Commentary

My husband grew up in three block walls with a palm-frond roof. There was no running water. No electricity. His parents slept in hammocks, and all eight children slept on the floor under blankets sewn together from scraps of old clothes.

The restroom was the woods, a shovel in hand, and corn cobs for toilet paper. Every member of the family was expected to contribute to survival: fishing; hunting; planting corn, beans, and squash; collecting turtle eggs; drying fish; or processing a hog for its lard. Tortillas were the foundation of every meal.

At 16, he crossed the border in search of something more. He lived in an apartment crammed with over 10 men, working constantly to pay back the cost of crossing. At 19, he came to work in one of my restaurants. By 23, we were married. By 28, the dreams he once imagined while swinging in a hammock had all come true.

He had the farm with fruit trees.

He had a wife and children.

He had the pickup truck he longed for.

He had enough food and money to quiet the fears about survival.

And then depression found him.

It puzzled him. For years, his life had been nothing but struggle, but also purpose. Now, in the comfort he had worked so hard to achieve, something unexpected crept in: emptiness. He calls it the privilege of depression.

Because when you are in survival, you cannot afford to be depressed.

This is not to diminish the pain of those who suffer. It is to point out something essential about human nature. In the absence of purpose and pressure, the mind creates its own burdens. In the United States, we live in a culture steeped in comfort. We no longer know how to sit with difficulty, to wrestle with hardship, or to see struggle as formative. Instead, anything that feels difficult is treated as a problem to be medicated.

It is no wonder, then, that more than 11 percent of American adults now take medication for depression. Women are more than twice as likely as men to do so. Among young people, nearly 70 percent of antidepressants prescribed are SSRIs. These numbers tell us something about our culture: We are not just treating illness; we are medicating discomfort at scale.

That is why we have more depression and more reliance on antidepressants than anywhere else in the world. Survival has been replaced with convenience. And in that convenience, our souls are restless.

My husband’s short season of depression ended when he realized what it was: a signal, not a sickness. It was a nudge from the soul, reminding him that joy is an inside job, and that only God and his own commitment to purpose could fill that void.

That is my concern for America. Depression is rising not because life is harder here, but because it is easier. When we lack a mission bigger than ourselves, whether devotion to God, to family, to service, or to a cause, our lives collapse inward. We become consumed by the self, and in that self-focus, despair finds room to grow.

I do not believe every struggle should be dulled by a pill. Sometimes discomfort is not a disease but a teacher. It points us toward change, toward growth, toward the deeper meaning our souls crave. To medicate that away may rob us not only of our best selves, but of the very work God placed us here to do.

The privilege of depression is real. But privilege comes with responsibility. It is not enough to recognize the emptiness that can settle in when life is too comfortable. We must also respond, by embracing purpose, by living for something beyond ourselves, and by letting discomfort shape us into people who are fully alive. Depression is not a curse, but an invitation, a calling from our inner voice, asking us to be the best version of ourselves.

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