Gerald was written with great love and sympathy; in it Daphne was never cruel or unkind, but she described the shadowed side of her matinée-idol father, haunted as Kicky had been before him by bouts of nerves and depression, unsure of himself or of those he loved best, and afflicted at times by a doubt that anything at all in life was really worthwhile. I read Gerald at one sitting, perched in the sun by the side window at Mena, and even now have only to open the book to find myself back at that wooden garden table, seated in a wicker chair that was shaped like an upturned Welsh coracle

A leader who fails to live amongst his folk will be like a blind man that does not know the light from darkness. Yet a leader who fails to serve but waits to be served will toil endlessly in his rule and he will find no meaning in his leadership. Yet a leader who aspires for glory and fame will be like a cub that can't learn the tricks of hunting. Yet a leader that seeks wars and warmongers will cause depression among his countrymen. A leader that seeks wealth rather leading will make his countrymen corrupt. A corrupt leader will make the country poorer and corrupt because it is his law to be corrupt. A leader must live like his people. A leader will be known by his deeds and not by his name and a great leader will not govern. A leader is an example for all his subjects. A great leader will not serve while the country is getting hungrier and starving but a leader will become hungry like his hungry citizens.

What are the health effects of the choice between austerity and stimulus? Today there is a vast natural experiment being conducted on the body economic. It is similar to the policy experiments that occurred in the Great Depression, the post-communist crisis in eastern Europe, and the East Asian Financial Crisis. As in those prior trials, health statistics from the Great Recession reveal the deadly price of austerity—a price that can be calculated not just in the ticks to economic growth rates, but in the number of years of life lost and avoidable deaths. Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialize. Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. Social protection saves lives. If administered correctly, these programs don’t bust the budget, but—as we have shown throughout this book—they boost economic growth and improve public health. Austerity’s advocates have ignored evidence of the health and economic consequences of their recommendations. They ignore it even though—as with the International Monetary Fund—the evidence often comes from their own data. Austerity’s proponents, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, continue to write prescriptions of austerity for the body economic, in spite of evidence that it has failed. Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth—a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm—punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession.

But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what causes us misery in our lives. What causes misery is always try-ing to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happiness— this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing. In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path because of deep unhappiness. Suffering can also teach us empathy for others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear. Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us, and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s been some kind of mistake or we’ve lost it. In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place.

Mom, your love is a mystery: How can you do it all? Mother is such a simple word, But to me there’s meaning seldom heard. For everything I am today, My mother’s love showed me the way. You are the Thunder and I am Lightning And I Love the Way You, Know Who You are to me Cause Mom You are a firework My Moon in times of darkness My Sun in times of my happy hours My pillow in times of sorrow And My strength In Times Of Great Depression How Can You Do It All? My World, My Forever What will I Have Been Without Such Pure Love Like The Moon In Someone’s Sky You Show Me The Way to life With your loving and slivering light you shine like and angel And I Thank heaven for the grace of having such a mother Which paths are wise and life is true You are my sunshine I’ll love my mother all my days, For enriching my life in so many ways. She set me straight and then set me free, And that’s what the word "mother" means to me. Mom, I wish I had words engraved in the clouds to tell How much you mean to me. I am the person I am today, Because you let me be. Your unconditional love Made me happy, strong, and secure. In all the world, there is no mother Better than my own. You're the best and wisest person, Mom I have ever known. Like the stars talks with no words your wisdom Enlightened me And Forever the angels will sing hallelujah For they Woe to have someone like you

problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier – no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear. Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

Why Did the Stock Market Crash? The most persuasive explanation for the 1929 stock market crash blames the Federal Reserve. Throughout the 1920s, but particularly in 1927, the Fed pumped artificial credit into the loan market, pushing down interest rates from their free-market level. Lower interest rates exaggerated the feeling of prosperity, and misled businesses and investors. In a laissez-faire market where money and banking are not disturbed by the government, the interest rate is a price that tells borrowers how much capital citizens have saved and made available to fund projects. But when the Fed adopts an “easy-money” policy by pushing down interest rates, this signal is distorted and the interest rate no longer does its job of channeling the available capital into the most deserving projects. Instead, an unsustainable boom develops, with firms hiring workers and starting production processes that will have to be discontinued once the Fed slows down its injections of new money. Many economists point to the Fed hikes in interest rates during 1928 and 1929 as the cause of the stock market crash. In a sense this is true, but the deeper point is that the crash was made inevitable by the bubble in the stock market fueled by the artificially cheap credit preceding the hikes. In other words, when the Fed stopped pumping in gobs of new money that pushed up the stock market, investors came to their senses and asset prices plunged back towards their pre-bubble level.

Genes can be activated or turned off by factors in the environment. In the Cree population of northwestern Ontario, for example, diabetes is found at a rate five times the Canadian national average, despite the traditionally low incidence of diabetes among native peoples. The genetic makeup of the Cree people cannot have changed in a few generations. The destruction of the Crees’ traditional physically active ways of life, the substitution of high-calorie diets for their previous low-fat, low-carbohydrate eating patterns and greatly increased stress levels are responsible for the alarming rise in diabetes rates. Although heredity is involved in diabetes, it cannot possibly account for the pandemic among Canada’s native peoples, or among the rest of the North American population, for that matter. We will see that in similar ways changes in society are causing more and more children to be affected by attention deficit disorder. It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions about genetic information. Some studies have identified certain genes, for example, that are said to be more common among people with attention deficit disorder or with other related conditions, such as depression, alcoholism or addiction. But even if the existence of these genes is proven, there is no reason to suppose that they can, on their own, induce the development of ADD or any other disorder. First, not everyone with these genes will have the disorders. Second, not everyone with the disorders will be shown to carry the genes.

At the outset I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course there are many events in human history that can only be labeled as evil, but from the standpoint of inner individual experience the distinction has become blurred for me. Some things start out looking great but wind up terribly, while other things seem bad in the beginning but turn out to be blessings in disguise. I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, which I thought was a bad thing. But the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I'd ever been, and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful, but it resulted in a complete cure, which I decided was good. I later found out it may also have caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant. At some point I gave up trying to decide what's ultimately good or bad. I truly do not know....Although not knowing may itself seem like a bad thing, I am convinced it is one of the great gifts of the dark night of the soul. To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death about what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience-because there really is no way of knowing. I don't have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure, but they've given to me in the course of life; I haven't had to figure out a single one.

February 26 The Past Do not call to mind the former things, or ponder things of the past. Behold, I will do something new.—Isaiah 43:18-19a (NASB) The past is a nice place to visit, but a terrible place to live. The Bible makes it very clear we are not to stay in the past. The words above are an emphatic “Do not”! When we focus on the past it may become very depressing. It also takes our focus off what God is doing in our life today, and what he wants to accomplish in the future. I thought of an acrostic this morning after I prayed. It is: P.A.S.T. (Pressing Ahead Saying Thanks). The past can teach us many things, some very great lessons; yet it is the future that we as believers should be concerned. Most often the past can remind us of things that were about us; while today and what lies ahead puts our focus on God, His plans, and purposes. When we don’t know what a day can bring, or what the future holds, we become more dependent on our heavenly Father. Going back in time can cause us to think more of what we had, what we did, and what we hated to release, when we really need to move on. Our walk with Jesus is just the opposite—we need to hold on to all things loosely. People, places, and things are all temporary. So let go, let God, and be expecting him to do something new. I’m so thankful God is always at work in my life doing something new. It behooves me then to do my part, to be constantly changing, moving ahead with new spiritual maturity, to prepare me for my life with Jesus and his forever kingdom. Let’s not get stuck in the past, but Press Ahead Saying Thanks for what we have learned, that equips us to move ahead. Thank You Jesus for reminding me to look ahead and find joy in You.

We could call Christianity, in particular, a huge treasure house of the most elegant forms of consolation — there are so many pleasant, soothing, narcotizing things piled up in it, and for this purpose it takes so many of the most dangerous and most audacious chances. It shows such sophistication, such southern refinement, especially when it guesses what kind of emotional stimulant can overcome, at least for a while, the deep depression, leaden exhaustion, and black sorrow of the physiologically impaired. For, generally speaking, with all great religions, the main issue concerns the fight against a certain endemic exhaustion and heaviness. We can from the outset assume as probable that from time to time, in particular places on the earth, a feeling of physiological inhibition must necessarily become master over wide masses of people, but, because of a lack of knowledge about physiology, it does not enter people’s consciousness as something physiological, so they look for and attempt to find its “cause” and remedy only in psychology and morality (—this, in fact, is my most general formula for whatever is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can have a varied ancestry; for instance, it can be the result of cross-breeding between different races (or between classes — for classes also always express differences in origin and race: European “Weltschmerz” [pain at the state of the world] and nineteenth-century “pessimism” are essentially the consequence of an irrational, sudden mixing of the classes), or it can be caused by incorrect emigration — a race caught in a climate for which its powers of adaptation are not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India); or by the influence of the age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or by an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the inanity of vegetarians, who, of course, have on their side the authority of Squire Christopher in Shakespeare); or by degeneration in the blood, malaria, syphilis and things like that (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which spread bad diseases in an epidemic through half of Germany and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German timidity).

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. . . . At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed. There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. . . . But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." -Lyndon B. Johnson, 15 March 1965

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products. For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market. Elon

The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929–30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India’s money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency would cause losses to the British from a corresponding decline in the sterling value of their assets in India. So Britain insisted that the Indian rupee stay fixed at 1 shilling sixpence, and obliged the Indian government to take notes and coins out of circulation to keep the exchange rate high. The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from some 5 billion rupees in 1929 to 4 billion in 1930 and as low as 3 billion in 1938. Indians starved but their currency stayed high, and the value of British assets in India was protected.

Some of my patients suffer greatly after a single course of antibiotics, even if the antibiotics were absolutely necessary. This is exactly what happened with Greg. He consulted me about symptoms that were not clear at all. Greg had frequent episodes of cold-like symptoms, which had been occurring regularly for over two years. The strange part was he never presented a fever or cough. He also suffered through bouts of depression, which affected him even though everything in his life was working well. When I asked Greg about his health history, he told me that he had had pneumonia two years earlier. Doctors—rightly—had prescribed a round of levaquin, a very strong antibiotic.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle. “When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

When he was young, he explained,2 his people had ranged across the Great Plains on horseback, and their lives had always been organized around two crucial activities. They hunted, and they prepared for the wars they fought against rival Native American tribal groups in their area. Everything they did was designed to prepare them for one of these two organizing poles of life. If you cooked a meal, it was in preparation for the hunt, or for the fight. If you conducted the ceremonial Sun Dance, it was to ask for strength in the hunt, or in the fight. Even your name—and the name of everyone you knew—was based on your role in the hunt, or in the fight.

the great antidote to spiritual depression is the knowledge of Biblical doctrine, Christian doctrine. Not having the feelings worked up in meetings, but knowing the principles of the faith, knowing and understanding the doctrines. That is the Biblical way, that is Christ’s own way as it is also the way of the apostles. The antidote to depression is to have a knowledge of Him, and you get that in His Word.

one of the top five spots selected as most inspiring by the SNAP community in their writing contest. I was elated that people who were familiar with sexual abuse and also victimized by representatives of the Church voted for my story. My own peers read my words, understanding the pain and struggle to fight the mental anguish of such heinous, horrifically hypocritical abuse. They knew about the hell we have to live with every breathing moment of our lives. My equals acknowledged the fight we have to overcome to rectify the damage caused from the sins of the abused. It was a great moment for me, and it was another turning point in changing my thought process from dark to light. I realized an amazing correlation between myself and the success of the organizations I had been involved with, envisioning myself as a link in the chain. This chainlink concept came to fruition when I tried to search for some additional positive affirmations to lift me out of my depressing period. I

Many complex elements contributed to the Great Depression of 1929. However, most economists believe that the two main causes of the Depression were the immensely uneven distribution of wealth during the previous decade and the extensive speculation in stock that took place in the latter half of the decade. The decade preceding the Depression was a time of tremendous prosperity and became known as the “Roaring Twenties.” However, prosperity was not for everyone. The number of wealthy people in the country was less than a tenth of a percent of the total population yet they controlled most of the money in the country. In a well-functioning economy, demand must equal supply. But in 1929 wealth was so unevenly distributed that the supply of products far exceeded the demand for them. People may have wanted the products at the time but they couldn’t afford them. If supplies keep building and demand lessens, the economy can collapse. One way to balance the equation is to allow people to buy products over time. By the end of the Roaring Twenties, over 60 percent of all automobiles and 80 percent of all radios had been purchased on credit. With this new influx of money into the market, the economy was booming at the end of the 1920s. Stock speculation became rampant. Profits as high as 3,400 percent could be made in less than a year and people could buy on margin. In other words, they only had to put down 10 percent cash when buying a stock. Because of this, everyone was buying stocks. The poor were equal players with the rich. This buying spree pushed the market to new highs. In 1928 alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from 191 to 300. There were warning signs as minor recessions occurred in the spring of 1929. Investors became nervous. In October people started selling their shares of stock. As the market started dropping, more and more people sold stock, margins were called, and by October 1929 there was panic selling. Stock prices dropped so fast that many rich people became poor in a matter of hours.

If you recognize, however, that the physical may be partly responsible for your spiritual condition and make allowances for that, you will be better able to deal with the spiritual. Another frequent cause of spiritual depression is what we may describe as a reaction—a reaction after a great blessing, a reaction after some unusual and exceptional experience. I hope to call attention sometime to the case of Elijah under the juniper tree. There is no doubt in my mind that his main trouble was that he was suffering from a reaction, a reaction after what had happened on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19).

Interpretations are usually tied in some way to the era in which they were written. It’s far from accidental that the generation that fought the war would come to view it in the North as a moral struggle over slavery, and in the South as a more defensible support of state’s rights. Similarly it is far from accidental that the economic interpretation gained great popularity during the 1930s, the years of the great depression. Nor is it surprising that interpretations emphasizing fanatics and incompetent politicians should arise as people in the 1930s began to see World War I as an avoidable conflict, and who were simultaneously witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Nor should we be surprised that all these alternative views to slavery as the cause of the war emerged in the decades of intense racism in the United States. Nor should we be surprised by the reemergence of slavery as a moral issue, and the question of race relations in the era of civil rights and in the years since World War II and the full revelation of Nazi racial atrocities. .... The emphasis of psychological interpretations in this same time period should not surprise us either. ... Nor should the emphasis on ideology that developed in the years of the cold war, which was an ideological conflict [be a surprise].... . It is important to realize that if one accepts the ideological approach then all the previous interpretations retain their validity. For even if there were no conspiracies in reality, no truly irreconcilable differences in economies and cultures, no basic disagreement over the nature of the Union, and no chance of slavery establishing itself in the territories; Americans North and South believed otherwise because of their ideology, and they acted on the basis of those beliefs. Furthermore, ideology and perceptions are themselves products of all the general factors previously cited as causes of the war--Economics, culture, politics, political theory, moral values. And the common denominator linking all of these previously sited causes is SLAVERY. It was the base of the southern economy, southern culture, the conspiracy theories north and south, the fanaticism, politics, moral arguments, racism, conflicting definitions north and south of rights, and ensuing ideological conflicts. It is therefore the basic cause of the war.

A risk factor is something that makes depression more likely, without necessarily causing it. There is now a great deal of scientific support for three risk factors for depression: Poor social skills Shyness or withdrawal Excessive dependency on others

The real cause of the beginning of the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This shocking and totally unprecedented legislation ended up imposing an average 60 percent tax on more than 3,000 import items. It was the equivalent of exploding a bomb that devastated the global trading system.

Relieving Stress Stress is your reaction to outside stimuli pushing your mind, body or spirit out of balance. Adapting to new stimuli is how you increase your capabilities and develop new skills, i.e., the basis of growth. But, if the stimuli is too great or arrives so quickly that you are unable to adapt, then the resulting stress can lead to physical, emotional or mental problems. Stress can be triggered by many factors, including: physical, emotional or mental abuse; life changing events such as a new job, moving, pregnancy or divorce; work or school-related deadlines; high stress occupations; and uncomfortable social situations Exposure to stress affects us in stages: In the first stage, when we experience stress, our bodies automatically react with the characteristic “fight or flight” response, also known as an adrenaline rush. In life threatening situations this is helpful, as adrenaline causes our bodies to increases our pulse, blood pressure and rate of breathing, better preparing us to do battle or to escape. When the outside stimuli disappear, often with a good night’s sleep, we return to normal. Continued exposure to stress, without a break, results in the second stage. In today’s modern society, everyday stress from traffic jams, work, or just plain living, triggers this same reaction. We end up in a constant state of stress. We deplete our reserves, especially our adrenal glands, and lessen our ability to handle additional stress. Even our ability to sleep can be affected. The final stage results from the accumulation of stress over time and leads to exhaustion. Unable to return our body, mind and spirit to its normal state of balance due to overwhelming stress, we suffer physical, emotional and mental breakdowns. Warning signs are: weight gain or loss, ulcers, indigestion, insomnia, depression, anxiety, fear, anger, inability to concentrate, moodiness, and other problems. It can be argued that all disease is a consequence of stress.

*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.

2007. Greg is a lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has long helped students defend their rights against censorious campus administrators. In 2014, he saw something strange happening: Students themselves began demanding that colleges protect them from books and speakers that made them feel “unsafe.” Greg thought that universities were somehow teaching students to engage in cognitive distortions such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and emotional reasoning, and that this could actually be causing students to become depressed and anxious. In August 2015, we presented this idea in an Atlantic essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.

As a monk, I do not have genetic children or grandchildren, but I do have spiritual children. I have seen that it is possible to transmit my realization and wisdom, and the capacity to adapt, to my students—my spiritual children and grandchildren. Just as I look like my parents, so do my students and disciples also somehow look like me. This is not genetic transmission, but spiritual transmission. There are many thousands of people in the world who walk, sit, smile, and breathe like me. This is proof of a real transmission that has been incorporated into the life of my students and inscribed in every cell of their bodies. Later on, my students will in turn transmit this adaptation to their descendants. We can all contribute to helping Homo conscius—the species that embodies mindfulness, compassion, and enlightenment—develop and continue in the world for a long time. The world is in great need of enlightenment, understanding, compassion, mindfulness, and concentration. There is so much suffering caused by stress, depression, violence, discrimination, and despair, and we need a spiritual practice. With a spiritual practice, we will be able to adapt and survive. By living with solidity and freedom, we can transmit mindfulness, concentration, insight, joy, and compassion to others. This is our legacy, our continuation body, and we hope future generations will inherit our life’s offering.

I am giving a lesson on the causes of the Second World War, trying to go back from 1939 through the 1930s, talking about Italy taking over Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1935, as well as Hitler’s rise in 1933, the Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression. ‘Well, they tried, but in a really half-hearted way. Economic sanctions, but nothing that was majorly enforced. But the thing is, at the time, a lot of people didn’t realise what they were dealing with. You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way. No one knew where fascism was heading.

Girls typically exhibit higher rates of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety, turning their emotions and suffering inward. Boys, on the other hand, tend to exhibit higher rates of externalizing disorders, turning their emotions outward and engaging in high risk or antisocial behavior that often affects others, such as drunk driving, violence, and drug abuse. But around 2010, something unprecedented started happening: Both sexes shifted rapidly toward the pattern traditionally associated with females.

This feeling of being lost and confused is not anyone’s fault. It is a natural reaction to having been born into times of great change and chaos. The old support systems of the past—religions, universal causes to believe in, social cohesion—have mostly disappeared, at least in the Western world. Disappearing also are the elaborate conventions, rules, and taboos that once channeled behavior. We are all cast adrift, and it is no wonder that so many people lose themselves in addictions and depression.

Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote: “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.

The generation brought up during the Great Depression and the Second World War, still in measure steeped in the much-maligned Protestant work ethic, resolved to work hard and provide a more secure heritage for their children. And, in measure, they did. But the children, for whom the Depression and the War belonged to the relics of history, had nothing to live for but more “progress.” There was no grand vision, no taste of genuine want, and not much of the Protestant work ethic either.83 Soon the war in Vietnam became one of the central “causes” of that generation, but scarcely one that incited hard work, integrity in relationships, frugality, self-denial, and preparation for the next generation. That ’60s generation, the baby boomers, have now gone mainstream—but with a selfishness and consumerism that outstrips anything their parents displayed. There is no larger vision. Contrast a genuine Christian vision that lives life with integrity now because this life is never seen as more than the portal to the life to come, including perfect judgment from our Maker. At its best, such a stance, far from breeding withdrawal from the world, fosters industry, honest work for honest pay, frugality, generosity, provision for one’s children, honesty in personal relationships and in business relationships, the rule of law, a despising of greed. A “Protestant work ethic” of such a character I am happy to live with. Of course, a couple of generations later, when such a Christian vision has eroded, people may equate prosperity with God’s blessing, and with despicable religious cant protest that they are preparing for eternity when in their heart of hearts they are merely preparing for retirement. But a generation or two after that their children will expose their empty fatuousness. In any case, what has been lost is a genuinely Christian vision. This is not to say that such a vision will ensure prosperity. When it is a minority vision it may ensure nothing more than persecution. In any case, other unifying visions may bring about prosperity as well, as we have seen. From the perspective of the Bible, prosperity is never the ultimate goal, so that is scarcely troubling. What is troubling is a measuring stick in which the only scale is measured in terms of financial units.

What do you hope we’ll be studying for History Day?” Bruce asks. “Pioneer times would be nice,” I reply. “I like the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They’re ever so lovely, don’t you think?” Oh my God. Why am I talking like that? Ever so lovely?! Bruce nods. “What about studying the Great Depression? That could be fun to learn about.” “Or depressing,” I add. Whew. OK. Good comeback. “What caused the Great Depression, anyway? Was there a therapist shortage?

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.

The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes

Going Public Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure. This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission. Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products. For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market.

The way I see it right now, the United States of America has destroyed itself, or is destroying itself from within, thus making it vulnerable to being conquered from without. The United States of America is corrupt, as it has no rule of law, and little or no prudential regulation and supervision. The Global Financial Crisis, make no mistake about it, is a global Depression even worse, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and was caused by the same thing – rampant corruption, and it will result in the same thing – World War.

History records that there was only one Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo — and that he was too small for his job. The fact is there were two Napoleons at Waterloo, and the second one was big enough for his job, with some to spare. The second Napoleon was Nathan Rothschild — the emperor of finance. During the trying months that came before the crash Nathan Rothschild had plunged on England until his own fortunes, no less than those of the warring nations, were staked on the issue. He had lent money direct. He had discounted Wellington's paper. He had risked millions by sending chests of gold through war-swept territory where the slightest failure of plans might have caused its capture. He was extended to the limit when the fateful hour struck, and the future seemed none too certain. The English, in characteristic fashion, believed that all had been lost before anything was lost -— before the first gun bellowed out its challenge over the Belgian plains. The London stock market was in a panic. Consols were falling, slipping, sliding, tumbling. If the telegraph had been invented, the suspense would have been less, even if the wires had told that all was lost. But there was no telegraph. There were only rumors and fears. As the armies drew toward Waterloo Nathan Rothschild was like a man aflame. All of his instincts were crying out for news — good news, bad news, any kind of news, but news — something to end his suspense. News could be had immediately only by going to the front. He did not want to go to the front. A biographer of the family, Mr. Ignatius Balla, 1 declares that Nathan had " always shrunk from the sight of blood." From this it may be presumed that, to put it delicately, he was not a martial figure. But, as events came to a focus, his mingled hopes and fears overcame his inborn instincts. He must know the best or the worst and that at once. So he posted off for Belgium. He drew near to the gathering armies. From a safe post on a hill he saw the puffs of smoke from the opening guns. He saw Napoleon hurl his human missiles at Wellington's advancing walls of red. He did not see the final crash of the French, because he saw enough to convince him that it was coming, and therefore did not wait to witness the actual event. He had no time to wait. He hungered and thirsted for London as a few days before he had hungered and thirsted for the sight of Waterloo. Wellington having saved the day for him as well as for England, Nathan Rothschild saw an opportunity to reap colossal gains by beating the news of Napoleon's 1 The Romance of the Rothschilds, p. 88. 126 OUR DISHONEST CONSTITUTION defeat to London and buying the depressed securities of his adopted country before the news of victory should send them skyward with the hats of those whose brains were still whirling with fear. So he left the field of Waterloo while the guns were still booming out the requiem of all of Napoleon's great hopes of empire. He raced to Brussels upon the back of a horse whose sides were dripping with spur-drawn blood. At Brussels he paid an exorbitant price to be whirled in a carriage to Ostend. At Ostend he found the sea in the grip of a storm that shook the shores even as Wellington was still shaking the luck-worn hope of France. " He was certainly no hero," says Balla, " but at the present moment he feared nothing." Who would take him in a boat and row him to England? Not a boatman spoke. No one likes to speak when Death calls his name, and Rothschild's words were like words from Death. But Rothschild continued to speak. He must have a boatman and a boat. He must beat the news of Waterloo to England. Who would make the trip for 500 francs? Who would go for 800, 1,000? Who would go for 2,000? A courageous sailor would go. His name should be here if it had not been lost to the world. His name should be here and wherever this story is printed, because he said he would go if Rothschild would pay the 2,000 francs to the sailor's wife before

we see here that Jesus comes and teaches people from the boat. But did you notice that it doesn’t mention what he said? There is no teaching expressed here. That tells us that the story itself is the teaching. As 21st century people, you know that when you take a four gigabyte file and turn it to a 100 megabyte file, you have compressed a great amount of information.   That is what we have here. This is sacred wisdom containing universal truth and one of our great mistakes is that we only take it on the surface. Do you know that for hundreds of years, for centuries, all the teachers talked about different levels of understanding holy scripture and yet, somewhere around the 1800s, scholars locked in to merely the surface, so it is just about Peter and the guys out fishing.  Yet, this is only a picture to touch us at an emotional level that can understand better than our mind. Jesus is going passed our mind to a place where we can understand in another way.   Let me give you an example of a picture that stirs the emotions. You notice that the fishermen were washing their nets and a bit later, we find Peter saying, “We’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything.” Have you ever tried something with all your efforts and gotten nowhere? Have you ever run out of steam or lost hope? Have you ever given up on something because you’ve given it all you had and nothing came of it?   Jesus is addressing us right there in that frustrated place, in that unhappy place, in that depressed place, whatever it is that caused it. Jesus is giving us a spiritual remedy to our sense of failure.

Mark is a walking dilemma, one of those people who’s hard to figure out. He is an unmarried Christian professional man with no “horrible” problems like drugs, sex, or compulsive addictions. He’s intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. He’s responsible and loves God. Mark is forty-five years old. And he has no friends, safe or otherwise. He is very, very alone. How does that picture come together? On the outside, it doesn’t make sense. A guy with Mark’s qualities should have a rich, active relational life. But when you understand the power of perfectionism, it makes “perfect” sense. For Mark is a perfectionist and has only recently seen the devastating consequences of this trait. Sometimes we make jokes about our perfectionism: “I looked in the mirror and got depressed about being three pounds overweight.” The genuine article, however, can be much more serious. Perfectionism can be a major cause of depression, destructive behaviors, and divorce. What is perfectionism? Simply put, it’s an inability to tolerate faults. Perfectionists have a phobia about imperfections and blemishes in themselves, in other people, and in the world. They spend enormous amounts of time trying to create a perfect world, running in futility from the realities of sin, age, loss, and cellulite. The perfectionist tries to live in the land of ideals. He sees life the way “it should be.” People should treat each other right. I should be a productive, successful person. Fairness and equality should rule. Then he sees the huge chasm between the land of ideals and the land of the real. For example, he cannot live up to his expectations of himself. Or he is let down by someone important to him. And he has great difficulty accepting where he lives—the land of the real. So he tries to change his permanent address to ideal-land again.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.

Depo-Provera is a powerful poison, with a devastating inventory of wretched side effects: Under federal law, the Depo-Provera label must bear FDA’s most stringent Black Box warning—due to its potential to cause fatal bone loss. Furthermore, women have reported both missed periods and excessive bleeding; blood clots in arms, legs, lungs, and eyes; stroke; weight gain; ectopic pregnancy; depression; hair loss; decreased libido; and permanent infertility.73 Some studies have associated Depo-Provera with dramatic increases (200 percent) in breast cancer risk.74 The FDA warns women not to take Depo-Provera for longer than two years, but Gates’s program prescribes at least a four-year course—or indefinitely—for African women and goes to great lengths to avoid warning Black women about the concoction’s many drawbacks.

Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.

To experience more self-transcendence, we need to turn down the things in our lives that activate the profane mode network and bind us tightly to our egos, such as time on social media. We need to seek out conditions and activities that have the opposite effect, as most spiritual practices do, including prayer, meditation, mindfulness, and for some people psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly found to be effective treatments for anxiety and depression.[

debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z. Collective

Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it, too, expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world. The screen he projects over life is painful because life itself is painful. So it is, too, for the residents of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty and depression. Imbued still with the honour accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains why it is their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses, but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: they all gave the impression that, because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth that they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic licence to be paralysed.

…adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

The Bible is relevant and real, and the people who inhabit its pages are people who have faced what you and I face. Life has disappointed them, others have disappointed them, and they have disappointed themselves. Just like us. Remarkably, amazingly and delightfully, these people are the people God uses. The disappointed ones. Sneaky and snarly people who often acted before they thought, who failed to act when they should have and sometimes didn’t act at all. Yet they were called friends of God. The man who named the people of Israel, Jacob, was a mama’s boy. The one who became brave enough to stand up to his wealthy adopted family and side with the oppressed immigrant workers, Moses, lived with a stubborn insecurity. Rahab, a woman whose circumstances led to her prostituting herself, became the one who helped establish a country for the “pure and holy” people of God. King David, famous for his devotion to God, gave into his voracious sexual appetites and passion. These are the ones God calls friends: people like the great prophet Elijah who struggled with depression, fear and a weird streak of pride that caused him to do an ugly power play over the fate of two little boys. Jonah, the prophet to the ancient city of Nineveh, who didn’t want to go because of his racism. John the Baptist, who would today likely be holed up in Idaho somewhere, living off his produce and writing treatises against the government and church.

Other-Directed Shoulds lead to feelings of anger and frustration when others don’t meet our expectations (“He shouldn’t feel that way” or “She shouldn’t have said that!”). Other-directed shoulds cause conflicts with others, such as marital problems, arguments, and even violence and war.

Self-Blame and Other-Blame. You find fault in others or yourself instead of solving the problem or identifying the true causes of the problem.

He was taken to the McMinnville hospital and died on January 29, 2019, at the age of fifty-seven. The official cause of death was congestive heart failure, but that medical term misses so much: his expulsion from school in ninth grade, his loss of good jobs as factories closed, his abuse of drugs and cooking meth, his criminal record from drugs, his genius for mechanics, his failed marriage, his loyalty to friends including us, his five grandchildren all taken into care by the state, his loneliness, his desolation. This was another death of despair, and Clayton was a casualty of America’s social great depression.

Affecting more than 100 million people a year, depression is the world’s leading cause of disability.

The verb “un-man” is defined in a nineteenth-century dictionary as “to break or subdue the manly spirit in; to cause to despond; to dishearten; to make womanish.” In other words, there was a sense that truly going off the deep end—being unable to work or function, as happens in the disease of depression—ran contrary to true masculinity.

The first step to reconnect with your body is to breathe into its lungs. This one is still a tough pill for me to swallow, but people who get in the habit of breathing regularly report great things. Since it only takes a few minutes without oxygen to straight-up die, it seems reasonable that even a small increase in the amount of air you consumer might make you feel vaguely less dead. Now don't be a hero and try for the long, deep breath. Experiencing that "good God, I'm alive" feeling so suddenly might cause you to recoil like a vampire from the light. At first just try a wee puff, as from a questionable doobie.

If we are unhappy and depressed Christians it is more than likely that it is all due to that lack of discipline. Let us therefore be up and doing, and giving all diligence, let us supplement our faith and not be afraid. Let us get our ideas clear and then put them into practice, and supplement our faith with this strength and vigour, with this knowledge, with this temperance, with this patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and love. Let us begin to enjoy our Christian life and to be useful and helpful to others. Let us grow in grace and knowledge and so be an attraction to all who know us to come and join with us in the like precious faith, and to experience the blessedness of these exceeding great and precious promises which never fail.

We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability—on some unconscious level—scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence—our conceptual self—will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist. Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that’s the whole point. Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die. Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects. Becker argues that wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub up against another group’s. Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s. But, when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as Becker points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence.