Monday, November 17, 2003
Pope Say Consumerism Helps to Spread Depression
VATICAN CITY (RNS)--Pope John Paul II warned Friday (Nov. 14) that a consumerist society preoccupied with material well-being has helped to make depression the most common psychiatric disease in the Western world.
Addressing participants in a conference on depression, the Roman Catholic pontiff offered the experience of religious faith as a valid treatment for the depressed because it "opens them to hope and presses them to choose life."
More than 600 experts from the psychiatric, health care and religious worlds are attending the three-day (Nov.13-15) international conference organized by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Health Care.
"The spread of depressive states has become worrying," the pope told them at a Vatican audience. "They reveal human, psychological and spiritual fragility that at least in part are induced by society."
It is important, he said, to recognize that depression can be a response to messages of the media that "exalt consumerism, the immediate satisfaction of desires and the race to an ever better material well-being."
Depressed people need to regain "self esteem, faith in their own capacity, interest in the future and the will to live," John Paul said. They need to be part of "a community of faith and life in which they can feel themselves welcomed, understood, sustained and, in a word, worthy of loving and being loved."
John Paul said the family, schools, youth movements and parish associations have roles to play in preventing the disease.
"The phenomenon of depression tells the church and all of society how important it is to offer to people, and especially to the young, models and experiences that help them to grow on the human, psychological, moral and spiritual plane," the pope said.
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