Finding an Rx for the Soul

Whether one defines anxiety or depression in strictly medical terms or in the language of lay people, these two conditions are proliferating. The American Psychiatric Association’s health poll in 2024 showed anxiety clearly on the rise in all age groups, with “current events” and the “economy” among its leading causes. Pretty safe to say those two reasons remain very much in play two years later. And it is not just anxiety that we suffer from; there is a startling increase in incidences of clinical depression, especially in young people. Gallup reports that the rate of depression among young adults has doubled from 13% in 2017 to over 26% in 2025.

Depression and anxiety are inevitable human experiences, but why the increase in both? One answer is that illnesses relating to mental health have been supercharged by modern culture. Social media with its loneliness-producing technologies generates so many messages making people feel inadequate alongside so many news clips making people fear for the future. Civilization has created new sources of stress while lessening the travel time to our brains. Negativity enters from both the private and the public spheres. We endure the trials of daily existence (job insecurity, divorce, trauma, etc.) as we witness catastrophes on a grand scale that lie outside of our control (war, natural disasters, economic recession, etc.). The upset people feel from these externals can be more profound than their feelings about personal issues because the tragedies of the world seem so impossibly distant. We stare at those festering problems with our stomach in knots, taking them all in without any strategy to diminish their potency.

Is there any good news for the multitudes who are feeling very bad? Great religions and great thinkers have been advising us for centuries on how to— using a contemporary term — “process” the pain we feel. There are excellent ideas out there originating from cultures around the world, if we can set aside our pessimism to explore them for a while.

While a good attitude is a prerequisite, easy answers remain elusive. Neither religion nor philosophy nor modern medicine has been very successful of late in part because mastering despondency is not an easy task: How much of the terrible truths should we even bother to contemplate? Are we better off simply closing our eyes and plugging our ears, and emotionally inoculating ourselves against the bad things we cannot control? Does tuning out the world mean a loss of empathy for those who suffer? Or is there a legitimate way to “see the good” in even the most horrible circumstances? Is there a form of mindfulness that lets the grief and pain in, but does not cause us to drown our souls in it? Can we learn to forgive those who are the culprits of so much destruction, but who do not repent or ask for forgiveness? Should we even try?

In our Toronto Pursuits 2026 seminar Making Lemonade: Writers and Sacred Texts on Mastering Despondency, we will examine excerpts from a wide variety of texts and literary forms to address those questions. These include works like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, The Rule of Saint Benedict, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and excerpts from the Qu’ran. Seminar participants will explore interpretive and evaluative problems of meaning, applying ideas to personal experience and weighing the author’s values against their own. Mastering despondency is not a jovial topic, to be sure. However, appreciating the ideas out there that bring some clarity as well as relief to our hearts and minds is a worthy, classical pursuit in these troubled times.

—John

John Riley has taught at Benedictine University and was a director of the Great Books Foundation. He has focused many of his Classical Pursuits seminars on modern and postmodern literature and philosophy, including courses on Kierkegaard, Freud, Derrida, Sartre, Camus, Bolaño, Márquez, Joyce and others. He is keenly interested in the philosophical implications of modernity and how our contemporary world sorts these out.

Image credits: Seneca, Wikimedia; Hannah Arendt, Wikimedia; Optimism by Jonathan Billinger