It doesn’t take a physician to say that these are difficult times, resulting in significant depression and anxiety. We have pandemic, social upheaval and political theater. And all of it transmitted to us 24/7/365 on cable and satellite. Worse, it comes to us on our home computers, and on the smartphones we carry around and look at every few minutes in our own toxic news cycle that takes us from fear to rage and back again at blinding speed. And it is offered to us in a way that endlessly supplements the advertising revenues of the social media sites, which addict us and feed on our worries and rage.

As a physician, I find this tragic. I see it in patients and I see it in loved ones, who daily find a new reason to find this life more hopeless and who then identify one more person or group to assign to the “enemy” list. There’s plenty of good news on every front. But that doesn’t trigger as many clicks, and so those who make the news don’t bother with it.