Not long ago, I wrote a post aimed at the family and friends of people who suffer from depression like I do. I didn’t mean bummed out people or friends having a bad day, I meant those of us who suffer (in the full sense of that word) from a medical condition in which our brains don’t work right and produce intense amounts of pain regardless of our outward circumstances.
This time I wanted to write one to us, the depressed. Here are five things you and I all need to hear and keep hearing:
1. Depression is a real disease.
Repeat after me: “You’re
sick.” You really are. Just because it’s hard to see from the
outside, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
You wouldn’t tell someone with a compound leg fracture to just walk it
off. You wouldn’t tell someone with lung
cancer that it’s all in their head and that they just need to try to be more
positive. And yet that’s the kind of
thing we hear day in and day out, not just from others (which is bad enough),
but from ourselves too. We need to accept
that depression is a real illness with real debilitating symptoms that cause
real, unimagined pain. Don’t let anyone
tell you otherwise.
2. It’s not your fault.
This might seem a bit overdone by
now, but the following is a clip from the film Good Will Hunting. Matt
Damon’s character Will is visiting his court-mandated therapist, Sean (Robin
Williams*). While for most of us, our
psychic trauma isn’t the result of abuse like Will’s is, we all still need to
hear Sean’s message. I don’t know how
many times I’ve had this conversation with myself in my head or how many times
I’ve cried having it:
I think you probably get my point
by now that we didn’t do this to ourselves and it doesn’t represent some
failing on our part, but for those of us who are Christians, we can get somehow
an even worse end of the stick. (How many ends does this stick have?)
For those of in an Evangelical (or
other similar) environment, spiritual health tends to be equated with positive
emotion – that is, if you’re in a good place with Jesus, you should be filled with
enduring joy. Needless to say, I wrote
about how wrong and damaging that is in my last post. That kind of theology, whether explicit or
implicit, makes the pain of depression not just a failing, but a moral and
spiritual one as well. Thankfully, though,
there are plenty of Christians now and through history who have called BS on
that. Suffering has long been understood
by Christians as a part of life in general and therefore a very part of the
spiritual experience itself to be embraced and meditated upon as we look for
light at the end of some sometimes very long tunnels.
A few years ago, I had a major depressive episode that lasted over a year. That was bad enough to begin with, but I was in India for nine months at the time, trying to do research for my PhD dissertation (you can probably guess how well that was going) with pretty much no support network aside from my wife who had come with me. (She has been the best partner in the darkness I could ever have asked for, but even she can’t fix everything.)
A few years ago, I had a major depressive episode that lasted over a year. That was bad enough to begin with, but I was in India for nine months at the time, trying to do research for my PhD dissertation (you can probably guess how well that was going) with pretty much no support network aside from my wife who had come with me. (She has been the best partner in the darkness I could ever have asked for, but even she can’t fix everything.)
While trying to cope by reading
about depression and mental illness in general, I ran across the work of
English poet and Anglican priest John Donne, who at one point had become so
badly sick that everyone thought the was on his death bed. Donne decided to write a book of spiritual
meditations on his illness called Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions. Each
devotion began by meditating on some aspect of his condition, after which he
tried to see what he might learn from that mediation, and then proceeded to write
a prayer in response to it all.
His very first devotion
considered the spontaneous and seemingly senseless nature of his condition:
Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this
minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden
change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by
any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and
air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building;
and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon
batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our
diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider
only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.
O miserable condition of man!
No matter where you're at in your life, sometimes “in
a minute a cannon [of our disease] batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all;
a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our
curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes
us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.”
You can’t control getting sick, the best you can do is decide what you do about it.
3. Get treatment.
That brings me to my next point:
get help, even if you think you could probably get by without it. If you had emphysema or had a heart attack, I
hope you would go see a doctor. Clinical
depression is serious, and you’re
probably not as good at dealing with it as you think you are.
Generally we need some combination
of antidepressive medication and talk therapy.
If you start trying and it doesn’t seem to be working, hang in
there. A lot of antidepressants can take
weeks to fully kick in, and not every type of medication works equally well for
every patient. Talk therapy can take
time too. None of this means this stuff
is bunk or that your case is hopeless or that you’re never going to improve – it
just means that your doctors are still working hard to hone in on the right
treatment for you.
One way or another, things are going to get better.
4. Feel free to yell and swear sometimes.
Not at people, maybe just alone,
maybe in your car. There is a real
cathartic value to not just yelling, but swearing your head off. That’s not very “good Christian blog advice”,
but it’s good actual advice. Sometimes,
you just need to let out your pain and frustration with one big,
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKK!!!!!!!!!!!” on the freeway. I promise Jesus understands.
5. Accept yourself for who and where you are.
Your are who you are, and that’s fine. It’s okay for you to not be okay.
I’m not saying it’s acceptable to stay in an unhealthy place
by avoiding treatment. But wherever you
are right now is where you are, and beating yourself up won’t change that.
Maybe the best you can muster today is to just get out of
bed and watch television. If that’s the
case, then well done sir or madam, VICTORY IS YOURS!
Seriously, be kind to yourself. You’re sick, and this shit is hard.
* It hurt badly for me and a lot of other depressed people
when Robin Williams took his own life in 2014.
Robin was deeply depressed and struggled mightily with substance abuse
issues of the course of his life. Like
many of us, he told jokes and did his best to make people laugh in part to
project an outward face to try and hide the depth of pain inside, but he was so
much better at it than the rest of us. I
see so much of that in myself, and I really wish he was still with us.
