3/18/2024

I started thinking about this subject in earnest nearly fifteen years ago. A family member was told by her doctor she had just months to live. A bit later, he told her that he thought she was depressed and prescribed an anti-depressant. This seemed very strange to me. Isn’t “depression” a normal response in this case? Are we supposed to get that kind of news and not miss a step? ? Why would a shift in emotions require adjustment through medication?

I began to question. Some kinds of depression are really bad and dangerous. But couldn’t there be different kinds? They are all lumped together so that any subdued shift, any sad emotion, starts to look worthy of medicating.

And how does all this play into spirituality? As a Catholic, I believed in a spiritual reality. I believed in a soul. I believed that we have spiritual journeys. However it seemed like this was entirely missing from the conversation. Even Catholic doctors, even Christian medical providers, do not seem to acknowledge that there is a spiritual reality and that it is not separate from physical reality.

This brings me to another topic: ADHD. People heavily medicate their children. So often I hear it is because they want their kid to succeed in school. They want them to be able to “focus” on math.

This hits close to home. Math was my subject. In 7th grade, my math teacher told my parents I was mentally retarded. The reality is that I felt like school was prison and I was spacing out. When I tell people this now, I am frequently told that this is a sign that I have ADHD.

I think this is so strange. Feeling like school is a prison is a sign of some mental disorder and an indication for medication? But school is like prison, isn’t it?

All my best ideas come from my subconscious. “Spacing out” is when I think most deeply. I spent 14 years of my life doing math. (I have a MSc in Mathematical Modelling from the University of Oxford.) Throughout the course of my life I have often woken up in the morning with the answer to a difficult math problem in my head. It wasn’t my conscious brain solving the problem. It is after long meditative walks that I am able to sit down and write an essay in 2 hours. My brain arranges ideas when I am (supposedly) spacing out and staring at the sky and the plants around me.

Spacing out is precious time. These little moments where your brain seems to be doing nothing matter. Instead I see kids with ADHD playing video games for hours upon hours. I think video games are okay in moderation. However I think they are missing out on the clouds and the ant piles and the wind and the birds. They are missing out on prayer and contemplation of the divine.

What are the spiritual implications of this? It seems like so many people want to make their children into robots or computers. “Sit down, now, and do math, now. Stop looking out the window! Hopefully with the drugs you are taking you will succeed.” This is the message. Don’t these people realize we have AI now? What is the point in being a computer? We don’t need to do math like computers. We need to do math like living breathing spiritual beings.