It’s interesting: We use the same word — depression — to describe a paralyzing melancholy and general economic collapse.
I imagine it’s safe to say one leads to the other and back.
Some say the cure for an economic depression is to have the government spend our way out of it. That, of course, ignores the fact that the government usually has spent our way into it.
Some say the cure for clinical depression is the right medication. I agree that when a chemical imbalance has caused the depression, a chemical tweak can improve things.
But what if your depression is caused by a depression — the depression (paralyzing melancholy), for example, of a restaurant owner forced out of business by a government who ordered her to close because it didn’t trust her to keep her customers safe from disease (thus causing an economic depression)?
Interestingly, this kind of deep sadness (the externally-generated kind, not the chemical kind) has the same treatment as the economic kind:
Resistance. Action.
Sometimes doing something to resist the emotional paralysis — resisting inertia and taking action, almost any action — can break the spell of sadness ever so slightly, and “ever so slightly” can be enough, for now at least.
And sometimes resisting an unjust law — or an unjust executive order — can lift an economic depression ever so slightly. Perhaps the injustice was the last straw that crushed a struggling business, but that was only the end of that dream.
Other dreams will come. They always do. There is no shortage of dreams in the universe, and not even the soldiers of totalitarianism can stop them all.
It’s hard to see this when both forms of depression weigh you down. But resist, and act, and slowly you will begin to dream again.