Dr. Peck had a teenage patient suffering from depression. His older brother had committed suicide with a 22 rifle a year earlier. For Christmas, his parents gave the patient the rifle his brother killed himself with. When Dr. Peck challenged the parents about the inappropriateness of the gift, the parents refused to acknowledge there was any problem with such a gift, claiming they were just simple, working people who can’t be expected to think like the doctor. They were not willing to examine and find fault with themselves at all. As a result, Dr. Peck diagnosed the boy’s depression as being the fault of the parents and threatened to call social services to get the boy to go live for an extended time with his aunt. He concluded the boy’s depression was actually healthy in this situation, and that the boy needed protection from his parents’ evil more than anything. What is Creator’s perspective?

There is a much deeper story than known to this author or those involved in this interchange within the family. But it is a good example of a high level of insensitivity by would-be parents who are in the grip of evil, and have become hardened at the expense of their own child and his emotional needs and suffering, because he was still capable of feeling remorse about his older brother and was yearning for love and nurturing, but instead got a cold and indifferent treatment from his parents with the seemingly symbolic gesture of gifting him the means of his brother's destruction. So we agree with the doctor here, that for the boy's sake it would be far better to live with someone else more capable of love and nurturing, and sensitivity to the boy's emotional needs and well-being. There are many living lives of quiet desperation who end up committing suicide because they cannot tolerate existing in a loveless world and, if that is the circumstance they find themselves, may choose this extreme means of escape. While this is always embracing defeat and a karmic error, we understand there are mitigating factors and do not find fault when people find their life unlivable under the current conditions and choose to leave rather than continue living in agony, because that will continue harming their soul, and if they are trapped in circumstances beyond their control, leaving might be the lesser of evils in fact. So we do not recommend that as a solution, but it is always the hallmark of desperate circumstances and deserves careful study to understand the history and motivations of those caught up in such dire circumstances.