Darkness
This is the time of year when many people dear to me are bottoming out in their annual struggle with depression. It strikes early—as early as late November—and may be momentarily disrupted (or exacerbated) by the light and color and levity of the holidays. At least, there are usually other people around to distract us from the voices in our head telling us how bad things have gotten, cycling through the viciousness of isolation, depression, isolation, depression, with a little shame thrown in for good measure. But then the trudge through January, February, March…and April is the cruelest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot.
The good news for those with bad blues is that the stigma surrounding mental illness, and depression in particular, is not what it once was. We make cracks about going into therapy to undo what our parents wrought, and compare notes on our prescription medications.
Problem is, we can talk about depression from a safe distance, we just can’t actually be depressed in front of one another. As one of my peeps recently said to me: “it’s funny how legitimate mental illness is these days. We all have our diagnosis: seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder, panic attacks. We all talk about it over coffee or beer. But it’s still not acceptable to actually exhibit our mental illness in front of people.”
And yet we become more and more aware of the multitudes among us living with depression, anxiety, or worse. Is the problem growing? Or is it merely that we live in this densest of cities, and therefore live with very little privacy, and have ever-larger social circles? So inevitably we notice when our roommate sleeps till 3 in the afternoon, or our coworker has shallow scratches on her arms from cutting, or our blind date is panting and looking pale. It’s enough to make one, well, depressed and anxious.
There have been very few tests to my religious faith. I suppose I’ve been through as much as your average 30-something straight white American woman, and been able to reconcile all my trials with the idea of a God who is good and wills the best in all situations. But when I see people I love struggle day after day, do the right things, eat the right things, visit the right therapists and take the right meds, and still feel hopeless and helpless, or want to end their lives, it makes me want to turn my back on God.
Just what place do depression and other challenges to mental health have in what Jesus has called the Kingdom of Heaven—if God is in charge, what business does He or She have letting these gatecrashers in?
Is God responsible for smiting certain people with suicidal depression, or crippling social phobias, or schizophrenia? Or are the individuals themselves responsible for not being able to get out of bed, or hold a job, or talk with strangers? If they tried harder, could they not be well?
To blame it on God is to yank out the thread holding the fabric of our faith together, a belief in a God who loves us and wants us to be whole. But to blame the individual is to further disable someone already crippled by self-doubt. This dilemma puts us, to paraphrase Cab Calloway, between the devil and the deep blue funk.
There are various accounts of mental illness in the New Testament Gospels. Although they happened to be called exorcisms. Jesus encounters a man with “an unclean demon” in the synagogue at Capernaum, as he is teaching. Later, a wild man meets the disciples at a cave in the Gerasene countryside; he is the neighborhood crazy and the people are terrified of him. Still later in the gospels, a father brings his son, who has violent fits, to Jesus, seeking relief.
Demons were a relatively new concept in first century Israel; belief in them had crept in from neighboring cultures. Not everybody believed in them, but they did serve to explain why some people’s behavior was so unpredictable, and dangerous to themselves or others—the kind of behavior we moderns now know as severe mental illness.
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