Post-World-Health-Day Depression

According to the WHO, “Depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide. More than 300 million people are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% between 2005 and 2015.” Out of these, some 800,000 per year go on to commit suicide, which seems to be the end result of depressive thinking… Contemplating this on April 7th, I fought against getting depressed about it and studied the situation...

To put it bluntly, societies produce so many depressed people (and suicides) because they are sick societies. They don’t make their citizens happy. But a higher suicide rate in certain areas of the world may also indicate a traditional acceptance of causing one’s own death, as in North and South Korea (ranking tops at 37 and 29 per 100,000), Japan (18), and maybe Russia (19) and Eastern European countries (red countries range from 40 down to 12). Note that Indian culture (21) is also blasé about taking one’s own life, and some African countries (14-18). On the other hand, Islamic societies in the Middle East seem to show such a great acceptance of Allah’s wishes that they rarely take their own lives: Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Oman, Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria and Saudi Arabia are at the bottom of the list, all under 2 per 100,000. Green countries range from 12.84 to 8.54; violet from 8.53 to 4.52; grey countries are below 4.49.

 

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/suicide/by-country/

From the viewpoint of this blog, depression is simple. It’s a result of habitual patterns of wrong thinking and low awareness. The solution is right thinking and increased awareness. The problem is, where to get this from?  Because it isn’t a convenient commodity like a bottle of anti-depressants. Right thinking only comes with high levels of maturity in individual human beings, and this is then reflected to some degree in the societies they live in, or the masses of “followers” they create. But these human beings are few and far between. So people have to look to sometimes surrogate spiritual guides, gurus, religious people and a few intellectuals, psychologists and philosophers to make any headway. The mass media won’t help, nor will governments, political parties, the entertainment industry or big business. Internet today is a major evolutionary step forward in that you can find just about anything - if you feel the urge to look!

Sick societies create depressives, but wrong thinking produces the individual depressive. But mostly this is hardly the individual’s fault. He has been indoctrinated to think falsely and create his or her own messed-up mind. And so we are like tiny little mammals just peeping out of the grass at the lumbering dinosaurs of depression still dominating the Earth. There's lots of evolution to look forward to, but meanwhile what do we do? Without a total understanding of everything that is, the only thing we can do is look to ourselves and strive to increase our own level of awareness and start making the attempt to think properly. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”, as was once said.