"It's the season to be jolly." That's how the Christmas carol goes. But it is also said that during these times when the general atmosphere is one of happiness and joy those who feel lonely or depressed will feel that their burden is heavier than it is usually during the rest of the year.

The topic of depression was recently discussed during an international congress held at the Vatican. Depression is a very common illness. There are 340 million people affected. Everyday experience is evidence of how widespread this sickness is. Depression is also a killer. One million lives a year are lost as a result of suicides committed by those suffering from depression.

One can legitimately ask whether there is a cultural dimension to the increase in the number of sufferers of depression. This Vatican congress answers affirmatively.

Relativism's negligence of objective moral principles is a primary cause of widespread depression and must be countered with fundamental religious and ethical values.

"Individualism, unemployment, divorce, insecurity, the absence of a genuine education, the lack of the transmission of learning, of culture, of morality, and of the religious life, and ethical relativism's negligence of objective norms, weaken people," who feel uprooted and unstable in life, the participants concluded.

Bishop James Wingle of St Catherines, in Ontario, Canada, in a very interesting speech noted that "when cultural references are closed to the infinite, humanity is constrained to live solely on a horizontal plain. This profound frustration disturbs human life and introduces a dynamic of rupture and brokenness across human culture in a form of negative solidarity."

Bishop Wingle says - and this must be the conviction of many of us as a result of their contacts with people suffering from depression - it causes immense personal suffering throughout the human family. While accepting that its causes are complex and multiple he points to a cultural reason for the increase in its incidence. "Functional agnosticism is a dominant theme in the present culture, marked as it is by a truncated vision of the human person and an essentially reductionist understanding of human destiny."

This dominant cultural milieu reduces the human person to one dimension and reduces human dignity. On the other hand love and solidarity are the strong messages that Christianity puts forward. There are many tasks that can be done to put forward this perspective.

The media and those who work in them have the duty to try to propose models of life and cultural ways that respect the values of life, the family and society. Such models will be a great help to convert individualist attitudes and tendencies of the post modern culture... into positive, personal, altruistic and solidaristic patterns of behaviour in favour of life.

"To listen, to understand, to love, to always value a person and to encourage him/her to participate and to feel comfortable," is the message the Church offers to support victims of depression, the participants emphasise.

We do not for any moment want to suggest that those who suffer from depression have less faith than others or that they are not good Christians. This is absolutely not the case. What we are saying, in line with the participants of the congress we are referring to, is that the infrastructure of our secularist culture makes coping with problems more difficult.

It is the duty of all men and women of good faith to help those who are suffering that it is not true that a person who is depressed has not been forgotten by God. In fact, God keeps such a person at the centre of his compassionate love. This, the members of the congress believe, is a Christian answer to the reality of depression.

"In fact, when beginning his messianic mission, Jesus said: 'I have come for the sick,' " among whom are the depressed. "The spiritual life transforms this promise in concrete ways to which offer the believer spiritual support to address any sickness, including depression," the concluding document adds.

If we want this season to be really jolly, we must try to make it so for those suffering from depression or other illnesses which prevent people from being jolly.

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