O perspectivă ortodoxă asupra depresiei. Cauze actuale şi remedii duhovniceşti

Abstract

According to international standards, depression is a state of sadness which lasts at least two weeks and which interferes with work, school or home. In the most severe cases, depression leads to suicide, the experts from World Health Organization (WHO) establishing a very clear correlation between the two realities. Every year, almost 1 million people commit suicide; since half of them suffer from depression, the disease is described by the same experts as being a real silent pandemic. As indicated by the estimation made by WHO, by the year 2020 depression will be world’s second disease, after heart diseases, surpassing cancer. At the moment, depression is on the fourth place.
Depressions are of different types, and according to their nature we can find the appropriate “cure” for healing them. It is very important to understand the nature of depression and the factors which trigger it in order to limit its evolution and to overcome it. There is a difference between the mental and spiritual diseases; consistent with their type, some depressions are considered to be mental diseases, while others spiritual diseases.
The harmonious relation between body and soul is defining for man’s salvation. The Orthodox psychotherapy starts from the assumption that the contemporary man’s main disease from which all other things derive, is the absence of God from his life, that is why the main priority is retrieving the interpersonal relationship with God. The result of Orthodox psychotherapy is the purity of the heart and God’s expiation.