The Queen of Peace Catholic Community in Gainesville shared their Aug. 16 bulletin on the topic of suicide and melancholy.

The concept of melancholy is a muddled one in this day and age, the Rev. Ron Rolheiser said in a letter published in the bulletin. While there is sufficient work being done in the areas of psychology and psychiatry, there is a loss of understanding about what melancholy truly is.

“Melancholy is much more than what we call ‘depression,’" Fr. Rolheiser said. "For better and for worse, the ancients saw melancholy as a gift from God."

Melancholy, as a gift from the divine realm, was able to bring severe emotions but also to inspire the individual dealing with the emotions to great creativity and wisdom.

Today melancholy has been forgotten and replaced by the less full concept of depression, turning a complex set of emotions into a “treatable illness,” Rolheiser continued.“Refusing to recognize the depth and meaning of melancholy is demeaning to the sufferer and perpetrates a violence against a soul that is already in torment."

This is the very same issue when handling the topic of suicide.

“Suicide is normally the result of a soul in torment and in most cases that torment is not the result of a moral failure but of a melancholy which overwhelms a person at a time when he or she is too tender, too weak, too wounded, too stressed, or too biochemically impaired to withstand its pressure,” Rolheiser said.

Suicide is still misunderstood by most of society today. The victim of suicide is left to shoulder the blame, but rather than judging someone who commits suicide, we must be willing to look at what caused the individual to make that choice.

“Perhaps a deeper understanding of the complexity of forces that lie inside of what we naively label ‘depression’ might help us understand that, in most cases, suicide may not be judged as a moral or psychological failure, but as a melancholy that has overpowered a suffering soul,” Fr. Rolheiser said.