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I've been fighting with my depression for more than twenty years. Before I came to this country with a disease I had in Romania, the Secret Police threatened, "We will put you in a psychiatric hospital!" In my former country, to go to prison is better than going to a psychiatrist.

I took many kinds of antidepressants in Romania without much effect. Now, I am taking Zoloft and it makes me much less depressed. But separation from my wife in 1990, which culminated in divorce eight years later, was much worse than all the years of persecution under a Communist regime.

The loss of my family was a total devastation. After losing my family, I needed to socialize and not be alone in my apartment, so I started sipping wine in an Irish bar in Queens.

My depression and my drinking advanced. I lost my appetite and suffered from insomnia. In order to go to sleep I was sipping wine continuously. It was not something I enjoyed. It was something that I hated. I called it the fight with loneliness and an attempt to forget the past, but in reality, the alcohol created an even deeper depression.

Now I am in a program called MICA (mental illness, chemical abuse) to sustain my sobriety. I salute its emphasis on sobriety, solidarity, anonymity, and fellowship. But in the face of addiction, it is powerless.

We know that addiction is a power much stronger than ourselves. It is much stronger than any program, medicine, reason, free will or common sense. Yes, temporarily, pushed by mandatory decisions, avoiding jail, using free will, you can come back to a "normal" life. But addiction does not disappear totally when it is replaced with other addictions like gambling, bad relationships, smoking, drinking coffee, womanizing, or over-eating.

Who am I? I am a wounded Christian who had some trauma in his life. I will continue to come to the MICA program, which encourages human fellowship, using the phones, going to meetings, living "one day at a time." But I continue to keep a relationship with my God, as a Person, the Creator and Savior who understands any diseases including my severe depression and use of wine. In Him is my final hope for a spiritual birth that humanly is called "recovery."