Astrology and depression

Nowadays it would be easy to assume that more than the 30% of the adult (and some children), are medicated in one way or another.

It would be OK, since in many cases the medication helps, if they didn’t have secondary effects. But every remedy has a negative effect on something else. Are there times when these effects are so disturbing that one decides not to take the medication anymore in spite of the risks involved?

An article by The Associated Press publised on April 17th, 2005 reads:

About 130-million Americans – many far healthier than the Heckmans – swallow, inject, inhale, infuse, spray and pat on prescribed medication every month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates. Americans buy much more medicine per person than any other country.

The number of prescriptions has risen by two-thirds over the past decade to 3.5-billion yearly, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical consulting company. Americans devour even more nonprescription drugs, polling suggests.

Recently, safety questions have beset some depression and anti-inflammatory drugs, pushing pain relievers Vioxx and Bextra from the market. Rising ranks of doctors, researchers and public health experts are saying that America is overmedicating itself. It is buying and taking far too much medicine, too readily and carelessly, for its own health and wealth, they say.

More than 125,000 Americans die from drug reactions and mistakes each year, according to Associated Press projections from landmark medical studies of the 1990s. That could make pharmaceuticals the fourth-leading national cause of death after heart disease, cancer and stroke.

The pharmaceutical industry served up more than $250-billion worth of sales last year, the vast majority in prescriptions, according to industry consultants. That roughly equaled sales at all the country’s gasoline stations put together, or an $850 pharmaceutical fillup for every American.

Do we need all these drugs? A relative handful yank many people away from almost certain death, like some antibiotics and AIDS medicines. Though carrying some risk, other drugs – such as cholesterol-cutting statins – help a considerable minority dodge potential calamities like heart attack or stroke.

The right balance of risk and benefit is still harder to strike for a raft of heavily promoted drugs that treat common, persistent, daily life conditions: anti-inflammatories, antacids and pills for allergy, depression, shyness, premenstrual crankiness, waning sexual powers, impulsiveness in children – you name it.

“We are taking way too many drugs for dubious or exaggerated ailments,” said Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About the Drug Companies. “What the drug companies are doing now is promoting drugs for long-term use to

essentially healthy people. Why? Because it’s the biggest market.”

And that is only in America. At the moment I live in Spain and I can safely say that more than 40% of my clients are or have been medicated for depression. So, what’s going on?

One of the obvious characteristics of depression is the loss of a sense of inner power, or understanding of one’s fate, and/0r the strength to overcome life’s crises.

In my years of Astrological Practice I have come to realize that our inability to fully understand what “free will” means is one of the causes of our victimization and often depression.

How can Astrology help? in the reading of the personal birth chart ( NOT a 1 time reading, of course) we can learn to understand our fate (This does NOT mean fated events) and in that process begin to discern our hand in it or in the bearing of it.

By this process, the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness often symptomatic of depression, can begin to open doors to other attitudes less out of control, more in tune with the lessons involved in life experiences and hence the re-gaining of the inner power sense necessary to cope with a life crises.

An Astrologer called Pat Harris has even worked with people with chronic pain, who were heavily medicated for years, doing birth-chart readings for these patients with great success, by this I mean, that the understanding that the wisdom of the birth-chart brought to them, helped them immensely.

With a little bit of TLC, psychotherapy or even better an Astrological reading that may last up to 6 month in weekly visits or fortnight sessions one can get closer to one’s painful area, being the knee or the soul and try to understand what is that we are telling ourselves, through the pain.

Depression renders the person helpless and often this is caused by a strong unrecognized anger or lack of control of situations and feelings that linger in the unconscious, sometimes from childhood and the awareness, recognition and acceptance of them, helps with the symptoms that quite often disappear as by magic. Is in this sense where the power of Astrology becomes so relevant and helpful. The insight that the Astrological readings offers helps us bring light into darker areas of our mind so that we can deal with our inner demons in a healthy and contained manner.