I met Ed Fitzgerald in 1979. I was running for Alderman in Cabbagetown, Toronto and didn't have a clue how to do that, except I had the ambition and and was having a good year and was sure I could make City Hall work better. Ed was a noted NDP insider and adviser, and drinking buddy at the Parsons Nose Pub on Parliament St, who felt that city politics should not be controlled by political parties.
So now I had the smartest political guy in Canada running my campaign. The NDP were not impressed and they were really mad at Ed and threw their best at us. We loved it but lost. We remained lifelong friends and he stood Godfather to my son Jon.
Ed went on to Direct the National News re branded as ,The Journal with Barbara From, (Great Broadcast) and then moved to Boston and worked with Peter Kent as his traveling producer doing great news stories around the world.
Finally Ed moved to Cambodia as CNBC Asia man at large, from 1988 to 2000. Today he is semi retired in Ottawa. While in Cambodia, (Ed is a great storyteller and thank God because he has great stories) he recently told me, over a chat about the great problem of depression, that once the UN sent two Psychiatrists from Sweden to Cambodia to report on the mental health of the population given the madness that the Khmer Rouge had rained on the people?
Over a interview dinner with them ,Ed asked if the level of depression and anger was as great as one would expect. "No," one of the Doctors said, "Depression is 1st World luxury. In the Third World folks get up in the morning and have so many challenges, like getting something to eat that they seem to have no time to get depressed. The are focused on survival."
It is an interesting thought. Every culture and society develop and live with many diseases. In the Third World many diseases exist that we have been eradicated here but maybe we made our own unique to our lives and culture. like depression and anxiety.
Don't get me wrong, depression is a serious problem in the developed world, our world. And we need to study it more and take the stigma from it, so more people suffering from it can get treatment and governments need to spend much more on finding fixes and cures. We know that some 8 % of Canadians will suffer major depression in their life time and for most of them, their chemistry is out of whack. I knew depression once, for about 6 months when I was 19. I remember it seemed to just appear, no reason or major occurrence and I was lost. I could not find hope and suffered great anxiety. I took no medication and as soon as it appeared it just faded away and I was better and happy. I could never explain it but it gave me empathy for the illness.
More of the talk Ed and I had about this touched on the fact that we don't understand all of who we are and how we came to be US. Our religions and myths fade in modern life. Our communities have little or no traditions in our cities and our families live around the globe. We are way better educated but we need new myths and stories to sustain ourselves and our minds. Our coping skills and mechanisms need to be overhauled. We have too many choices but no sense of our limitations and I am convinced religion is not the answer. We can't lay this one on God or ask him to fix it.
Ed told the story of when the Cambodians started arresting the Khmer Rouge leaders recently and putting them on trial, he went to interview a few of them in a village, with his interpreter. The homes they lived in were empty so he stopped a fisherman and asked if he knew the men who lived there and that they were to be arrested. The man said he knew them, as they had killed his wife and 4 children back in the Rouge days of terror. Ed asked if he ever thought about revenging them by killing him and the man answered no. He had to get up and make a living for his new wife and children whom he married after the war. Ed said he totally let it go. Not in a selfish, non caring way .He coped and did not allow himself to despair over what he could not control. Ed said that these people had codes and were tribal, in that they knew they had to go on. If they had a bad month of weather and caught no fish or crops were spoiled, there was no Bank on the corner to borrow money from to get by. They had to rely on their families and neighbors for support and strength.
Finally, have you heard the phrase, The magic of the office? It's a known phenomenon observed of people elected to high office, like Prime minister and how they became much more sure footed, successful and confident. Even when they were not known for that image. Joe Clarke Canadian P M and Jimmy Carter, U S President are examples. They rose to the challenge. The opposite of that phenomenon is I think, depression
Lots for us to think and talk about.
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