Why Antidepressants Don't Improve Quality of Life

We would expect people with depression to feel better if they took antidepressants. Surprisingly, a huge study that examined 17.5 million adults diagnosed with depression each year between 2005-2016 concluded that they don’t. According to the study, “The real-world effect of using antidepressant medications does not continue to improve patients’ Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) over time.” Moreover, the study concludes that “Future studies should not only focus on the short-term effect of pharmacotherapy [treatment by medications], it should rather investigate the long-term impact of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions on these patients’ HRQoL.” Clearly, depression cannot be cured with drugs. The only solution to it is to deal with the root cause of depression; nothing else will help.

Emotional satisfaction, the lack of which causes depression, is the result of one’s connection with the root of life, the origin that vitalizes everything around us. Just as we do not feel the oxygen in the air, but immediately feel when its concentration declines, we do not feel that we are connected to the root of life, but we most certainly feel when we are disconnected from it.

Drugs are chemicals that can affect our feelings. However, emotional satisfaction is far more than a temporary feeling that fades when the concentration of a drug in the blood drops. Emotional satisfaction, the lack of which causes depression, is the result of one’s connection with the root of life, the origin that vitalizes everything around us. Just as we do not feel the oxygen in the air, but immediately feel when its concentration declines, we do not feel that we are connected to the root of life, but we most certainly feel when we are disconnected from it.

The root of life is a vital force that generates and sustains everything around us. It maintains a dynamic balance between two opposites that we can generally relate to as giving and receiving. These opposites manifest differently on every level: night and day, spring and fall, life and death, love and hate, and so forth.

When we are disconnected from it, we feel disoriented, insecure, and aimless. Imagine being out in space with nothing all around you, not even stars or planets to show you where you are. You can breathe, but nothing you do has any effect. When we are on Earth, tremendous pressures operate on our bodies from the air, gravity pulls our bodies downwards, the changing weather and hours of the day dictate what we do, and the people around us force us to act and think in ways we would not otherwise choose to act and think were it not for social pressures. However, precisely these pressures and counter pressures we create from within make us feel alive and vital. They give us direction, spur our actions, and enable us to evaluate our lives.

When we become too concentrated on ourselves, we lose contact with others, our human and social connections break down, and our most valuable channel for connection with the root of life, that vital force, becomes blocked. This is why people without healthy social ties do not feel vitalized although there is nothing physically wrong with them.

The more we develop, the more we need emotional satisfaction. If previously, we needed social connections primarily in order to satisfy our survival needs, such as food and work, modernization has made securing our physical well-being relatively easy. As a result, our social ties have changed their purpose, and instead of securing our survival, they provide us with a reason to survive. Instead of diminishing their meaning, they have become the very meaning of our lives.

It has been shown in countless studies that a person with good social ties is far happier and far less prone to depression than a more introverted person. Again, it is the interaction of pressure and counter-pressure that makes us feel alive and gives us a sense of purpose and direction. The cure for depression, therefore, is not in drugs, which have no effect on our social connections, but in building meaningful social connections that will give us emotional satisfaction.

This does not mean that we should all have many friends or that we should not be alone. Our natural disposition to sociability or privacy should remain. However, every person, however private, needs social connections. Our purpose is to make the ties we do have meaningful.

Our social connections should be such that we support each other and encourage each other to realize our potential. We should learn to see the differences between us not as causes for separation, but as perspectives that enrich us with views we would not come to by ourselves.

Our social connections should be such that we support each other and encourage each other to realize our potential. We should learn to see the differences between us not as causes for separation, but as perspectives that enrich us with views we would not come to by ourselves. Just as the night gives meaning to the day, an opposite opinion to mine gives meaning to my own opinion.

Think, for example, of democracy. What would be the meaning of the word if everyone had the same political opinion?

Therefore, the only way to improve our quality of life is by having as many views as possible within the same society, and maintain the cohesion of society while keeping all those different views “alive and kicking.” This will keep us connected to that root of life, to the contradictions that give life direction and meaning, and that provide us with emotional satisfaction.?

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New Drug that Promises to Target Only Cancer Will Not Kill It

Scientists at Tel-Aviv University (TAU) reported that they have developed a new way to deliver drugs directly to cancer cells rather than dispersing them throughout the body. According to the magazine Science Daily, “The study opens a new path to a personalized and precisely targeted battle against cancer.” Prof. Dan Peer, head of the research team, stated that their aim was “to silence the enzyme HO1 which enables tumors to develop resistance to chemotherapy, and to conceal themselves from the immune system. …Our new nanodrug,” he asserts, “knows how to precisely target the cancer cells, silence the enzyme, and expose the tumor to chemotherapy, without causing any damage to surrounding healthy cells.” I am all for advanced medicine, but medicine cannot cure the cause of cancer, and without curing the cause, it is like sealing one leak in a pipe only to find that we have created a new one instead.

Because cancer is an “egoistic” illness, the only cure for it is to cure our egoism. Eliminating cancer, therefore, requires uprooting egoism from our society.

Cancer is a unique disease. It develops when cells begin to consume their environment and grow at its expense. Eventually, cancer brings on itself its own death by killing the body that sustains it, but it cannot help itself.

That “selfish” behavior of tumors is very similar to the way we are behaving toward each other and toward the environment. Although we are dependent on both for our survival, our attitude toward them is opportunistic and abusive, yet we cannot help ourselves. In that sense, humans are the cancer of the earth.

While it is not that the more selfish one is, the more likely one is to develop cancer, the increasing prevalence of cancer in human society as a whole is a result of our increasingly exploitative attitude toward Earth and toward each other. Just as kind and generous people, or even little children, may develop cancer, the effects of humanity’s abusive attitude can manifest in parts of the world that are not particularly exploitative. There is mutual responsibility here: Just as the entire organism suffers when one organ becomes sick, all of humanity suffers when its overall attitude becomes sick, namely abusive.

Cancer is not the only outgrowth of our abusiveness. Basically, so are all of our diseases. However, cancer is the most striking case of a “selfish” disease, since the way it operates is so similar to the way we are behaving toward each other, toward animals and plants, and toward Earth as a whole.

Because cancer is an “egoistic” illness, the only cure for it is to cure our egoism. Eliminating cancer, therefore, requires uprooting egoism from our society.

Clearly, this is an educational process and not a medical one, but we will feel its benefits in every aspect of our lives. Education toward reciprocity and consideration will not only benefit our health, but our economy, the safety of our society, the level of drug abuse and drug-related crime, and our overall standard of living and well-being.

Even if we cannot see an overt connection between cancer and selfishness, eliminating the latter is clearly a worthwhile goal. Therefore, I would suggest that we try it first, and when we see the results, we will not want to stop.