Perception of depression - Wrong call

The suggestion by a Catholic bishop’s adviser on religious education that depression and self-harm among teenagers is linked to the absence of religion in young people’s lives seems at least blinkered. It is certainly based on the truths of another time.

Fr Gerard Condon, writing in The Furrow, also links suicide rates with the decline of religious practice or understanding.

He, reasonably, points to the emptiness of a life shaped by consumerism and social media but his suggestion that depression might be less prevalent if religious belief was more prevalent hardly seems perceptive or even helpful.

Indeed, the suggestion that such a destructive illness might be fended off by religion only fuels the taboo that has caused so much darkness and tragedy in this society. It also wrongly suggests that those who suffer from depression are the architects of their own difficulties. Depression is a terrible sickness and must be treated as such. It is not a consequence of deciding to believe in one faith or in none, a reality that should be obvious to anyone involved in education.