Depression is quite often a response to our present conflict between material pressures and spiritual aspirations. used wisely, it can be a springboard to spiritual awakening and wisdom

You are in Good Company

Everyone has it sooner or later, so quit putting yourself down. In fact, the great seem particularly susceptible to it. Here is the roster of famous names who underwent depression at some point in their lives: Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolfe, Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana, King Solomon, Ernest Hemingway, Baudelaire, Edvard Munch, John Keats, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Beethoven, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, S.T. Coleridge.

The learning from their experience is that no one is spared periods of darkness, as life knows that some of the most profound lessons are learnt through it. Hear it from some of these seasoned players of life:
“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better it appears to me.” - Abraham Lincoln

Postscript: He was treated for his depression. He became the 16th President of America soon after. Some of his greatest achievements came after the depression as it made him more self-aware and empathetic.

Her name has become a synonym for holiness and faith, but it turns out that even Mother Teresa experienced the dark night of the soul. Between September 1946 and October 1947, she experienced visions of Jesus instructing her to found the Sisters of Charity, and she sank into spiritual depression when they stopped. “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains,” she wrote in 1958. “[People] think that my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing, and that my intimacy with God and union with His will fill my heart. If only they knew.” Later, she went into more detail: “The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God, and that God does not exist.”

Postscript: Nothing stopped Mother from doing her work and today she has become a blazing symbol of love and faith for the world. Her last few words, as reported by Sister Nirmala Joshi were, “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you”
- Megha Bajaj