Posted by dj on August 10, 2000, at 11:12:51
In reply to Re: Where the Roots Reach for Water - Anyone...???, posted by JohnL on August 10, 2000, at 4:46:11
> >Enrichment or not, my life is far better with pills than without. I accept melancholia and I accept that's the way I am. But to refuse a remedy of any kind I think is irresponsile to one's self, one's spouse, one's children, one's career, one's friends. If one is diabetic by nature, he/she must first accept it to deal with it. And then treat it. I see no difference with >melancholia.
John & Yona,Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, it's a subject I continue to puzzle over and it's great to read some other points of view, which is what I enjoy about PB and other good sources of insight including the books I've referenced.
I agree that depression is biologically based and it is irresponsible to not deal with it. The question I continue to puzzle over is the best way to deal with it. Different folks, will find different answers. For a whole variety of reasons, which I've touched on, here, I've chosen the non-AD route, at this time. I have used them in the past, when in deep depression and they have helped me regain my emotional, mental and physical balance. However I still felt off intellectually, spiritually and physically, the effect which varied with different ADs.
The results I've experienced and link with various one-on-one and group therapies, diet refinements, exercise regimes and expermentation with various supplements guided by a thoughtful, conservative, research and results-focused ND (natuopath) have led me to believe their is another way, though not necessarily an easier one to discover and explore, particularly if you have a lot of pressing commitments which you cannot put aside easily.
Regardless, I'm struck by the fact that depression rates are rising internationally as I've noted from various authorative sources including Canada's Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health who link this directly to stressful workplaces and shoddy management and communication practices in the 37 page report they released. Their target is corporate CEOs globally, because as they say in folkier circles: "If a fish stinks it stinks from the head." Problem is some of these folks may have been paying attention to other smells...
The honourary Chair for this Roundtable is the former Finace Minister for Canada who's son committed suicide a couple of years ago. An awful way for anyone to be alerted to the horrible impact of some of the growing pressures in our society and their impacts, which are a reflection, I believe, of an economic model which views us all as consumers rather than citizens.
I've given this a lot of thought and shared some of my and others thoughts here because I've been working on a mediation on this issue with an educational institution which viewed me as a disposable consumer who could be cast aside if I did not fit their model, which was a technocratic one.
That model is reflected in the following telling quotes from some of the many sources I've consulted:
“Institutions can make decisions on the basis of scores and statistics, and there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism – that is acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience – they are delusionary…
As the power of traditional societal institutions to organize perceptions and judgements declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery becomes the principal means…”
- Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1992
$
The Technocrat
"...a technocrat is someone who emphasizes the technical conceptions of a problem to the detriment of their social and human consequences..."
- Patricia Pitcher, Artists, Craftsmen & Technocrats: The Dreams, Realities and Illusions of Leadership, 1995, pgs. 41-44
$
“…as the evidence in this chapter makes abundantly clear, depression is a genetic disorder of being vulnerable to a stressful environment.”
- Robert M. Sapolosky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, 1998
$
"It doesn't matter how long your spirit lies dormant and unused. One day you hear a song, look at an object, or see a vision, and you feel its presence. It can't be bought, traded, or annihilated, because its power comes from its story. No one can steal your spirit; you have to give it away. You can always take it back."
- Carl Hammerschlag, M.D., The Theft of the Spirit - A Journey to Spiritual Healing, 1992, pg. 171
$
“But for all its playful love of puns and cool disdain for "suits," the high-tech world is, at heart, a cruel, unforgiving place ruled by the merciless dynamics of the marketplace...
As the former Wired writer Paulina Borsook points out in her new book "Cyberselfish," the digital community is increasingly a world that mirrors our "winner-take-all, casino society," a community that projects the attitude I've got mine (or certainly intend to if the bureaucrats don't get in my way)," so you don't matter…
This cybertopian world would eliminate "PEBCAK" (tech support shorthand for "Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard"), but then it would also eliminate "meatbots" -- or human beings, as they are still currently known.”
- Michiko Kakutani, “When the Geeks Get Snide: Computer Slang Scoffs at Wetware (the Humans),” New York
Times, June 27, 2000$
"For it is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from."
Robert F. Kennedy as quoted in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, pg. 114
$
Our failure to draw a distinction between illness and attitude (for want of a better phrase) can cost an employee their job and the company an otherwise valuable asset in which it has a significant investment…
Burnout is a product of extended pressure. It builds gradually, when:
* The job is a bad match between demand and the resources/skills of the individual;
* Individuals take on serious responsibility without authority, garnering little or no recognition or appreciation along the way;
* Employees lose or lack control over things getting done;
* There is work overload;
* The employer or the function lack clear goals;
* There is constant fire-fighting;
* Employees lose private time.
- Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health, The Unheralded Business Crisis in Canada: Depression at Work, July 20, 2000, pgs. 33, 36
$
"I have explored the idea that truthful communication enhances our spirits and that lies and miscommunication either bruise or destroy our souls, regardless of the organizational setting."
- Jerry B. Harvey, How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife?: And Other Meditations on Management , Top Nominee MANAGEMENT GENERAL Top 10 Resouces: New Thinking for Leaders, as quoted at: http://www.mgeneral.com/5-top/99-top/harvey.htm
$
“Adam Smith, the high priest of market economies and of modern capitalism may well be the most quoted and least read of all authors. Who for instance knows that he wrote this: “A profitable speculation is presented as a public good because growth will stimulate demand, and everywhere diffuse comfort and improvement… [But] the nature of this growth, in opposition, for example, to older ideas such as cultivation, is that it is at once undirected and infinitely self-generating in the endless demand for all the useless things in the world.”…
Organizations are rightly seen as the instruments of wealth creation, whether the wealth be money, health, education, or service of one type or another, but we now see more clearly that, in their turn, the individuals inside the organization have become its instruments, subordinated to the goals of the organization, used and/or discarded as needed. That was not intended…
It is not always remembered that Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of Nations, the bible of capitalism, but also and, in his view, more importantly, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argued that “sympathy,” a proper regard for others, was the basis of a civilized society. Markets, for wealth and efficiency, need to be balanced by sympathy, for civilization.”
- Charles Handy, Beyond Certainty: The Changing Worlds of Organizations, 1996, pgs 1, 4, 20
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Managing in this age of intangibles requires that we develop a very different mind set and skill set. We know that command and control doesn't work. We must work harder at building trust.
This is true in all industries, even in the brawny forest sector. To quote the CEO of a mid-sized forestry company when asked why his company was flourishing when many others in the Pacific Northwest were floundering: "We put a lot of emphasis on building relationships based on trust and mutual respect."
- Ann Svendsen, Grow Your Business With Trust!, Management General, http://www.mgeneral.com/3-now/99-now/050599as.htm
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Even when not written into a code, principles of professional ethics are usually expected of people in business, employees, volunteers, elected representatives and so on…”
- Larry Colero, Crossroads Programs Inc., A Framework For Universal Principles of Ethics, http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/papers/invited/colero.html
$
“It was the worse experience of my life. More terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer. I am ashamed to admit that my depression felt worse than her death but it is true. I was in a state that bears no resemblance to anything I had experienced before. It was not just feeling very low, depressed in the commonly used sense of the word. I was seriously ill... I could not think properly, much less work… I had panic attacks if left alone. And there were numerous physical symptoms – my whole skin was on fire and I developed uncontrollable twitches. Every new physical sign caused extreme anxiety. I was terrified… Sleep was impossible… and when I woke up I felt worse. The future was hopeless. I was convinced that I would never work again or recover. There was the strong fear that I might go mad.”
- Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression, 1999
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“The problems that we have created cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.”
- Albert Einstein
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“It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings… Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours, concern for the great unsolved problems of organizations of labour and the distribution of goods – in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of all your diagrams and equations.
- Albert Einstein
“One critic has said: “Education [is] by its very nature an individual matter… not geared to mass production. It does not produce people who instinctively go the same way… For one reason or another we are more and more ignoring differences, if not trying to obliterate them. We seem headed toward a standardization of the mind, what Goethe called ‘the deadly commonplace that fetters us all.’ “ This speaker was not part of a Berkeley rally; it was Edith Hamilton, one of our greatest classicists.”
- Robert F. Kennedy and some of his favourite quotes as cited in Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, edited by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, pgs 90 & 91
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“ The information revolution you say. Maybe, but writes T.S. Eliot again, “where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in information.”
Patricia Pitcher, Artists, Craftsmen & Technocrats: The Dreams, Realities and Illusions of Leadership, 1995, pg 201
$$$
As this selection from some of the many sources I've referenced shows these are not new problems facing us and our societies. However because there are more of us humans and the corporate mindset has become more prolific and numbers rather than community-driven, our societies are becoming less and less sustainable, I believe, and we who are more sensitive to these pressures are but canaries in a global coal-mine where pressures of many sorts are building... and need to be eased.
There are deeper issues here, I believe. Yona's description of her father feeling like a fish out of water and turning to alchohol as his solace is I think a telling reflection of the values clash which I suspect informed his solution to his spririt being crushed by a society where he felt unvalued.
One thing that struck me deeply when re-reading "Malignant Sadness" is how the author, a respected Proffessor of Biology as Applied to Medicine argues for psychotherapy as the treatment of choice. Now if we could just get some of those CEOs to sign up, maybe we could deal with some of those issues corporately and globally too, as some are attempting to do...
Sante!
dj
poster:dj
thread:42352
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000729/msgs/42505.html