Is there something wrong here?

Depression is a serious problem – one that can make you feel horrible, cause you to have no fun, leave you unable to sleep, worsen your health, and even make you want to kill yourself – a problem that will affect at least 25 % of the population at some point in their lives. Despite it being a common issue, with serious consequences, it is very hard to get treatment. One person in four will have this problem, but because we are ashamed of having ‘defective feelings’ and because media doesn’t talk about death by suicide nearly as much as death by other diseases, it doesn’t get the attention or the funding of other problems. On any given day one can much more easily buy a gun or get drunk or indulge in street drugs than find someone to talk to about how bad you feel. And there seems to be a lot less shame attached to any of those issues than having a ‘mental problem’. There are Urgent care facilities and Emergency rooms to take care of medical issues, but unless you are suicidal, homicidal, psychotic or mucked up on drugs, quick mental health help isn’t available except via some of the ‘hot lines’ where you can talk on a phone to someone who can hopefully help you with a crisis.
Why is this so? Because we really don’t appreciate the importance of emotional feelings in the running of our lives. We tend to believe that emotional issues are something to be ashamed of – that if we just ‘pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps’ we would be ok. We appreciate our other sensory organs – ears, eyes, taste, smell and touch, but do not realize that feelings are every bit as much a sensory organ as each of those others – a true sixth sense – that helps us relate to the world. Our emotions add richness and depth to our lives and also make us aware of things in vague ways, encouraging us to investigate things further. It is so much harder to tell when the emotional sensors are ‘broken’ than when the physical sensors are broken, which also makes it seemingly much harder to figure out and fix.
This country is magnificent about the way it can move forward to solve problems and push frontiers once they are truly aware of the issue. Look what happened when President Kennedy set the goal of landing on the moon in 10 years! It was ‘Mission Impossible’ at the time. If we could give emotional diseases, stresses, strains and problems this kind of intense focus, we could truly do miracles. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge and technology that has been developed during my professional lifetime, and yet there is no concerted effort to bring things out of that dark closet labelled ‘mental health’ and bring that same focus to teaching people to love themselves and their lives and move out of that dark torture chamber of depression and into the light of enjoying life. There have been many medical things found to cause ‘psychiatric illness’ and remove large numbers of people from those rosters and that is good. There have been psychiatric medications developed to help treat these illnesses, and when not overused or misused, this is also very good. But with the advent of medications and surgeries, and diagnostic techniques, we seem to have lost sight of the many other things that come from understanding how the nervous system and the emotions associated with it work, and those