Physical Causes
Overwork, prolonged mental stress, anxiety or fear may drain our mental and physical energy levels. Gone is the needed strength to cope with life and its problems.
Physical or mental exhaustion may take weeks or years to develop. But it eventually can translate into mental energy rundown — a feeling of being unable to cope.
Improper nutrition can gradually set one up for depression. Too many refined sugars, starches or fats in the diet, or other unbalanced nutrition, can weaken the body's physical endurance, mental alertness and ability to handle problems or stress. Allergic reactions to certain foods or substances can also produce mental dullness, irritability or depressed feelings.
Proper sleep, diet and exercise is necessary to help avoid falling into depressed states of mind. Proper rest, food and creative activity are needed to help a depressed person come out of his or her condition.
Creative activity or achievement of any kind, even if it must start out small, should be encouraged for depressed persons. It is necessary to build up, a step at a time, a depressive's sense of worth and accomplishment again. Accomplishments should be pointed out positively to the depressive, because their depressed attitude tends to downgrade even things they can accomplish.
Here is another important, but comforting, piece of knowledge: many deeply depressed persons feel they have totally lost all their former skills and abilities, hence are total failures. This is a misleading feeling caused by the depression. Unfortunately, it viciously adds fuel to feelings of hopelessness and futility. But the skills and abilities are really still there! They will return as the person recovers from depression, as he or she reorders his or her life with positive values and attitudes.
Although many don't realize it, boredom is another endogenous stress. The human mind and body were created to need a modest amount of healthy variety and stimulation to feel alive and maintain equilibrium.
Boredom is the absence or dullness of stimulation and feeling. Boredom produces apathy, lethargy, and loss of sense of worth and of positive feelings about oneself. Continual boredom will set one up for a depression. Many of the symptoms of boredom and depression are similar, only the intensity may differ.
This tragedy of boredom is virtually engineered in many areas of modern life — such as homes for the elderly, prisons for the criminal and bleak residential quarters.
Drugs and alcohol are often used to tranquilize the resulting pain or to fill the emptiness. Yet the pain and suffering will not be truly alleviated without an exciting, worthwhile goal or purpose in life. What is needed is a life filled with faith and hope for growth in the future.
Drug/Health Factors
Depressive feelings can be induced by certain drugs, abuses of alcohol, improperly working bodily functions or viral infections. This is called toxic depression.
Wrong use of certain drugs needs special emphasis. Many depressives take barbiturates sedatives, tranquilizers or alcohol — drugs that depress the central nervous system — to alleviate their suffering. Some doctors carelessly prescribe such drugs for vague physical or emotional complaints not realizing that the problem is not physical — the person is depressed. Biochemical responses are already depressing the depressive's central nervous system. These drugs may alleviate certain pain or suffering temporarily, but in the long term they depress the brain and nervous system even more. This causes even less ability to solve underlying problems with right responses.
Imbalances in hormone production can also cause depressive feelings. This may happen from malfunctioning pituitary, adrenal, thyroid or other glands.
Menstrual, post partum (after birth) or menopause hormone changes sometimes produce negative moods.
Diseases such as diabetes, hypoglycemia, thyroid illness, mononucleosis, infectious hepatitis, a heavy touch of the flu or other poor health conditions can be responsible for some depressive feelings.
Because a wide variety of such conditions exist, anyone suffering from prolonged depressive feelings should seek a thorough physical examination to see to what extent any physical health problems may be involved.
Therapy Controversy
The medical and mental health professions today attempt to combat mental depression with a wide variety or combinations of drug, electric, verbal and health therapies. There is controversy over the effectiveness and safety of almost every technique.
An arsenal of new drugs have been developed in an attempt to calm or correct chemical imbalances in the depressed patient's mind and central nervous system. Doctors must often experiment with different drugs, and many of these must be taken for several weeks to have an effect. Consequent side effects must then be dealt with.
Modern mental health officials hope such therapy will reduce distressing emotions and feelings to more tolerable levels. Meanwhile therapists try to discover the underlying causes and suggest a course of dealing with them. Or they hope patients relieved of some distressing symptoms will improve by themselves.
It is not our editorial policy to make judgments about what is good or bad therapy for depressed persons — all of which treats the effects, not the ultimate causes. Such a decision is the personal responsibility of individuals involved or those taking responsibility for them.
For some seriously or chronically depressed persons — especially those threatening suicide or bodily harm — certain drugs or other special treatments may be the only option available if rational communication is no longer possible or if immediate lifesaving is necessary.
An objective presentation of the benefits and problems associated with common modern depressive therapies is discussed in the book Depression — How to Recognize it, How to Cure it, How to Grow From it, by Wina Sturgeon.
Our editorial policy, by contrast, is to reveal the causes of our human problems — why humanity is plagued with so much mental illness, with fears, worries and depression.
The Missing Dimension
The missing knowledge about mental depression is revealed in the Bible. Here is spiritual knowledge that unveils both the causes and solution to most mental ills, fears and worries.
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge [and that includes spiritual knowledge] . . ." Why? ". . . because you have rejected knowledge. . .," reveals the Creator in Hosea 4:6, Revised Standard Version.
Mental ill health is the result of broken spiritual and, possibly, physical laws that God set in motion and mankind as a whole has rejected.
Many modern minds think it educated to reject biblical revelation and the reality of immutable spiritual laws. But if we break these laws, eventually they break us!
Christ said, ". . . ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). God's written Word is truth. It makes us free — free of mental depressions, free of spiritual depressions, free of sin.
The truth that is missing in so many lives and in education in general is the true understanding of the purpose of human life and of the laws, Values and attitudes that produce peace of mind, joy and happiness.
Millions do not understand how and why their human nature develops with so many damaging values and fearful attitudes in life. Most humans have been blinded to the understanding of how they can receive the spiritual help and power they need to overcome their damaging human pulls and fears — of how to deal with every adverse situation in life with faith and hope — of how "to pray and not to faint," as Jesus taught (Luke 18:1).
Next month, an important follow-up article will fill in these enormous gaps of spiritual knowledge. You will be shocked to learn how humanity, cut off from God by wrong values and attitudes, has been set up by the devil to experience fears, hopelessness, futility and deep depression.
And, finally, you will learn God's way of escape from every fear and depression you now have!