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My interest in mental health was inspired by my mother’s awful struggles with mental health. She used to say that with a heart attack or cancer you might die, but depression was like a living death. Over the years I’ve come to realise that it is hard to overstate just how dangerous and damaging mental health problems can be. A heart attack can end one life but chronic mental illness can poison the lives of all those that love the one so afflicted. Alas, moments of profound mental darkness can bring doom to entire families, even whole communities can be left devastated by a mind that has unravelled.

It is the most natural thing in the world to want to end the suffering of a loved one, to usher them into a phase of healing, recovery, and restoration, to vanquish the darkness and tears and bring light and laughter back into our home. Years of watching my mother suffer, and seeing the indirect effect poor mental health had on my family, made me want to find a cure. I didn’t know if there was a cure, but I was open to finding one.

After studying and reflecting for years, on the conditions and the various treatments offered, after watching so-called mental health professionals treat my mother like a lab rat, testing/inflicting all kinds of drugs and alleged treatments on her, I finally came to realise these people were dangerous quacks. I came to see that that whole institution was dangerous and dark and woe betide you if you had the misfortune of getting entangled with it. They were not healers, they were destroyers – they destroy families, children, parents, health, lives and, in the last couple of decades, even whole communities.

I have concluded that the sooner the whole rotten edifice is destroyed the better.

They enslave the unwary, and entrap the vulnerable. The whole industry is based on lies and supported by deception. A moment of critical reflection, the application of simple scientific principles, exposes the whole enterprise and all who profit from the evil practice as Snake Oil merchants.

Being depressed is not an illness. It is one of many natural reactions to the challenges of life. Sometimes we encounter things that are hard to swallow. Sometimes we nearly choke, but choking is a natural reaction to an obstruction. The best thing we can do under such circumstances is not inject our necks with tranquilisers to make the obstruction bother us less but remove the obstruction itself, only then can our bodies return to stasis.

There are many ways in which we can restore ourselves to balance but they all involve dealing with the obstacle, not medicating ourselves so much that we are no longer conscious of the obstacle. The Snake Oil Merchants are only interested in selling Snake Oil, in treating the symptom not the cause. Once they have you in their web, once they’ve administered the first dose – their answer to every problem after that involves another dose, a different dose, more oil or less oil, a or different type of oil. They have no financial incentive in helping you to actually get better, in helping you find a cure. A cured patient is a lost customer.

In the immortal words of Captain Jack Sparrow, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude to the problem!”

The problem is the obstacle is all too often very painful, and dealing with it means dealing with pain and we, being animals, can be highly sensitive and unbelievably irrational when it comes to pain. It is this fear of pain, more than anything else, that traps people into lives of despair and darkness – not the pain itself, not the actual trauma, but the fear of it. The antidote to fear is faith, which is why religion [especially that faith inspired by Jesus] is so often instrumental in bringing about tremendous personal transformations in people long afflicted with emotional and psychic trauma.

Fear is the dragon that must be overcome if we are to have the treasures of restoration: peace, joy, and hope. And when at last we do summon the courage to face our fears, when we finally dare to run at the monster before which we have for so long cowered, it very often vanishes before our thrust. We discover that it was the fear of the thing and not the thing itself that was preventing us from moving forward. It’s not that dealing with the thing is easy, it is going to be painful, it is still going to be a challenge, but dealing with it is a heck of a lot easier than dealing with the monster our imaginings all too often make of it.