“Major Depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability in the United States for people ages fifteen to forty-four” according to award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker.

Studies have indicated that about 21% of all women and 13% of all men in the U.S. experience depression in their lifetime.

Leading researchers in the 1960s reported that “Depression is, on the whole, one of the psychiatric conditions with the best prognosis for eventual recovery with or without treatment.” But now, 28 years after the advent of Prozac and other antidepressants, depression has become epidemic. The chemical imbalance theory has been rejected by researchers who have also found that those who take antidepressants become chronically depressed.

In the last 30 years psychiatrists and pharmaceutical researchers have told us that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. Research has now shown that there are no chemical imbalances in the brain until you take these pills. It has also shown that antidepressants may help a few weeks but then are no more effective than a placebo, and the longer an individual takes them the more likely they are to relapse when the medications are removed.

In addition, there are a wide range of adverse side effects from the anti-depressants including a condition called "Akathisia" which leads to depression, suicidal thoughts, and violence and this condition can occur after a brief period of usage and may be irreversible. Other adverse side effects include sexual dysfunction, memory impairment, fatigue, learning deficiencies, and manic states that lead to a diagnosis of bipolar disorders.

Because of the serious adverse side effects of antidepressants, Dr. Breggin, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and researcher, recommends that people never take antidepressants. He also strongly cautions that it is not only dangerous to take antidepressants, it is also dangerous to stop taking them too quickly and should be done so under the supervision of a doctor experienced in the withdrawal from psychiatric medications. For further help, read Dr. Breggin's book, "Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal" (2013).

A man was referred for counseling for his depression which he said he had experienced for 25 years, after his first wife left him. He had been on antidepressants for 20 years and was still very depressed. A year before he was seen his second wife died, and both of his parents died, then he lost his job of 27 years.

His Christian counselor shared with him that 87% of all depression is caused by grief and shared how he could resolve his grief through a simple prayer process. He first prayed about the loss of his second wife, then the loss of his parents and his job. After several weeks he was no longer depressed and his doctor gradually weaned him off his meds over several months. He was seen numerous times afterwards to confirm his complete recovery and two years later he was still doing well and reporting no more depression.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves re comforted by God." (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

A woman was referred to me due to her depression that was affecting her health. She was a Christian woman who faithfully attended church with her husband and had never been on antidepressants; she said that she refused to give in to the pressure of her doctors to take medications for her depression.

I asked her when she first became depressed and she told me that she became depressed as a child. She had a little boyfriend at age 7 whom she liked a lot, and one day he laid his head down on his desk in class and died of a brain aneurism. This led to her first bout of depression. Then at age 19 she was engaged to a young man who joined the military and died in Vietnam. She met another man and married him when she was 26 years old, and he died in a car accident. She married her second husband in her 40s and he died a few years later from cancer. Then she met another man whom she became romantically involved with and he died from cancer at age 48. When she was 50 years old her mother, father, and grandfather all died. In addition, she told me that her brother had been diagnosed with cancer and she anticipated losing him in the near future.

I shared with this woman how she could get healing for these losses by making a list of the things she missed about each person, and then praying and asking the Lord to take it and carry it for her. The most painful loss was the loss of her mother, so we made a list of twenty-one things she missed about her mother and she prayed and asked the Lord to take her anger from her and carry it.

After she gave her grief to the Lord, I prayed and asked the Lord if there was anything that He wanted her to know. She said, “I see her smiling; I just see her smiling with her big, brown eyes.” I asked her how she felt while thinking about her mother and she said, “I feel happy; no sadness; very calm.” I asked her what she thought about this process and she said, “It’s so simple! I want to help my brother with his grief over my mother.”

This woman began praying about some of her losses on her own. Three weeks later, when she came back to see me she stated that she had no depression, in spite of having been depressed all her life. She said, “I feel everything is lifted off. I don’t feel the urge to crawl up in bed or hide and tell people to leave me alone.”

She was so excited about her freedom from depression that she gave her sisters a copy of the Set Free Grief Booklet and they wrote down their losses also and said they felt much better. One day she saw a woman in Walmart with white hair, and from the back of this woman it looked like her mother, and it made her smile instead of feeling sad. When I last saw her she said that on most Tuesdays she had been in a “black mood,” because her mother died on a Tuesday, but she said, “Now I feel good on Tuesdays and I have begun doing some visitation.” She laughed and told me, “My husband is blown away! He told the men at church that he had a brand new wife. Everyone should know about this!” Even though she was already free of her depression, she continued praying about some more sadness and the loss of her first husband, and she continued praying about all her other losses on her own.