Is It All Right to Want to Recover

In the five years since I met my partner, and especially the three and a half since we got married, I have suffered less from depression than at any time in my life.  I have far more reason to be happy; I live with someone whom I love and who loves me, and who doesn’t expect me to leave home when I grow up.  Also, I know that when I make myself miserable, it makes him miserable, so I have more reason to try to overcome my problems.

However, for most of the past week I’ve been suffering worse depression than I have for over a year.  For the first time since last Christmas, I woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep, unable to see anything to hope for, unable to do anything but cry and (eventually) distract myself by playing computer games.

A large part of the problem, and one that may be unique to me, is that I can’t quite believe that God doesn’t want me to be depressed.  There are a number of books and web articles aimed at Christians facing depression, including the following, some of which are quite helpful:

To the Depressed Christian 

Christians and Mental Health Issues 

A Christian Response to Depression 

How Should Christians Deal with Depression 

Most of these articles describe how some Christians feel guilty about suffering from depression because they feel that we should constantly be filled with joy, or that not being healed shows a lack of faith.  Of course, this is a misunderstanding, but it is a misunderstanding which springs from the generally healthy Christian beliefs that God is love, and that Jesus came to give us life in abundance. 

However, I have been depressed pretty much all my life, to the extent that it colours my view of Christianity itself.  So what I tend to assume is that God wants to hurt, diminish or destroy us.  When Jesus tells us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses, I assume that he means we must neglect all our own needs (or cease to admit that we even have feelings and needs) and embrace everything that is painful and destructive until it kills us, or even actually commit suicide.

Incidentally, this article offers the very different interpretation that what Jesus is talking about is not self-denial (in the sense of rigid self-discipline) but trusting that we have been crucified with Christ and are alive in him.  This may be the message for us now, though I suspect that the one Jesus expected people to take away at the time was simply the literal warning that being his follower in the Roman Empire was likely to lead to being crucified.  But at any rate, I know that it is unlikely that he wanted us to forgo everything good and embrace everything that is damaging, simply out of masochism.  I know this because, when people asked him to heal them, he healed them.

I once had an argument with a Christian therapist about what ‘taking up your cross’ meant.  I suggested that perhaps Jesus asked sick people what they wanted only as a test: if they said, ‘I want to be healed,’ he would heal them, but then leave them, as they were too selfish to be his disciples.

The therapist reminded me of an obvious counter-example: Mary Magdalene was someone whom Jesus had healed of demon-possession, and was also one of his disciples, and the first witness of the Resurrection.  Clearly, Jesus didn’t see her as selfish or unworthy.

Another point that occurred to me was that, when Jesus met people who had a physical illness, he asked them what they wanted.  When he met people who were demon-possessed, he just healed them anyway.  If your thoughts and feelings are distorted, you may not always understand what you need, and therefore may not be able to engage with your therapist in the way that he/she hopes.  But this doesn’t mean that you don’t need help, or don’t deserve it.

Another complication is the way in which people use the word ‘depression’.  They may be talking about situational depression (temporarily feeling unhappy because you are going through a difficult time) or clinical depression (mental illness that can blight your life for years, or a lifetime).  Sometimes writers argue that ‘depression’ is a normal part of human experience that can be a valuable learning opportunity.

What they mean, of course, is that we shouldn’t assume that all unhappiness is a symptom of illness.  But, because being depressed doesn’t make it easy to think clearly, I assume they mean that I am supposed to accept feeling worthless and being unable to hold down a job and hating myself and being too agitated to think rationally.  Therefore, I am baffled when the same writers talk about recovery – if depression isn’t an illness, how can we recover from it?

When I asked my therapist why he thought it was permissible for me as a Christian to want to get better, he explained why he, as a Christian, decided to train as a therapist: because the way God heals people often involves human medical techniques, rather than miraculously healing in response to prayer.  I’m not sure he understood that I was asking why it was permissible to want good things like health at all, by whatever means, because to him it seemed so obvious – why would Jesus have been a healer, if it was wrong to want healing? 

Perhaps the fact that this does seem obvious to all the Bible writers, and to most Christians (even depressed Christians, misguided Christians, and Christians who rely solely on faith-healing and shun conventional medicine) is the only answer I’m going to get.  The chances that all of them are wrong, and I alone am right, are vanishingly small.

I used to work as a care assistant for people with dementia.  One patient suffered from hallucinations of snakes, and one of my tasks was to catch the snakes and drop them out of the window.  They seemed real to her, but, as they were invisible to everyone else, they probably didn’t exist in any objective sense (certainly, they never bit me when I picked them up).  Most of the thoughts that trouble me probably belong in the same category as the snakes.  It’s best to accept that they’re a symptom, and not worry about them.