Depression

Stephen B. Smith is the Accreditation, Language Arts, and National Forensic League coordinator for the Public School System Central Office.
A time for seriosity—you like that word? It fits the times. Slow economy, increase in homelessness, increase in divorce rates, increase in business failures, social unrest, strange alliances in the political sphere: it’s a helluva time, definitely a time for seriosity. A byproduct of times like these is of course depression. I was in a bar recently and found even the bartender, Jack, to be depressed, and that one’s against the rules. It’s a bartender’s job to make the rest of us feel better, or at least not alone. And, then a question was posed to me…

“Hey, Steve, I know you’re taking courses in Psychology, whaddya think is going to be the No. 1 problem that psychologists are going to have to deal with in the years ahead?” Kind of a general question, but a valid one, at least in my opinion. I thought about it for a minute. There are a lot of things that counselors and psychologists have to deal with on a daily basis. I already mentioned a few of them above: homelessness, failed marriages and businesses, et cetera. There are lots more of course: veteran’s problems as they return from war, racism, ethnocentrism, gambling, domestic abuse, the list is long. But all of these things have one thing in common: They all breed depression. Still, even that doesn’t answer the question, the underlying one: What is the number one causes of causes as it relates to depression?

The answer for me has to be substance abuse. Let’s look at it. The way I see it, your local neighborhood dispenser of illegal pharmaceuticals is responsible for a plethora of miseries: broken homes, child and spousal abuse, petty and felonious crime, physical ailments almost too numerous to catalog, mental disorders some of which may not even have names yet—and—of course depression. Well, actually all of those things and more lead to somebody’s depression.

Our prisons are full and the cost to the taxpayer is enormous. The supreme irony is that the producers of our chemical mega-industry, that which at least indirectly, fills all of those prison cells, are almost never mentioned in the news. They need to be; they need to be persecuted and prosecuted. But, that’s a story for another day.

The rock star who is caught with a pound of marijuana in the back seat is mentioned in the news. The mom or dad who left their personal stash out where their teenage son or daughter could find it is mentioned. Occasionally, a politician whose sins are so egregious not even his friends in the Legislature can save him—or her—are mentioned. And these are the ones who are living their lives at the expense of the state. And, while they are so incarcerated, their families are suffering from depression. Then there are the medical problems.

President Obama is trying to get us all universal health care. I posit the thought, that if there was no substance abuse in the country, we’d probably be able to afford universal health care.

Oh yeah, we the people need to rethink how we deal with these issues. Psychologists are going to be more than just busy dealing with them in the years ahead. The depressed state of the economy is nothing when compared to the depressed states of mind of the many people afflicted by all the pressures that we experience on a daily basis.

I sincerely believe that all of us need to slow down. We need to employ well thought out choices and treat these problems—and their causes— now and fast and summarily. I am making my contribution right now. I have in my pocket a phone number. It’s the number of a psychologist. I am going to give it to Jack. My bartender has to be “not” depressed. It’s not acceptable that I have to deal with my number one unlicensed counselor, my bartender, when he’s even worse off even than I am!

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[I] Stephen B. Smith is the Accreditation, Language Arts, and National Forensic League coordinator for the Public School System Central Office.[/I]