If you have doubts that Americans have lost faith in a Higher Power, take a look at how we worship the biomedical model of depression. The biomedical model is so entrenched in our culture that it has become gospel—preached in doctor’s offices, reinforced by advertising, and accepted as unquestioned truth, even though it’s been debunked. Depression was sold to us as a simple problem of serotonin insufficiency, a convenient narrative that made drug companies like Eli Lilly, Forest Pharmaceuticals, and Pfizer very rich.
As a former pharmaceutical advertising writer, I not only witnessed the explosive growth in antidepressant drugs, I contributed to it. The reframing of depression as a problem of impaired brain chemistry has been a goldmine for the pharmaceutical industry, with today’s global marketplace for antidepressants worth over $20 billion. Unfortunately, the messaging of Big Pharma is hard to reverse once embedded into our collective brains.
My Journey: From Pharmacy School to Pharma Marketing
I entered medical advertising in 1980, fresh out of pharmacy school and eager to break into medical communications. Landing my first job as a junior copywriter at a global pharmaceutical ad agency in New York City felt like a dream come true. Writing about breakthrough drugs and explaining the science behind them was both challenging and meaningful.
At the time, there was no direct-to-consumer advertising, with drug companies only advertising medications to physicians. Equally important, my client’s drugs were generally superior to existing treatments, with each claim supported by two clinical trials demonstrating clinically relevant improvements in survival, outcomes, or quality of life. In those days, FDA approval actually meant something.
But in less than a decade, I watched the industry morph from what I thought was an ethical and innovative business into a soulless money machine. What began as a wonderful career combining my scientific knowledge with creative writing gradually revealed itself as something far more troubling: I was helping to manufacture “facts” about diseases and treatments that would shape medical practice for decades.
The Industry Transformation: The “Me Too” Movement in Pharma
The 1980s ushered in an era of greed and profit-mongering in the pharmaceutical industry. It even has a name—the “me too” movement—not the one about sexual harassment, but the one where building billion-dollar brands replaced actual innovation.
Big Pharma—already profitable and growing greedier—realized that real innovation was expensive, risky, and time-consuming. This wasn’t just a shift in marketing; it was a complete transformation of the industry’s business model. Companies realized they could take an existing drug, tweak a molecule, file for a new patent, and market it as an “innovative” breakthrough. Soon, companies would switch from marketing breakthroughs to marketing virtually identical drugs, and no class of medications exemplified this better than SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).
This business transformation necessitated a corresponding major transformation in pharmaceutical advertising and marketing. Companies that normally would be rivals became “allies” in efforts to market their very similar antidepressants. Their combined marketing power led to an unprecedented, carefully orchestrated promotional effort that fundamentally changed people’s understanding of mental health.
The chemical imbalance theory—specifically the idea that depression is caused by insufficient serotonin in the brain—was in truth a marketing necessity. Prozac, the first SSRI, was marketed as the panacea to this chemical imbalance, fundamentally reshaping how depression was perceived and treated. For SSRIs to make sense as a treatment, depression had to be reframed as a simple chemical deficiency. This marketing effort provided a compelling narrative positioning medication as a life-long solution for those with depression, even though the initial SSRI studies were only six weeks long.
By 2018, Americans were spending $17.4 billion annually on antidepressants, highlighting how deeply this narrative had permeated the thinking of the medical and the lay community.
Case Study: The Serotonin Theory and SSRI Marketing
Before the 1980s, depression wasn’t widely seen as a problem of brain chemistry. It was understood as an emotional disorder or melancholic condition influenced by personal life circumstances and social factors. For pharmaceutical companies to successfully commercialize SSRIs, they had to convince psychiatrists (and then patients) that depression was due to a chemical imbalance of serotonin—all fixable with a magic pill.
The chemical imbalance theory was powerful in its simplicity: too little serotonin in the brain causes depression, and SSRIs work by increasing serotonin levels. This narrative accomplished several critical marketing objectives at once. It medicalized depression, making it a biological disease rather than an emotional or social condition. It provided a simple explanation that doctors could easily discuss in a brief office visit. And it created a logical path to medication as the first-line treatment. What wasn’t widely discussed was how little scientific evidence supported this theory. Instead, most of the research supporting it came from the labs of corporations.
Fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, was introduced in 1988 as the first SSRI. Eli Lilly, the company behind Prozac, funded studies and published journal articles relentlessly reinforcing the message that depression was caused by 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), the chemical name for serotonin.
Ray Fuller, co-discoverer of fluoxetine and a biochemist at Lilly, Charles Beasley, a Lilly medical officer, and David Wong, a Lilly neuroscientist, published numerous papers reinforcing the link between serotonin and depression. A 1991 journal article titled “Role of Serotonin in Therapy of Depression and Related Disorders” by Ray Fuller appearing in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (JCP) provided evidence supporting the serotonin theory.
But, there was something most doctors didn’t realize. This particular issue of JCP was a journal supplement—paid for by Eli Lilly. Unlike peer-reviewed research, these supplements bypass rigorous scientific scrutiny—but medical ad writers cited them as authoritative sources for years. Journal supplements, which appear to be regular journals, are actually a form of paid marketing, serving as a vehicle to promote corporate research science.
Even more damning are statements revealed when reading the entire article, which begins by saying that SSRIs are an effective treatment for depression and then goes on to question the strength of the serotonin-depression link. A more complete reading reveals that the relationship between 5-HT antagonism and antidepressant effects was understood even then to be more hypothetical than definitive, and activation of serotonin receptors was not necessarily the mechanism that alleviates depression.
Yet, we did not mention these particular conclusions in our marketing materials. Advertising at its very core involves presenting a highly selective set of facts, carefully cherry-picked by drug companies to leave a favorable impression.
The Mechanisms of Influence: How Marketing Shapes Medical Practice
As the industry changed, I too had to adapt. My colleagues and I became the architects of new forms of advertising, ones that expanded the definition of depression, presented the serotonin theory, and even educated physicians and patients about the diagnostic criteria of depression itself, so as to create ever-larger markets for psychiatric drugs. The goal? To expand the number of treatable patients, so each company got a hefty slice of the billion-dollar antidepressant pie.
I spent years creating educational content for doctors, including repurposing antidepressant research into advertorials—ads designed to look like independent editorial content. This form of marketing is especially powerful because it creates the illusion of scientifically validated information.
I’ll never forget attending an American Psychiatric Association conference in the 1990s, where doctors stopped by my client’s booth quoting verbatim from advertorials I had written—believing them to be independent research. That moment crystallized for me just how deeply marketing, when disguised as education, shaped prescribing practices in the United States.
Our tactics included:
- Ads to physicians that blurred the line between education and sales pitches
- Detailing materials alerting doctors that depression was a biochemical imbalance
- Targeting consumers with diagnostic checklists encouraging anyone feeling unhappy to self-diagnose with depression and talk to their doctor
- Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising that normalized medication as the first-line treatment
The pharmaceutical industry’s influence over modern medical practice is profound, as are their marketing budgets which allow them to dominate the flow of medical information. Most people trust their physicians to make independent, evidence-based decisions. But here’s the reality: your doctor isn’t spending their spare time combing through medical journals and textbooks at night and independently verifying research. They’re too exhausted from seeing patients, documenting notes in electronic health records, and dealing with the frustrations of our mechanized healthcare system.
Except for a small number of academic clinical experts, most physicians get their information from:
- Medical conferences (often sponsored by drug companies)
- News media (reporting research pitched by PR firms representing drug companies)
- Sales reps (trained with marketing materials written by people like me)
- Industry-backed journal supplements (articles created by experts with PhDs working for medical communication companies)
- Thought leaders (“Key Opinion Leaders”)—doctors paid to present at peer-to-peer meetings
The Legacy and Way Forward
Antidepressants are now as American as apple pie—with a whopping 24% of women in the U.S. reporting receiving treatment for depression in 2023.The increase in antidepressant usage has been especially sharp among young people: since the pandemic, antidepressant use more than doubled among girls aged 12-17 and rose over 50% among women aged 18-25. This explosive growth in SSRI usage also helped pave the way for exponential growth in use of all psychotropic drugs as well—stimulants for ADHD and antipsychotics used to augment antidepressants, manage bipolar disorder, and address behavioral issues in children, adolescents, and nursing home residents.
What was sold as a quest for better treatments was in reality a corporate feeding frenzy. The idea that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency didn’t take hold because of independent, groundbreaking research—it was aggressively manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. The strategy was so effective that, even today, many people—including physicians—cling to this belief, despite little evidence and questionable science. However, in reality:
- Drug companies funded the research on the chemical imbalance theory of depression
- Drug companies controlled the messaging around SSRIs
- Drug companies profited when we bought into their version of mental illness
Large marketing budgets allow the pharmaceutical industry to amplify its messages, while critical voices struggle to be heard. Modern psychiatric care isn’t built on science—it’s built on sales. This is why we hear more about antidepressants than about proven and effective lifestyle treatments for depression like exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Follow the money, and you will find that many medical theories—such as the serotonin theory of depression—are rooted in an unholy alliance between industry, scientific publishers, and medical researchers.
What can readers do with this information? First, approach claims about “chemical imbalances” with healthy skepticism. Second, when discussing treatment options with healthcare providers, ask about evidence for both medication and non-medication approaches. Third, recognize that pharmaceutical marketing is designed to create demand—not necessarily to provide balanced information.
The biomedical model of depression isn’t gospel—it’s a compelling story that was crafted to sell pills. As a society, we need to reclaim the narrative around mental health from corporate interests and return to a more holistic understanding of mental health that acknowledges the importance of psychological, social and spiritual factors to emotional well-being.
The sun is a special thing, and the pupils in our eyes are the space for it and through each of them the sun rolls in and then finally our brains and our minds see it. Because the sun was all plant life – life being the energy in the plant which came from the sun and which mixes the yellow sand with the blue sky making the green grass. And ever since that life has been longing for the sun and at first continued to drink the sun, until she bloomed in flowers which is her delight and love gift back to the sun. But it wasn’t enough just to drink the sun: she had to possess the sun, and made, at enormous sacrifice to her green self, the herbivore, this vicious beast that would eat the green plants, flowers and the trees but at least could actually see the sun, making eyes, these almost universal things, that are the mirror image of the sun. In the centre is a black hole ready for the sun. Around the black hole is the iris, which is the sky. Sometimes that sky is encircled in white or black which is the day or night, the full and empty versions of love. But this was not quite enough. Mother Earth had to become the Sun. So she created humans. And we made religions for the sun. And this inflamed our spirits to first grasp it with our science and then our minds and then our hearts. I am the sun and the Earth and the sky. We all are. The mind is the sky and the ultimate: the ego is the moon: evil is the night: good is the day: the body is Mother Earth: the heart is the sun which is God: and the human being is the only unifying principle of creation who can understand these things by simply being these things, which means really being yourselves. Find your way back to yourselves and be free.
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Lydia Green, I like your passion, your frankness and your surname. Welcome to the club Green Lady because I’m a green lady too, called Mother Earth, only I’m a man without green leaves.
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Thanks, Lydia Green, for dispelling the notion that a “magic pill” is the answer to suffering. All of us suffer and it is one’s attitude and action toward it that will make life bearable. You are among the few who see the truth and are not afraid to declare it! However, I believe that what we need to see is an answer that lies beyond the scientific approach to “mind”.
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This is an incredibly important article for the public to read. I hope MIA readers share it with many, many others.
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Huh, that all sounds like false advertising, which I was told was illegal, back when I was getting my marketing degree.
And you’ll pardon me for pointing out the irony of you confessing this on a website filled with people who were harmed by your “misleading claims.”
Better late than never, I suppose. I’m glad you finally “got off the fence,” and ended your illegal false advertising. Someone should sue big Pharma for false advertising.
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Thank you, Lydia Green, for your contributions. There is a wealth of research and experience that reveals the financial (monetary) relationships between psychiatry (and psychiatrists) and the pharmaceutical industries. The information in this article is one of them.
A famous psychiatrist (I forget his name now) used to say, ‘Psychiatrists are the pharmaceutical sales representatives of pharmaceutical companies.’ So, we could say that he was implying that they were not doctors or anything and that they were clearly harming people. In my opinion…. psychiatrists are pharmaceutical sales representatives for pharmaceutical companies who work in hospitals and other mental health units. Psychiatry and psychiatrists have no close relationship or connection with ‘real medicine and doctoring’.
All they do is harm people’s ‘healthy brains’ (i.e. they cause brain damage). They make ‘money’ by damaging healthy brains (causing brain damage). Thus… They make mental illnesses permanent. (That is.. They make natural psychological problems permanent.)
-Why are there so many increases in mental illnesses worldwide?
-Why are there increases in suicide, violence and homicide?
-Why are there increases in physical and mental chronic illnesses?
This is one of the biggest reasons. World-famous physicians, researchers, and journalists such as Robert Whitaker and Peter Gosche have revealed this fact. (Of course, not all of them, but the vast majority seem to be.) And the evidence is still emerging.
Who will say ‘STOP’ to this?
This is a matter of curiosity. Will honest doctors, journalists and politicians do anything about this? Will societies take to the streets and raise their voices? What will the Trump administration do about this? What will Robert Jr. Kennedy do? Let’s see, we will wait and see the result. Best regards.
With my sincerest wishes. 🙂 Y.E. (Researcher blog writer (Blogger))
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I’m pretty certain, those of us at MiA, are the ones saying “STOP” this. But we are the most defamed in society today.
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For some reason I grew up sensing that the practice of medicine has more to do with performance than facts, that the art of persuasion is more valued than being honest with patients.
Imagine my delight when finding a book based on consumer behavior!
Most interestingly to me was how well the authors shed light on why, according to them, most physicians tend to be more receptive than the average person to subliminal messaging, the heart and soul of skillful marketing. According to the authors, this is because a medical doctor’s rigorous training paradoxically dulls their intuitive judgments, which, in turn, makes physicians more susceptible to persuasive advertising when it is presented as credible science. Key word: “presented”.
It’s a sophisticated sleight of hand specifically designed to target unsuspecting medical professionals, most of whom don’t have the time, training or inclination to critically examine the “information” they’re fed as they’ve been intentionally trained to blindly obey more than critically challenge.
It doesn’t hurt that attractive drug reps know very well how to make doctors feel “well-informed”.
In a nutshell, physicians are prime targets for pharmaceutical grooming, and don’t think for a moment that advertising professionals don’t know this.
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I remember reading that the vast majority of doctors don’t believe they are affected by drug company advertising, while the reality is the vast majority are strongly influenced. Believing that one is NOT susceptible to manipulation makes one much MORE susceptible to manipulation!
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Yes!!! Almost funny the way overconfidence can be one’s undoing.
The book I read was unusual in that it pinpointed how and why most medical doctors are oblivious to what makes them tick which subsequently makes it easy to fool them into thinking they know more than they do, something their usually fragile egos seem to feel strongly entitled to.
This confirmed my gut feeling that most MDs have NO IDEA how gullible (and insecure) most of them really are.
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Well, and being given the undeserved “right” to force drug, control, and play “judge, jury, and executioner,” to innocent others, seems to have allowed psychiatry and psychology to lose their own minds, with their undeserved and unchecked power.
Maybe we should get rid of the evil systems of control, that are attacking the innocent people (which are what the psych industries, et al, greed only inspired industries chose to become)?
And we should try to return to a just and free society instead?
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Not sure a just and free society ever really existed, Someone Else, as history shows there will always be people willing to manipulate the unsuspecting, especially in today’s world where psychological manipulation means billions of dollars.
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It’s the fool who believes he can’t be fooled.
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Right!!!!
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Clarification: It doesn’t hurt that attractive drug reps know very well how to make doctors feel “well informed”.
Key word: “feel”.
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Thank you for your honesty and to share this.
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As someone who spent my entire career in advertising—though never directly on Big Pharma—I worked with Big Food, Big Box retail, and automotive clients. And the truth is, it’s all the same. They all use the same playbook: emotional manipulation, aspirational messaging, and manufactured “needs” to sell products. But I didn’t always see it that way.
That all changed in 2003, when my husband died from a known but undisclosed side effect of an antidepressant. We had blindly trusted the system—like so many do—believing that pharmaceutical companies and medical products were held to a higher standard. What I’ve come to learn is that this simply isn’t true.
Once my eyes were opened—and my heart shattered into a million pieces—I began to see the marketing machine behind everything. What we’re really witnessing is the industrialization of health. “Selling Sickness” isn’t just a clever phrase—it’s a strategy. It’s how an entire industry ensures a cradle-to-grave pipeline of patients (aka customers).
Even the former CEO of Merck admitted this back in the 1970s. He once said he wished his company could be more like Wrigley’s—able to sell to everyone, not just the sick. Just imagine if medications were marketed like chewing gum: Doublemint, Spearmint, Juicy Fruit, and Big Red—but for depression, anxiety, sleep, or attention. Sadly, we don’t have to imagine it. We’re already living it.
Thanks for a powerful piece that brings attention to this issue. We need more voices calling out the system for what it is.
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I’m glad to see you are still at it, shining the light of truth into a dark and fetid subbasement of the pharmaceutical industry. Your efforts, beginning with the national conference in D.C., were an important factor in encouraging me and colleagues at the National Center for Youth Law to go and do likewise, then and during subsequent decades.
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Ah yes, that’s capitalism
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That is the game that is played in capitalism. Turn good people into people who as Hannah Arendt would describe as “the banality of evil”.
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‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
Uptain Sinclair
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https://www.etymonline.com/word/gospel
https://www.etymonline.com/word/repentance
https://www.etymonline.com/word/metanoia
Had Jesus’s story, as I believe Saul/Paul would have and does have Christiasn believe, been that we are all hopeless sinners, falling not seven but maybe seventy times seven times a day, and required to “repent” by beating ourselves up for our falls/sins, then I think he would have been the bearer not of some good news gospel, but of maybe the worst of all possible news. Much like that chemical imbalance story.
If the poor guy was desperately misunderstood during his own lifetime and afterwards, so that the metanoia/Repentance was not understood as that transformation of consciousness TO Consciousness, and our return to Shamelessness (“Unless you be like small children, you shall not enetr the Kingdom…” etc.) and, with it the realization that, hey, everyone is always actually doing the best they know how it whatever level of consciousness/awareness or enlightenment they find themselves, but, instead, as that requirement for self-flagellation, physical and/or metaphorical, then one may appreciate the irony with which Jesus may have finally remarked that, apparently,
“I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning!”
And:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”
And:
“Jesus said: Perhaps men think that I am come to cast peace upon the world; and they do not know that I am come to cast dissensions upon the earth, fire, sword, war. For there will be five who are in a house; three shall be against two and two against three, the father against the son and the son against the father, and they shall stand as solitaries.” – from https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas/gospelthomas16.html
“Despair” used to be a “deadly sin,” of course – when a certain ancient society/economy/hegemony or two required folks to conform and serve that society/economy as useful, productive elements of it. The threat of Purgatory or even of Hell for all eternity was held over those failing to conform.
This worked fairly well, it seems – at least from the point of view burning heretics in order to save their immortal souls etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
How could our ancestors, some of them very bright and highly educated, have believed such stuff? How could they NOT?!
Time passed.
Modern hominids, many of them very bright and very well educated, have been led to believe that YOLO – you only live once, and that that one life is the span of a human lifetime.
I have previously exposed the improbability of this hypothesis by reminding anyone who needs it that if timeless eternity pertains on either side of any number of bangs, big or otherwise, the odds of any one of us being alive right now for, say 121 years, is 121 divided by an infinitude of years, or 1 divided by infinity, and that of 8.2 billion of us being alive now, 1 over infinitude to the power of 8.2 billion.
But, of course, being immortal beings the odds of us all being around right now is 100%.
A largely YOLO society/economy/hegemony which requires its citizens to conform and serve it may need to convince folks that Purgatory/Hell is “I would trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahpIirW0svY ) and that, if needed, we can pour ourselves a cup of ambition ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbxUSsFXYo4 ) or pop a hope-restoring pill or sniff a soul-restoring powder.
What destroys our hope and our courage may, of course, have nutritional or medical aspects to it, such as a deficiency of iron or of magnesium, of Vitamin B6 or B12 or infections such as Lyme disease, malaria, brucellosis, toxoplasmosis or diseases involving hormone-producing glands or organs.
I find that life is only as good as it is getting better – that it’s all about the slope of the curve and that while “I feel a LOT better since I gave up hope,” I am only as joy filled as I am hope-filled.
As I have also previously pointed out, educated adults who would justifiably laugh out loud if, on asking a physician, “Hey, Doc, why am I jaundiced, do you think? were told “Because you have clinical jaundice!”, fail to find it equally funny to be told “Because you have clinical depression!” having asked “Hey, Doc, why am I depressed, do you think?”
Possible causes of jaundice – pre-, post- or intra-hepatic – are very many.
Possible contributory causes of depression are very, VERY many, and, I’d suggest, usually multiple, too, in any one case, given that Hope constantly fluctuates and forces endlessly interact…
But depression does not cause a lack of hope: It IS a lack of hope, and its cure, therefore, is obviously the restoration of hope.
But the blindingly obvious has always had a way of escaping many of us, and possibly most notably the more learned and academic and clever, such as the courtiers of The Emperor of the Invisible Clothes…
And:
“At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” – Matthew 11:25.
Our professor of large animal surgery, the adorable and much adored John Patrick O’Connor, begged us not to become too proud, reminding us that “You’ll be treating animals for antibiotic deficiency for the rest of your lives!”
Had that great man taught any branch of human instead of veterinary medicine, I doubt he would ever have condoned the treatment of hominids for “antidepressant” deficiencies – not so long as those “antidepressants” consisted of neurotoxic chemicals rather than hope-restoring principles.
John also reminded us that the very worst animal diseases were the veterinary ones – those caused by us vets. Perhaps the worst human diseases are the iatrogenic and psychiatric ones?
Some have seen our species as like a vast field of sunflowers.
Some notable figures memorialized in written history may be seen as early bloomers in this field.
These may include the likes of Lao Tzu, Confucius and Gautama Buddha, Emperors Zhuangzi and Ashoka, Socrates and Jesus, Vibia Petua and Margaret of Antioch, Catherine or Katherine of Alexandria and Joan of Arc, “Julian” of Norwich, Hilda of Bingen and Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross and John of God, Gandhi, Paramahansa Yogananda, MLK Jnr., Daniel Ellsberg, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bob Whitaker and any number of contemporary mystics and whistleblowers.
So many reformed, reformers, whistleblowers and Me-Tooers, indeed, that it seems that our field of sunflowers may very soon be in full bloom, as these final torrents of global downpours or seemingly precipitous selfishness and stupidity water us all into burgeoning glory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDJBKEOe7Pg
Now, if only we can figure out how best to explain to some of our politicians that we all inter-are, and that we none of us need (or needs) to cram our every possible exploitation of all others into just one, single, finite human lifetime…
Thank you Lydia and MIA for another priceless essay!
Comfort and joy!
Tom.
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….I mean, not to mention….Steve McCrae, obviously, and JFK and his brother, Bobby, AOC, and, for all I know, “THE Good Pope,” Il Papa Buono, John XXIII, “Friend of the Jews,” (“Via veritatis: via caritatis!” who may have averted a Bay of Pigs nuclear holocaust, Judy Tenuta and maybe even, for all I know, Pope John Paul II, who, for all I know, may have brought down the Iron Curtain…
Theirs was not to question why:
Theirs was but to do, or die…
Happy Days!
Tom.
“The measure of Love is to love without measure!” – Francis de Sales.
“The sooner you fall behind
The longer you have to catch up!”
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See! You could only ever get a comment like this on Mad In America, which proves the Mad Americans are the sane ones and the sane Americans are the mad ones.
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I agree, No-one, it is nice that MiA allows philosophical commentary.
I haven’t yet looked into all your links, Tom, but thanks for the thought provoking commentary and links.
But I will agree, “depression does not cause a lack of hope,” unless it’s “clinical depression,” which too many within the psych professions claim is “a life long, incurable, genetic illness,” caused by a “chemical imbalance,” “just like diabetes” … all of which is blatant lies.
Meaning these psych professions are telling blatant lies to their clients, in order to steal people’s hope, for profit.
And I agree, “It IS a lack of hope [that can cause depression], and its cure, therefore, is obviously the restoration of hope.”
Which largely means, get away from the psych professions that are spewing hope destroying lies at you, and stop believing these systemic liars.
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Someone Else,
MANY thanks.
I’m not QUITE clear on what you mean when you say,
‘But I will agree, “depression does not cause a lack of hope,” unless it’s “clinical depression,”….’
You’re being facetious, right?
In olden days, I think various plant diseases were called Black Spot disease, White Spot Disease and so on, and, when the fungus or whoever was causing the (underlying) condition – if it was A condition rather than many, of course – the name tended, I think, to be changed to reflect the understanding.
Steve (or H. Steven) Moffic, M.D., among other things, mentioned to us PT readers that a son of his was a rabbi. If that son’s heart was half as big as his dad’s, he has probably saved half some galaxy by now.
Steve, when I asked – in public, like on the pages of a PT blog’s comments thread – how come, seeing as “depression” was considered a “mental disorder” and seeing as how one could not possibly be burnth out (as a physician or as a human being) without being “depressed,” “physician burnout” was not listed as “a mental disorder” in any ICD or DSM, and just got a passing reference in the ICD-10, I believed….well,
Good Old Steve, he told us that they preferred to call it a psychological condition as to do otherwise might cause stigma and inhibit colleagues from coming forward to seek appropriate treatment.
When nGood Old James Herriot burned out 0his not being a case of “physician burnout” or of human burnout, either, mind you, actually, but of “veterinarian burnout,” he was prescribed a vacation or two, which I believe he took, according to the writings of his son, Jimmy, in “The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father,”
https://www.amazon.com/Real-James-Herriot-Memoir-Father/dp/0345434900 , a really great read by a really, really wonderful veterinarian AND human being.
So, Someone Else, what the fluke, we may ask, is the difference between
a psychological condition
a psychiatric condition,
a psychiatric illness or disease,
a psychiatric disorder,
a mental illness/disease,
a personality disorder,
a mental disorder,
a spectrum position or condition…
and our human condition – or position or spectrum?
“The human condition: lost in thought.” – Eckhart Tolle, in “Stillness Speaks.”
I amuse myself to reflect on how pathologists or physicians or surgeons look not always for lesions in a tissue, but for pathology there – as though confused between the thing itself, and the study of the thing.
Similarly, we do not hear folks referring to emotional or psychic conditions, but to psychological (to do with the study of the psyche, whatever THAT may be) or psychiatric (to do with the healing of the psyche, whatever that may be) conditions or disorders.
Best of all, though, Someone Else (but not really, for, like everyone else, you are really ME), “clinical’ – that word, itself:
‘from klinikos “of the bed,” ‘ – from https://www.etymonline.com/word/clinical
So maybe this human condition of ours, this mental condition, as long as it remains so, has to do with the bed, whatEVER we are doing there (and our guileless, then approximately ?7-year-old Katherine, when I asked her why we were on this planet, told me, “To make other people!”) – must only remain a clinical condition until we learn to forgive ourselves our sins by seeing them all as “FORE-GIVEN” us in advance as gifts from “God” – until we need them, like our pallets and beds and drugs and addictions, no longer?
Clinical, indeed, all of us – until we realize that are “sins,” susceptibilities, frailties, vulnerabilities, proclivities, idiosyncrasies, temperaments, personalities, “personality disorders” and “mental” and “behavioral disorders” = and even our psychological conditions – must have all been preordained, accepted by us in advance, and fore-given us.
Much love, and many thanks, Someone and Everyone Else.
Tom.
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…and, of course, John McCain, and not saying that Nixon and Reagan, like any of us, may not have had and shared their own moments of Enlightenment, too, when/if they made absolutely everyone laugh…
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But there ARE mightily encouraging signs and symptoms that the times they are a-changin’, and the tide it is not just a-churnin’ but also a-TURNING – right?!
Endless love.
Tom.
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