Even Marylin Monroe and George Clooney fought depression

[Stephen Paul West]

Abraham Lincoln was not alone in depression. 

You are not alone in depression.

Royalty like King Solomon and Princess Diana; Movie Stars like Marilyn Monroe and Harrison Ford; 

Musicians like Beethoven and Eninem; Painters like Jackson Pollock and Degas; Heads of State like Winston Churchill and our Mr. Lincoln; 

Authors like Hemmingway and J.K. Rowlings; even specialists in comedy like Chris Farley and David Letterman, comedians - those pools of mirth and merriment for us - are afflicted!

And so is every person on the face of the earth. Rich and poor. Healthy and sick. All have faced, and will face again, the faceless creature called depression. 

And yet depression remains an uncured mystery. It is cruel irony that something totally ubiquitous to every human being is foreign to each of us. It would seem that great thinkers would have long ago solved depression. Yet it remains perhaps the greatest challenge of our modern era.