Faith and depression

“The joy of the Lord.” I’ve never felt it.

In 2016 my grandma died. The year before that, my other grandma died. In 2018 our house burned to the ground in the Camp fire (along with the whole rest of the town). I am well-acquainted with grief. And when I stopped believing I also experienced a super long and hard grieving period. It was like I had lost my best friend who I had spent every day of the previous 35 years with. But even before these events I had a problem feeling joy.

I had been told my whole life that the Bible commanded me to rejoice in the Lord, and that the fact that I was unable to rejoice meant I was being sinful and unholy.

By the time I was in 6th grade Job had become my favorite book in the Bible…

Paul and his thorns…

Jonah and his shady weed in the desert… (I hadn’t realized that Jonah was suicidal. I thought he was just disobedient.)

David’s Psalms of despair, those are the ones that resonate.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Ok, that’s a little better. At least Jesus was a little more sympathetic toward broken people like me.

But the songs and sermons at church weren’t about brokenness. They were about joy. I didn’t feel it, so I had to pretend… Fake it ’til you make it… But I wasn’t good at that. People used to ask my friends if I hated them because I didn’t smile, and my friends would say no, that’s just Aaron. The excuse was that I was lost in deep thought or something and maybe I was.

I never participated in “holy laughter.” If people were getting slain in the spirit at the altar I would be up there with my arms open waiting for it and dude actually had to push me down by my forehead.

So I sucked at faking it.

I was taught at a young age that the idea of self-esteem and the entire field of psychology we’re “humanistic,” and that humanism was satanic. Like Frank E. Peretti novel conspiracy-level satanic. Anything “secular” was by definition invalid. Worldly. Basically if anybody had any ideas about anything and that person wasn’t a Christian or was speaking from a scientific or academic viewpoint, those thoughts and ideas were not of the Lord and might even be from the devil.

So even if I had known I had a problem, treatment wouldn’t have been an option. It would have been prayer and fasting and spiritual warfare.

An aside

When I was little there was a time when there were noises coming from the attic like pebbles being scattered on a tin roof when our roof wasn’t tin… Apparently this wasn’t caused by pigeons or possums, or even ghosts, but by demons. So someone came over and anointed the house with oil. My parents probably wouldn’t even remember this story if you asked them. But things that scare the hell out of you when you’re a kid tend to stick with you…

Rain fell like judgment across my window pane
It fell like judgment but it was only rain. —Bad Religion

Overspiritualizing things is something humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years. Sounds from your roof? It’s demons. No rain at all? It’s because the gods aren’t happy, so do a rain dance. Can’t get pregnant? Sacrifice to the fertility goddess. Can’t find your shoes? The pixies stole them. Hear a bump in the night? It must be the bogeyman. You got cancer? Let’s pray for God to heal you. Got depression? It’s sinfulness. It means your faith is weak or something.

Ligonier ministries says depression is caused by the sin of hopelessness/unbelief.

Think about those things that are good, true, and beautiful, and your brain will demonstrate a certain chemical footprint; indulge sinful imaginations and it will have another.

They put the cart before the horse. It’s the chemical imbalances that cause the thought patterns, not the thought patterns that change the chemistry. You can’t magically change chemistry with the power of your mind. What are you, a freaking telekenetic super hero?

The diagnosis is mine

My brother-in-law claimed I had inherited anger issues from my father, and he said that Dad and I were both on the road to hell because of it. Well, it turned out what I needed wasn’t repentance, it was a fucking 33¢ pill.

My wife has chronic depression. It’s been tough to deal with over the past five years. When reading a book for partners/spouses of people with depression, I started to realize many of the stories actually described me, not her. So basically, up until that point I blamed everything on her, when it turned out I was having the same issues.

In the late twenty-aughts I was working at what I considered my best job ever. And I was damn good at it. But I started getting called in to HR for regular meetings about my personality and was put on probation.

My doctor had me take a quiz and diagnosed me with dysthymia. And apparently 1 out of every 20 people is in the same boat. Though not typically as severe as the depression my wife suffers, it is more chronic—it never goes away—and it’s harder to treat. Dysthymia has ups and downs with a wavelength similar to bipolar, but the peaks aren’t manic: they’re never above the baseline of “normal.” I’ve been on meds ever since (if there’s a lapse in my refills I start throwing things around the house).

One of the things that makes it really difficult to deal with dysthymia when you’re married to someone with depression is that it’s often difficult to tell when your reactions are due to your own condition, or in reaction to what the other is doing to you. (If one’s spouse suddenly decides to go off their meds for a month and a half, and that ends up being the worst 6 weeks of your marriage, it’s hard to tell who’s to blame.)

When I told HR and my supervisors that I was on meds now, and that my depression was a thing, they didn’t take me off probation or make allowances per the Americans with Disabilities act. I didn’t last much longer there. I think some bridges got burned. I thought maybe if I put my “disability” on later job applications maybe I’d get the understanding I needed… Probably not.

I read C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy but wasn’t surprised. I read Piper’s The Legacy of Sovereign Joy. That was probably a life-changing book. But I don’t think I got any actual “joy” out of it, though I got the sovereignty part. What did help was the idea that it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have joy; if I was ever going to get it, it would have to be thrust on me from a higher power.

If I were still a Christian I would be a Calvinist: our accountability is not dependent upon any notion of free will, but is a judgment deserved on us through the doctrine of original sin. The secular application of that is that our thoughts are not our own, but are a product of our genes and our physical brain and all the activity and chemistry going on there. Cause and effect. If you had scanners powerful enough you could actually look at my head and see the problem.

Your mental state is a product of your physical brain and its chemistry, not of your supposed immaterial soul. For that matter, anything we do is directly caused by our brains (see Sam Harris, Free Will) and maybe therefore a judgment of works makes no sense at all.