Aesthetic Realism: The Answer to Depression

Here is the third and final section of my article, "Aesthetic Realism: The Answer to Depression."

In recent years there has been a proliferation of first-hand accounts of depression and the attempts to treat it, including through drugs. One of these is Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1994 book, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, published when she was 27 and had been on Prozac for 6 years.
I feel this book shows how unscientific, desperate, and ill-equipped mental practitioners are in dealing with people's lives. For instance, when Elizabeth's therapist gives her a diagnosis--"atypical depression"--she says she never bothered to tell her before, because "there isn't any reason to draw the symptoms of a depression into a particular category unless a therapist is about to prescribe an antidepressant." Elizabeth Wurtzel writes,

Enter Prozac, and suddenly I have a diagnosis....Which seems backward, but much less so later on, when I find that this is a typical course of events in psychiatry, that the discovery of a drug to treat, say, schizophrenia, will tend to result in many more patients being diagnosed as schizophrenics.

This is horrible! Mental practitioners do not understand mind or the cause of mental illness; yet rather than study Aesthetic Realism which has the answer, they prescribe the latest drugs—including, increasingly, to teenagers and children! With psychiatry and the media as middlemen, drug companies are making huge profits from the suffering of people: 12 billion dollars worth of antidepressants were sold worldwide in 2002. From the depths of my heart, I feel for people who are being treated this way. They deserve to know that Aesthetic Realism explains and can end depression!
Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, writes in her definitive commentary about Prozac in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known issue 1089:

The big question about Prozac or any drug is this: Does it really have a person in a more just relation to the world--or is it a managing of the world, a trick to evade that justice which we deeply demand of ourselves and without the giving of which we shall never feel at ease? … Chemistry can certainly affect emotions. But what needs to be studied too is whether the purposes we have affect the chemistry of our bodies … Through injustice--wanting to manipulate, conquer, lessen the world--we dislike ourselves. The ethical cause-and-effect is beautiful and inescapable, and no pill will change it. A pill may mask temporarily the ethics of self, but cannot take it away.

And she describes magnificently what all people need to know about our minds:

It is the self's grandeur that it was made to see justly a whole world other than itself--a world of happenings, objects, human beings, words. Through justice to that world, we become intelligent, imaginative, alive, happy, proud.

This great knowledge is taught in a wide curriculum of classes, public seminars, and individual consultations in person and by telephone worldwide at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation, 141 Greene St., New York, NY 10012, (212) 777-4490.