WE ARE constantly told there is an epidemic of mental illness. Really? Why is this, and has it always been so? I’m reminded that about 15 years ago, at work, I was required to go to a Mental Health Awareness workshop, in which we were assured ‘we all get depressed sometimes; depression is a mental-health issue’ – whereupon my syllogistic mind told me we’re all suffering from mental-health ‘issues’. And yet I didn’t recall being told, earlier in life in the 1960s, about mental-health problems. Were many of the boys I was with at school plagued by this? I don’t think so.
My layman’s idea of depression is that it actually comes in two forms: the ‘ordinary’ kind, from which we do indeed all suffer from time to time; and real, disabling clinical depression, which renders sufferers incapable of normal life. Of course, clinicians and health professionals might tell me this is wrong, but its a difference described by Dr Meirion Thomas in these pages only recently.
If, however, there is such an epidemic now, I think it is down to the nature of contemporary culture: the ideas, values and assumptions with which people are brought up, into which they are socialised, if you will.
The whole culture, the establishment, the MSM and almost everything that influences our lives, from infancy onward, is strictly materialist. This is the belief, or assumption, that humans and everything else exist entirely by accident or, rather, by a series of chance, undirected processes and that this present life/world/society is all there is.
It’s some time ago that ‘progressive’ parents started to declare they weren’t going to initiate their offspring into any religion, but would leave them ‘make up their own minds’ when they became adults. But the fact is that by about the age of ten most children have been initiated, whether they realise it or not, into the religion of secular materialism. Furthermore, today (unlike in the mid-20th-century world) young people are educated (some would say brainwashed) into believing the world is constantly threatened by ecological crises, and mass death will soon be brought about by ‘naturally caused’ viruses and pandemics, or rising sea levels or intense heat, and so on.
We know too from Laura Dodsworth and others in these pages that during Lockdown a government-created body set out intentionally to spread fear. And who can doubt that such projects will not emerge again – if, that is, they ever went away?
Hopelessness, pointlessness and existential fear are the sure causes of mental illness. The culture’s remedy is drugs, antidepressants, which can be extremely addictive. I recently heard tell of a man who had a friend, a GP. The GP told him – discreetly, off the record – he sometimes wished he could suggest his patients have the odd calm-inducing cigarette instead of pills.
But what is the root cause of this hopelessness and fear-based depression? My answer is that without belief in a life, world or destiny beyond this one, without belief in the possibility of this-worldly wrongs being righted, without the expectation of true justice, there can easily be a feeling of hopelessness. Materialism, which is the sop, can readily lead via hedonism to nihilism, and then to the desire for death. Why, you have to ask, in countries like Canada, Belgium and Holland, has assisted suicide so effectively and inevitably led to euthanasia and killing on such a scale? That will surely happen here too.
Meanwhile, religion is portrayed by the media as, at best, something purely-this-worldly, about ‘helping people’ or as social justice. ‘Christianity as it is practised today is a rather mild social philosophy,’ Hoyle and Wickramsinghe wrote in 1981 (Evolution From Space, London, JM Dent, p133). At worst it is regarded as the refuge of inadequates.
Now by contrast those such as myself (a committed orthodox Christian) know well that the world is a mess, where the wicked flourish and governments are a mixture of madness and badness – but at least we are assured that, by Christ’s promise, a blessed eternity awaits, and though this world is cruel, fallen, flawed, life is at best, and worst, only an hors d’oeuvre. During the Covid lockdowns, even before I had read Dodsworth, I was determined above all to experience no fear, to ignore catastrophism. I was sceptical about masks. I just wish that this Statist-defying attitude could have been communicated to everyone.
Of course I will be told that many people, while believing passionately that death is, in personal terms, the end of everything, have a very positive attitude to life and the wonders the world has to offer. I admire and rather envy such people, though I fail fully to understand them. Perhaps such people are generally more educated, better ‘resourced’; they don’t live in tower blocks in depressed post-industrial towns. But I am not even sure of that.
Also, I will be told religious people get depressed just as much as atheists. The obvious example of a depressive Christian is Justin Welby, recently resigned Archbishop of Canterbury, who has shared his psychological ‘issues’ with the world and put them down to a messy upbringing. (You might be tempted to think the main cause of his depression was his hopeless attempt to hold together incompatible theological and ideological beliefs – though that is for another article.)
Why then do true religious believers still get depressed? Probably because in our time we are outliers; we sit back powerlessly and watch burgeoning evil fill the world, knowing most people are blind to what is happening. Yes, we Christians are increasingly marginalised (and in many countries persecuted as never before). The situation is depressing. It depresses me . . . so perhaps I’d better pray. Listening to Welsh hymns is also excellent.
