Quick quiz. What is the least depressed nation in the world?
1. U.S.
2. Holland
3. Nigeria
4. Monaco
How about the most depressed, from the same list?
Would it surprise you to learn that Nigeria was the least depressed, and America, the richest country in the world, the most depressed?
If you want the source, see this blog post, cited below:
Why was I not surprised to find that America is the most depressed nation in the world?
A concise report in The Week magazine March 23, 07 discussed an article written by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal concerning various nations and how they rank on the scale of depression.
The study by the World Health Organization and the Harvard Medical School somehow figured out that 9.6 percent of Americans "suffer from depression or bipolar disorder -- the highest rate of the 14 nations surveyed."
The other nations are included in the article, but the least depressed is Nigeria, "a land of desperate poverty, rampant corruption, and violent tribal conflict." It had a score of 0.8 percent. Now if that doesn't give you something to think about.
I heard this from Fr. Benedict Groeschel. Very interesting fact. Somehow, when we try to make life easier and more convenient, life has a way of inflicting new and different sufferings on us. Eastern Christians have an image of the Fall that extends into the world rather than into the self. In other words, in the west the Fall is said to affect the person: the person becomes "damaged goods", so to speak. In the eastern view, it is the world that is fallen. To use an analogy, suppose our life is like a journey, and stumbling is like a sin. The effects of original sin are due to the uneven path we walk on, not due to having damaged legs. Certainly, the western view does not deny that the world is affected by the fall. But the weird interplay of man and world to me seems to evoke the eastern view better — like there is some balance that when we push one way, something else pushes back. The alternative seems to be God actively playing games with us in an adversarial fashion to keep us in check, like he's inflicting depression on us because we are insufficiently punished some other way.
I find that less appealing. It's intriguing, though I haven't taken these thoughts very far.
