A disturbing proportion of people in the USA take antidepressants on a regular basis - 10% of the adult population average, ranging up to nearly a quarter of women aged 40 and 60.

One of the most depressing things anyone can live with is the belief that they exist for others. This axiom spawns the corollary that no matter how much you do, how hard you work, how much you invent, how much wealth you generate, it'll never be enough. If that's not a big black suffocating wet blanket, please tell me what is.

We recall that uplifting scene in The Fountainhead where Howard Roark hangs up his architect hat for a few hours and becomes a therapist to the sculptor Steven Mallory, delivering an improvised form of therapy not practised by any MD or ClinPsych, and how this snaps Mallory almost instantly out of chronic depression and substance abuse.

So I put forward a conjecture: A significant proportion, maybe the greatest proportion, of the endemic depression we see today is caused by people having lost themselves, by believing they are obligated to live for others; that their mental health can dramatically and permanently improve simply by being taught that it's safe and acceptable to honour themselves; that the most amazing thing they can do to support others is not live for them and bleed to them the fruits of their own labour, but to live for themselves, and set an example proving to others an amazing honourable life is within their reach as well.

Pack this up into a therapeutic protocol and I suggest you'd see antidepressant medication prescriptions and suicide rates plummet overnight.