The most successful effort on the part of the GDU medical staff has been in inducing clinical depression. This has been in no small part due to many external circumstances which aided in the research, such as job loss, divorce, and criminal indictment.

Herewith is a summary of the Report On Inducing Clinical Depression:

Clinical depression is distinguished from the "blues" , "just feeling down" and "being out of sorts" by the sense of a great weight bearing down on the subject, thoughts of suicide, and the ability to quickly relieve the subject of his mental pain through application of Prozac and other medication.

Clinical depression is generally thought to be caused by an imbalance in serotonin levels, though in all truth, no one really knows much how the brain actually works. Whatever, since the condition is relieved through medication, it is clearly a physical malady, as opposed to a failure of moral integrity and strength of will as is thought to be the cause by millions of Americans.

Since clinical depression is a physical ailment, it should be possible to induce the condition in an otherwise normal, healthy subject. The research program unrandomly selected a small group of normal people, namely the GDU medical staff, and thence proceeded to various attempts to precipitate the clinical depression condition in the subjects.

Previous research suggests that external factors can trigger brain chemistry changes that result in depression. Thus, the research program looked at various external causative factors, and attempted to reproduce these factors on the test subjects.

One frequently noted causative factor was the loss of a job, and the resulting status and income, which frequently cascades into divorce and ultimately homelessness. Out of the 20 test subjects, we selected five in an arbitrary manner (primarily based on who we liked the least) and terminated their employment with GDU. Very quickly all five subjects sank into measurable levels of depression as none could find other employment.

Another commonly reported cause of depression was divorce. We selected five other subjects who were happily married, and proceeded to do everything we could to destroy those marriages, such as requiring the subjects to work 16 hours per day in the presence of extremely attractive members of their opposite sex, taking them to strip joints, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust about their spouses such as by having their pagers go off at 2 AM. In all five cases the marriages failed within 6 weeks, and within 12 weeks all test subjects were clinically depressed, had quit their jobs, and had moved to other cities.

Other extreme traumas are reportedly effective triggers for depression, such as death or criminal indictment. Since killing people is slightly improper for a medical school, though the item required significant debate, we elected to use the criminal indictment approach for the next 5 subjects. As the local prosecutor was seeking large amounts of publicity for his re-election campaign, we paid small children to claim they had been molested by our test subjects. Even though these children quickly admitted they had lied and had been paid to make these false claims, the wheels of the criminal justice did not stop grinding our test subjects down, and all five were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. All five exhibited serious states of clinical depression before their trials.

The last group of five were considered the "control" group meaning that since our budget had been cut by 75%, only 25% of the staff was allowed to remain. The five of us designed the research program, which without question proved that clinical depression could be induced, and reduced our staff by 15 people.

While the results of this study may be utterly useless to the medical profession, the research paper and details of the research plan have been widely requested by the human resources departments of many large institutions afraid of being sued over outright termination of excess personnel.

Copyright 1998 by
Hugh Holub