On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 14:43 -0500, D. Jay Newman wrote:
> Andre:
> 
> While your list is full of good things, they will only help the symptoms
> of chronic depression, not the cause. Even doing all of these things will
> not always help.
> 
> Chronic depression is a disease of the brain: certain neurotransmitters
> don't work right.
> 
> You list makes it appear that you think that people with chronic depression
> can just "shake it off". This is the attitude that killed my father.

It is unfortunate, but not uncommon that certain diseases get labeled as
"your fault". Depression is often one of those diseases. The mass of the
public misunderstand what depression is and feel it's something a person
should just "get over". They don't understand that there are real
physical causes, and although the symptoms seem to be "in a person's
head", that doesn't discount the fact that the disease is REAL, and not
something a person can just "walk off".

Another similar twist to this is for some diseases the public feels the
sufferer "got what was coming to them". A good example of this is lung
cancer. While many people with the disease were smokers, there is a good
percentage of people with the disease that NEVER touched a cigarette in
their lives, and were never really exposed to smoke. Lung cancer can
pretty much hit anyone (like every cancer), yet because many cases
happen to smokers, ALL suffers get lumped in with this "it's your fault
you have cancer" crowd.

It just bugs me that there are people out there that are TRULY suffering
and society looks at them in this sort of way. TTYL

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