Current printed periodicals that have survived the internet barrage have been undergoing change in effort to survive in the world of commerce. Even the best ones have wrestled with losses in readership, funding, influence and respected staff. Nevertheless, many fine titles remain even under economic threat of death. Many have disappeared, and others embraced changed business structures to survive. Much printed space is now given to meaningful information that sometimes appears more educative than media organs formerly used. There was always some information but much for distraction, especially related to problems, life negatives, entertainment, and gossipy/racy features. Only in recent years did the newspaper coming to me dedicate regularly a section to the discoveries of science. I applaud what I see as improvement, greater objectivity, less partisanship, and some effort to hold to wholesome language in the better pages.
Consider the theme of health. The health context includes many more topics than can be addressed here. Let us take human depression as an example. We are now reading, in lay terms, about this troublesome, often mysterious factor of human life. Many millions of persons are infected to greater or lesser degree by an invader in life that not only infects individuals, but may take whole societies leading to dilution of energy, objectivity, truth, problem solving and may lead to premature death – especially through suicide, but more often through the debilitation of poor habits and depression in the human spirit. The damage list is long. The treatment list though long for research is short for predicating solutions. My wife, sometimes taken with depressions that made her rigid in body and grimly silent to anything being said or done in her behalf, became my classroom for the subject. Very little of the material in our attention was helpful, not because the material was poor, but because depression is so virulent, so mysterious, so evasive of cure, and sometimes so pervasive that it becomes habit. Like other hard habits it seems to outsmart the persons ministering to the problems, as well as the person bearing the burden of depression. There are serious works suggesting that depression (like many other factors) may enter the genome of a person to be discovered in that person’s DNA. If it does reach the DNA it has a force that takes very strong human resources to overcome. Spiritual lifting may be the only recourse, but that aid may not be counseled.
My wife’s experiential solutions were several, some deliberate and some seem accidental. Without extensive instruction she became an excellent piano/organ player – a superb accompanist. She was depressed in the community we lived in, and where I had made a life professional reputation. So we were called upon to move, but she wanted her own piano for the hours alone, when she could get some lift from playing sacred music. I bought a piano delivered to our new home 1400 miles west. In the new home she was lifted by moderated weather, playing piano and organ in the church, but asked if we could trade the piano for a small home organ. (I discovered the piano had lost its lifting effect.) We moved the organ into the living room, as I believed the downstairs piano had lost its value in a wrong location.) The organ served better, but also lost some of its personal benefit for her. Our growing children distracted her somewhat in their presence and good performance. So options were tried for periods and faded. They didn’t hold as we hoped they would, and I could see in her, and in others, how depression was negatively dragging them downward in illness – illness that must lead to premature death. (This is one of the focuses of current literature on human depression that we gained little from during the last century. The best we could get then from most persons was that the depressed needed to get over it. They didn’t and couldn’t.) But, we found a way at last. Project the depression out rather than in. Learn to push it away when it insisted on entrance. Do something you really want to do when it hits, communicating your purpose with those of the family. Take refuge with those you love. Change something in your style. Anticipate desired experience, like dinner out next Friday. Believe in affirmatives. Life is to be affirmed. Prayer, Scripture, and family won in her wrestling. My dear wife learned to manage the unwanted guest. In her dying, she knew she had won. She relived her mountains not her valleys. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020