Story: Onions
A DEPRESSION story – that it is so easy to focus on the wrong things and then it can just unravel.
Read the story below
There was once a man who spent a lot of time peeling and cutting up onions. Now most people know that onions can make your eyes smart and that, when this happens, tears automatically come into your eyes.
Most people also know that such tears have nothing to do with sadness or depression or life circumstances that need to be examined. They are just onion tears, no more and no less than that.
But this man …well, he had somehow forgotten about this and, finding the tears streaming down his cheeks, he began to wonder what had made him so sad. Perhaps it was something traumatic and dreadful in his past he had unwittingly been reminded of, though he couldn’t think what…or perhaps it was a premonition, from as part of his mind that knew and appreciated such things, of a terrible event that was to come. Or perhaps he was ill…The more he thought through his tears, the more concerned and worried and, indeed, lachrymose he became.
Now, the question is did he need sympathetic understanding and antidepressants or did he need to stop peeling onions and start thinking?
Rob Parkinson
