Panacea Poison

Our word, panacea comes from Greek mythology, the myth tells of this babe Panacea (Greek Πανάκεια, Panakeia) and she was the goddess of healing. Panacea’s mama was Asclepius, the god of medicine, and her grandpa was Apollo, god of healing (and a bunch of other stuff). For most of us, the word panacea means a cure-all. Unfortunately a cure-all cures nothing. For me the word panacea represents one of the most significant causes for my depression. I am a depression prone dude. I don’t just get blue, I get Navy Blue. The causes of depression are myriad, but the panacea problem is a problem in coping with depression.

Maybe I inherited a down in the dumps gene. I can possibly blame my melancholy on harsh and insensitive parenting, or maybe on traumatic stress. There may be value in exploring the causes for your depression, but I’ve been working on those causes since 1983 and I pretty much have an idea of the hurts and losses of my childhood. I am not concerned about the unfairness of my early years, I am concerned with salvaging what life I have left, and this is where the panacea problem causes me serious trouble.

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What I want, what most of us want, is A cure. Note the capitol A. What is desired by all of us is one thing that will fix what is broken. We want this for every problem we face. With this current economic meltdown going on now, we want someone to come in and say, “Do this one thing, and all our economic woes will evaporate, leaving behind the crystallization of mass prosperity." We want some guy to come in and say, “Cancer? All you have to do is take this Asparagus Supplement and Cancer will be forever eliminated from the human race.?"

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When I first caved in to the crushing depression that I’d been carrying around with me for as long as I could remember, I went to see a psychiatrist and was prescribed an antidepressant. I remembered being sick, getting a penicillin shot and I swear I could actually feel the bacterial infection dying off. I expected this antidepressant to work like that. I swallowed the pill and waited for the depression to lift. I wanted that pill to be my panacea for my pathetic aching existence. When that pill didn’t cure me, I went into talk therapy, and jumped around over the year from shrink to shrink looking for some therapist to shrink my problems. I was wanting some mental health practitioner to be the panacea that made my depression go away. I gave up on a pill and went to see Psychiatrists who would prescribe an anti-depression cocktail. I figured, me being a complicated guy, I needed a complicated solution. I figured a combination of different types of medications would work together to cure my depression. The cocktail did not turn out to be a panacea for my problem.

At this point in my life, I feel that anything that appears to be a panacea is Panaceic Poison. The cure for my depression is unlikely to happen. Notice that the sentence I just wrote contains the words the cure. THE CURE is a panacea. THE CURE is what I want, it is what we all want, but the word THE is sometimes call in grammar, a determiner, or an article.

An article is a word that, combined with a noun, indicates the type of reference being made by that noun, and to specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference. In-other-words, when I say the cure, or a cure, I am indicating how many cures there are: there is one, and only one cure, and such a belief is the perfect definition of panacea.

Juan Ponce de Leon supposedly searched the jungles of Florida looking for a Fountain of Youth. It didn’t exist. Ponce de Leon wasted a significant part of his life searching for something that did not exist. Will I do the same? Will you do the same?

This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am 58 years old and I can see 60 from where I stand now. I know a lot of people my age who are already dead. Life is short, death is forever, and I can’t waste my life looking for THE CURE for depression.

I believe that my depression comes from negative thinking and self-destructive behaviors. If I want to be better then I need to change the way I think and the things I do. Knowing the causes of depression may be helpful, but at most, it can only be part of the process of coping with the inner tormentors.

A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey. ~Sufi saying

There is no pill, or person who is going to fix your thinking or make you do healthy, life affirming stuff.

. . . an intellectual understanding of concepts is important, but ultimately the only thing that counts is what we do. ~David Michie

The essence of living is the doing. ~Ted Kooser