I recently heard that a number of depression medications can, statistically, cause increases in the types of thought and action consistent with the most severe levels of depression. Being weird, I started to think about this. This is more Joel’s field than mine, but I pondered this question from an alternative point of view. What if the problem is not depression but something that looks like depression?

There are times in which the human mind, working within design specifications, will exhibit the loss of will. Having been birthed and trained in the beliefs of naturalism, we tend to see problems in terms of biological mechanisms. Even when we deny it, our minds are bound to the dogmas of the faith. It is so deep within us that we even deny that it is a faith that we hold and will call its dictates self-evident truth.

A computer can crash because of bad hardware. Most of the time, a computer will crash because of bad software. What if the appearance of depression is the same way? Are we feeding bad programming into the next generation in the belief that we know better than our designer? It is completely possible that the results that we are getting are biological GIGO.

Garbage In-Garbage Out. If the problem was small enough to be accounted for by a defect in the product line, then hardware problems would make more sense. What the defect is a large enough percentage of the population to become the normal state of the product, then the defect looks like a normal function. So my thought concerns looking for a biological solution to a problem that is not biological. Is it so far fetched that the question can be dismissed out of hand or am I thinking the thoughts that nobody else wants to think?

I’ve often considered the possibility that a bad idea can be a disease. This would not be the first time that I was correct about an off-handed observation. If nothing else, think about this idea. Know why you stand where you stand well enough to defend your stance against an honest challenge.

Futility is the knowledge that nothing you do will matter in the long run. It is logical that a deep-set sense of futility would look a great deal like depression. There would be no biological error involved. This is not even the only possibility for world views that can give the impression of depression. Have we drugged a generation so that we do not have to look at the truth we have chosen not to see?

There is an old song that I recall, in part. “Skip a Rope.” The song is about how children show us the things that we do not want to see about ourselves. It talks of children doing all the things we teach them to do by doing. None of these things are pretty. “It’s really not very funny what the children say.”

I’m short on time as a stand up philosopher for the day. You really would not want me to write a book here. All that I am asking is that we take an honest look at the man behind the curtain and see ourselves as we really are. What the world needs now is hope. Hope is the reason for the season.

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