We sat across from each other in a restaurant. Everything about him was sad: his face a grim mask, his eyes full of unshed tears, his body still as death. Only his lip trembled, just a little bit. I'd have missed it if I hadn't known to look.
"Could you see somebody?"I asked. "A therapist?" He had just told me of his despair. He shook his head. "I could never witness to anybody again if I were in therapy. I'd feel like a fraud."
Witnessing is telling the story of how God came into your life. Ultimately, it's supposed to be a happy tale -- although you're allowed many trials along the way, it must end up with your accepting Christ, and then things are supposed to be all right with you. You're not supposed to be hopeless and want to die. There's not a lot of room in this narrative for despair, so people committed to it who find themselves staring despair in the face tend to keep that fact to themselves.
This conversation took place years ago. It was before people were as open about their inner lives as they are today. It took place at a time in the man's life when his faith had become very important to him. The style of faith that had grabbed him was that of the charismatic renewal, the movement within the church that embraced healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues. It had a lively sense of the living presence of Christ in the world, and expected to see signs of that presence. Like this young man, many people in it had rediscovered the faith in which they were raised and felt it quicken to vivid new life.
But the culture of his prayer group, and the things he read, saw a fairly immediate relationship between faith and spiritual well-being. It ought to feel good to be a Christian, they felt. The songs they sang were all happy praise signs about the joy of loving Jesus, and their understanding of scripture tended toward the literal. They were committed to healing prayer, and excited about miracles of healing that had happened in their midst. They had the gift of seeing God everywhere.
Or almost everywhere. The people in the prayer group drew a sharp distinction between The Spirit and The World. They had ample scriptural justification for this, they believed -- the Gospel of John was a favorite, with its stark imagery of darkness and light, its larger-than-life Jesus striding magnificently through the events of his life and his death. The teachings given at the meeting were often about how to resist the world, about its lures and temptations, about how the categories of the world were nothing like the categories of the Kingdom.
Nobody in the prayer group ever talked about depression. They talked about having faith. You needed to believe that God would handle everything. It was but a short walk from there to the idea that if your healing was a result of your faith, then your continuing illness must be due to your lack of it. This came dangerously close to the feelings the young man was having already: guilt about the very fact of his desolation.
He may have felt isolated, but he was far from alone. Many people -- most people -- who suffer from depression resist turning to their communities of faith with the truth about themselves, for fear that understanding and support will not be forthcoming. Some are so convinced that their condition is shameful that they don't even even apply. Others do, and wish they hadn't- - as one woman wrote me, "I survived the church telling me the following: If I confess my sins, the depression will go away. If I were not gay, I wouldn't have this problem with depression. I must be out of right relationship with God. Pray more. Have more faith. You will go to Hell if you kill yourself."
Oy. No wonder so many just close out the church's account. But there are at least two sides to everything -- depression and faith are both complex enough that there are as many reasons to come as there are to stay away.
At its best, a faith community offers love, and the honest admission that life can be hard. It is matter-of-fact and unsurprised by human limitations and mistakes. It carries memory, powerful stories of redemption and release. It provides a context larger than that of our immediate surroundings -- faith asserts that what I can see is not necessarily all there is. It welcomes the good wherever it appears, and is quite able to understand psychotherapy or medication as miraculous, too, in their own right.
Faith, like everything else in the world, comes in different flavors. We are responsible for finding the one that speaks best to us. And yes, a sloganeering faith probably does do more harm than good. But that's not the only show in town.
Because we have lots of company. Probably 10% of the population in the United States will suffer from depression at some point in life, not to mention the other people affected by it. Every religious leader should be aware of its signs, and stand ready to be the kind of friend a sufferer needs. This may mean being a sympathetic listener, but also may mean learning how to help someone over the hump of misplaced shame that prevents him from seeking the professional help he needs. It may mean using the community 's healing rituals -- confession, healing prayer, the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick, silent meditation, spiritual direction -- in new ways. And it may mean being appropriately candid about one's own struggles. I have come to view my own history of depression as a very useful tool: I may wish with all my heart that I had learned what I know about it in any way other than by experience, but I cannot deny that it has helped me understand other people's struggles with the beast in a way I never could have done without it.
Pick up a Bible and turn to the Gospel of John. Find the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead -- it's in the 11th chapter. It contains the shortest verse in scripture, just two words: "Jesus wept.". Then thumb through the Hebrew scriptures and notice how many of the psalms are laments -- about a third of them. Reflect for a moment on church hardware -- you see lots of crosses, not many smiley faces. Our tradition is no stranger to sorrow. Honest faith has no interest in brushing aside our grief, and the beloved community does not demand it. It accepts the present as it finds it, and looks toward a future in which life is not only possible, but blessed.
Rita Nakashima Brock, Ph. D.: Should Donald Rumsfeld Go to Hell?
Study finds link between faith, depression - USATODAY.com
Will God Get You Out of Your Depression? - ABC News
The Soul in Depression [Speaking of Faith® from American Public Media]
Depression Center: Symptoms, Causes, Medications, and Therapies
Understanding Depression: Signs, Symptoms, Causes, and Help
Depression - Symptoms, Causes, Tests - NY Times Health Information
DJ Jaffe
http://mentalillnesspolicy.org
I suppose in your world when your grossly overweight spouse says "Honey do these pants make me look fat?" You would answer "No dear they make you look sexy" and not "No dear, its not the pants that make you look fat its your poor diet and lack of exercise that make you BE fat, the jumbo pants are just the shell."
I'm quite certain a professional psychiatrist would not lie to their patients, they would try to get their pateints to see the truth by helping them to face REALITY. Only the truth, not fairy tales will bring about positive change.
Organized religion uses the fear of God and the promises of an imaginary afterlife to achieve power and status for religious leaders, not to benefit followers.
Religious people always quote the positive parts of the bible but the bible is a very depressing and morbid book. Its like reading your children Little Red Riding hood when the tell you they are afraid of the dark and cant sleep. Grandma gets eaten and an innocent carnivore that is simply acting under instinct gets slaughtered with an axe. Now sleep tight little ones.
Lets summarize the bible. A TON of stories of atrocities and violence to try to steer you toward righteousness and the end result is what....? Well? Nothing really. Humans still are just as bad as they were 4000 years ago.
Is there any question that the 'swapping' of your: "---illusion of immortalitÂy
and the sense of transcendeÂnt purpose---"; plus a dearth or, 'absence' of
"logic"; for the 'solid ground' of the 'rational' secular 'non-illusal' world'
of those 'secularists' who are referred to 'maliciously' by 'theists"; as
"Atheists"?
-
And, is it 'reasonable' to deem such a valuable 'trade-off' "sacrifice"?
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Jocta Anoracle
Thus the Church needs to acknoledge its roll in depression as the cause of much of it. Then it needs to take real measurable steps to create a better enviorment for healing. Throwing out the bible would be an excellent first step in that acknowledgement. However the Church is operating under denial of its part and will never admit to it.
Thus many simply leave the toxic Church, the bible and Christianity behind.
"What people don't understand is that mentally ill people are ill just like diabetics or cardiac patients the only difference is the organ causing the illness."
There is a certain circularity in this observation. It belies a deeper truth. It is an implicit assertion that agency does not exist except in the experience that is created by the brain organ. Our actions are determined by our physical brain/body and not some agent acting outside of the physical laws of nature. If my behavior/mood is "off", it's because the brain/body is doing it; not "me". And the collective brain/body manifold manipulates reality in such a way that the pill produces a behavior that is more "normal"; the life compulsion to maintain a state of homeostasis in action; organisms using the evolutionary mechanism of the brain-created agent representation to reach the desired goal inherent in the physical reality of the life form. There is a certain unsettling quality of this viscerally understood reality, both for religion and for the rationalist position of "self" determination. The "people understanding" are just representations in our mind created by our physical brain/body. The output of just another organ.
I'm an agnostic atheist, in that I don't have any faith in today's religions, but I am enthusiastic and interested in technology enough to know that virtual reality and human interfaces will eventually get to the point where it will be impossible to distinguish between what's real and what's virtual. So the little techno-utopian in me holds open the possibility that we're all living in a simulation created by more intelligent beings...
But my understand of the personality of Jesus is that he was *extremely* depressed with the social order of his time. He was profoundly resentful of the authority structures around him and horribly frustrated with the dynamics of economics and competition and greed.
So why should should depression and mental illness and Christianity be somehow mutually exclusive, when the central character was himself suffering so much mentally and emotionally. The Jesus character that I learned about was *extremely unhappy* with the status quo.
Just imagine, from the perspective of modern psychology, all the different diagnoses that would fit the man today.
He would have laid it all out perfectly, so that there would be no doubt and no confusion in no mind in all of humanity. That's what an omnipotent God would do. Obviously, he fell short.
First of all, if God already knows what you're going to decide before you decide it, then what kind of Free Will do you really have. The only thing you're "free" to do is to decide the way God knew you were going to decide all along. You really never had a choice, did you?
If there is an Omnipotent and Omniscient God who sent a messenger to relay a message to humanity, why did he bother, when he already knew that billions of people wouldn't get the message? Either he's just a sadist who enjoys confusing people, or he's not omniscient and omnipotent.
How can you say that "Jesus was sad for the condition of the world, but never depressed by it?" What's the difference between being really sad and being depressed?
How is Divine Sadness different than Divine Depression? It all comes down to neurotransmitters in the brain, and stimulation of the pleasure center, and levels of dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine and acetylcholine and all the rest of that complex stuff God decided not to give me the power to fully comprehend.
Why did he choose that?
One important element and key to understanding and becoming truly happy is altruism.
This is why I ask the super-rich that do not use their wealth (its both a privilege and a great responsibility) to help others - what good is it; you can't take it with you.
Most people don't know jack squat about mental illness. Until it affects you or someone close to you, or you, at the very least, go into study of psychology and/or the psychiatric profession, you don't have the right to assume and presume.
I've had "something wrong with me" all of my life. My childhood was a long string of people telling me there was something not right with me, adults and peers unable to handle my overage of emotion. My family didn't do church - spirituality in those days was a pot-luck, basically the "ideal let kids choose for themselves" thing. Without "indoctrination" I still turned out nuts. Found out a few years ago that I'm bipolar. It's something deep in the brain chemistry - shared with a relative as well as ancestors who suffered before anybody knew what it was.
I've found church-people saying things like "Pray and you won't be depressed" very damaging. I've also found non-believers saying that anyone who has problems is "Weak and selfish" to be JUST as damaging. "Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" is just as horrible as "You're being plauged by demons." The most damaging of all on every side is "You aren't fully-human until you have a spirtual awakening / drop your fairy-tales and start thinking critically / whatever."
The point is - few understand this issue AT ALL.
I wish you well and I hope that now that you understand your illness you find the proper treatment. What people don't understand is that mentally ill people are ill just like diabetics or cardiac patients the only difference is the organ causing the illness.
I used to be under the popular impression that "gay people only care about sex" - that is, until I met and actually talked to some gay people online who showed me -- they just want to be treated like humans. Dispelled my homophobia right there. I could easily slip into "all atheists are jerks" (especially after reading a lot of HuffPo), but I have a friend who's an athiest-leaning agnostic who dispells that right the heck out for me. I cannot dump on Pagans, either, believe it or not, I've known a few - at least Wiccans who actually follow that "first do no harm" stuff.
You may have been hurt by people in the past - which leads to tunnel-vision for so many, but in my experience, the world (and its variety of people) are so much bigger than what most allow themselves to see.
Then, this is the talk of a crazy person.
And a fundamentalist contributed to turning someone dear to me against christianity by saying "You won't be depressed if you just pray."
Christianity can help Christians deal with depression. Buddhism can help Buddhists deal with it. Atheism can even help Atheists deal with it. If you're depressed, go with what you know.
Another double-winning great moment in therapy.