Okay, so you’ve read the title and you’re wondering what the “malady” in question is. You might think it’s syphilis or gonorrhoea or elephantitis or even the flu. Well, those are all—as you might have guessed already—wrong. The illness in question here (I grew tired of the word “malady”) is depression.

Of course, you’re thinking that it’s not the worst illness in the world. But why not, I ask? It hurts, it makes you bleed, it destroys your soul, and it kills you. It has the worst of every disease in it, in a way.

Depression makes you sad, hopeless, energy-less, and it turns you into a total wreck. It destroys you and all your loved ones, as they see you getting killed so slowly, so painfully. It makes you lose all happiness, all hope in everything. It makes death seem like a wonderful, inviting prospect. It make you want to die, but it somehow also robs you of the energy, and the drive to so much as kill yourself.

You enjoy it—you enjoy being depressed. You never want to get out of that state of mind, because once you’re there, you feel like this miserable, sad, difficult is still better than what you deserve. Depression fills you with the darkest emotions known to man, among them a soul-crushing guilt. Once you are depressed, you always want to remain that way, and in a way, you begin to enjoy it—despite knowing that it’s killing you.

You know what’s worse? It’s difficult to shake off. Once you know you’re depressed, even if you like being depressed, there will be a panic deep within you. You know that it’s a terrifying disease, and you want to shake it off. You tell your loved ones—or maybe you seek help from other sources. You might try going to a psychologist, taking medicine, hypnotism sessions, or any number of ways in which depression can be got rid of. None of those work easily. You’ll have to battle depression for a long, long time despite the help of all these things, and only after that long battle will you (maybe) stand a chance of shaking it off.

And the worst part is that it claws right back into your life—this crippling, soul-destroying malady. Yes, you read that right. You might employ any method and get rid of it. You then rest assured thinking that you’re free from the clutches of this vile disease, but guess what? You’re not. Somehow, sometime, it’ll crawl right back into your life, and begin to destroy it again, putting all your desperate efforts of getting rid of it in vain.

Once you’ve suffered depression, there is a 33% chance that you’ll fall prey to it again. If you’ve gone through it twice, the probability increases to 50%.

So, it’s a terrifying disease all right, and there’s only one way in which you can prevent it from getting hold of you. There are many, many ways in which that can be said, but the conclusion is a simple, three-word sentence: Enjoy your life.

Yes, enjoy your life. It’s that easy. Love everyone, enjoy everything, live life to the fullest, don’t complain, make friends....enjoy life. And you’ll never fall prey to this impossible-to-shake-off disease.