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I
Speaking only for me, I am profoundly grateful to my PD specialist for
resisting the idea of anti depressants IN MY CASE, for the first months
of feeling lost, afraid of the future and generally very down.  His
expressed desire to avoid starting more than Requip at one time gave me a
time for mourning the passing of that me which had been, and time to
achieve acceptance of the probable me of the future.  It was perhaps more
painful by the absence of available medication, but I am now grateful for
the unclouded intensity of my sorrow and fear.

Most of the spiritual growth in my life has been precipitated by pain of
one sort or another.  At this moment I am grateful to PD for bringing new
friends and new opportunities to grow, but to get to this place I had to
give up my "fighter" approach to the disease.

When I briefly saw PD as my enemy, I experienced envy of people with
cancer (with its ever growing list of curables), and I slid into self
pity and feelings of victimhood.  How could I not feel self pity, which I
labeled by a better sounding title of depression without benfit of
medical opinion.  After all, I self righteously thought,  I had been
attacked by an oponent never before defeated in the history of medicine.

Fortunately I had  some experience with the wisdom of accepting that
which which I cannot change, together with a strong foundation of belief
in a God of infinite Love, so that I soon began to live in cheerful
cooexistence with my PD, seeing it as having the greatest potential of
any life experience to date as a teacher of acceptance, peace and Love.
For many years I desired to actually live in the NOW, and in just a few
months my new teacher accomplished that which all those years of  wishful
thinking and good intentions had not.

For those frozen into spiritual inaction by the intensity of their
clinical depression, by all means use the chemical tools with which we
have been blessed, but I believe such therapy can best be coupled with
the use of spiritual medicine which grows abundantly all about us,
waiting only for our willingness.

Chuck