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The Search for Meaning: Creative Responses to Depression
This issue of the SGI Quarterly presents a range of perspectives
on a problem at once familiar and misunderstood. Throughout history,
individuals have found themselves gripped by an overwhelming sense of
sadness and pointlessness. This can be caused by many things--by an
event in our lives such as bereavement or betrayal, illness or
disappointment--but quite frequently it seems to lack an obvious cause:
one is simply overcome by a sense of dark emptiness. Just as
mysteriously, these feelings can lift or change. Many of those who have
left records of their struggle with such feelings did so because they
were able to muster from within something that enabled them to embrace
and reframe this melancholy, to cast it in a new light. The creative
expressions of this struggle--as art, philosophy, religious insight or
scientific discovery--have enriched and benefited all of humankind.
Is depression a peculiarly modern phenomenon? Is it fundamentally a
question of biology, of neurotransmitter imbalances or deficiencies,
undiagnosed in the past and now amenable to treatment? Is it the
by-product of market-based, materialistic societies that seem to
deliberately erode people's sense of meaning in order to spur
consumption? Or is it a sensitive apprehension and turning inward of
anger at the injustices of society, a reflection of the loss of personal
identity and purpose in a world too busy to care?
The fact of depression, which impacts the lives of hundreds of millions
of people throughout the world, and the apparent absence of any single
solution, may represent a fundamental challenge to a world that has come
to crave instant answers. Indeed, the condition known as depression has
no simple, instant solution. Any genuinely creative response requires
that we learn to live with frailty and imperfection, that we accept the
essentially problematic nature of the human condition. That we take our
need for meaning and human connection as seriously as our need for
things.
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