“Must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you All through my life? –sharing my fire, my bed, And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The critical issue many face is trying to survive the next episode of depression or mania. Somehow I think that cohabiting with something that is trying to kill you is especially disturbing. Depression is my mortal enemy and here I am, giving in and actually allowing it to destroy me. How crazy is that?
Some of us get absorbed into a dark melancholy. We instinctively carry despair and despondency wherever we go. It’s hard, but I really believe it’s crucial for afflicted believers to begin to worship again (and again, and again).
I’m totally convinced that the Holy Spirit absorbs much of the venom Himself.
When my depression slumbers, life proceeds fairly well. I can play with my kids, and be a good husband, friend, and neighbor. Everything seems quiet and normal. But when the dragon awakes, watch out, there’s going to be ‘hell to pay.’
There were many terrible, dark days that I simply couldn’t get out of bed. I was plagued with awful, dark thoughts. Meds didn’t seem to help me. I felt completely lost.
Depression might strike at any time, and exactly when, you can never be too sure.
“How will I handle it next time? Will I be in shape for Christmas, or will I lose it again this year? I just don’t know.” That’s the depressive way. But you know, the Holy Spirit ministers yet, and He will touch my heart again. He gently cares for the depressed.
“But God, who comforts and encourages the depressed and the disquieted, comforted us by the arrival of Titus.”
2 Corinthians 7:6, AMP
My wife and I were missionaries in Mexico for almost three years. We lived in a “burnt out” and very small trailer, with very sporadic electricity, and no running water. We had a 55-gallon drum for our drinking water, and we tried our best to avoid the mosquito larvae. And part of that time we had to park on the slanted slopes of a dormant volcano.
Sometimes it feels like that, I’m just waiting for the next eruption.
I am glad that God decided to intervene in my life. Without question, I need Him to watch over me. I have to believe that He will keep rescuing me over and over. As a believer in Jesus, I know he has put his hands on me. He shields me from the dragon.
Do you know someone who seems like he or she has “lost touch” with reality? Does this person talk about “hearing voices” no one else can? Does he or she see or feel things that others can’t? Does this person believe things that aren’t true?
Sometimes people with these symptoms have schizophrenia, a serious illness.
What is schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is a serious brain illness. Many people with schizophrenia are disabled by their symptoms.
People with schizophrenia may hear voices other people don’t hear. They may think other people are trying to hurt them–we call this paranoia. Sometimes they don’t make any sense when they talk. The disorder makes it hard for them to keep a job or take care of themselves.
Who gets schizophrenia?
Anyone can develop schizophrenia. It affects men and women equally in all ethnic groups. Teens can also develop schizophrenia. In rare cases, children have the illness too.
When does it start?
Symptoms of schizophrenia usually start between ages 16 and 30. Men often develop symptoms at a younger age than women. People usually do not get schizophrenia after age 45.
What causes schizophrenia?
Several factors may contribute to schizophrenia, including:
Genes, because the illness runs in families
The environment, such as viruses and nutrition problems before birth
Different brain structure and brain chemistry.
Scientists have learned a lot about schizophrenia. They are identifying genes and parts of the brain that may play a role in the illness. Some experts think the illness begins before birth but doesn’t show up until years later. With more study, researchers may be able to predict who will develop schizophrenia.
What are the symptoms of schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia symptoms range from mild to severe. There are three main types of symptoms.
Positive symptoms refer to a distortion of a person’s normal thinking and functioning.
They are “psychotic” behaviors. People with these symptoms are sometimes unable to tell what’s real from what is imagined. Positive symptoms include:
Hallucinations: when a person sees, hears, smells, or feels things that no one else can. “Hearing voices” is common for people with schizophrenia. People who hear voices may hear them for a long time before family or friends notice a problem.
Delusions: when a person believes things that are not true. For example, a person may believe that people on the radio and television are talking directly to him or her. Sometimes people believe that they are in danger-that other people are trying to hurt them.
Thought disorders: ways of thinking that are not usual or helpful. People with thought disorders may have trouble organizing their thoughts. Sometimes a person will stop talking in the middle of a thought. And some people make up words that have no meaning.
Movement disorders: may appear as agitated body movements. A person with a movement disorder may repeat certain motions over and over. In the other extreme, a person may stop moving or talking for a while, a rare condition called “catatonia.”
Negative symptoms refer to difficulty showing emotions or functioning normally.
When a person with schizophrenia has negative symptoms, it may look like depression. People with negative symptoms may:
Talk in a dull voice
Show no facial expression, like a smile or frown
Have trouble having fun
Have trouble planning and sticking with an activity, like grocery shopping
Talk very little to other people, even when they need to.
Cognitive symptoms are not easy to see, but they can make it hard for people to have a job or take care of themselves.
Cognitive symptoms include:
Trouble using information to make decisions
Problems using information immediately after learning it
Trouble paying attention.
Helpful Links for Further Thought
The Mayo Clinic:Good, solid and trustworthy, a great introduction.
O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. 2 Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! 3 For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am a man who has no strength, 5 like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6 You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep.
Psalm 88:1-6, ESV
I definitely needed this Psalm today. Yesterday I went to the doctor and was blindsided by news that really isn’t good, at all. Of course, I also have this ongoing struggle with depression. Today I feel like I’m running a marathon with ‘leg weights’ on.
This particular Psalm is radically different than the others.
This Psalm has no kind words, and no praise to God for deliverance. It is a singularly sad song. Imagine if you will, a huge stone fortress in the mountains. Every room has a door, and every room a window. All except one. No light enters this room. There is no entrance or exit, no way to get free. Psalm 88 describes living that torturous experience.
I like my Psalms to be strengthening or encouraging.
But then comes this one! Life unravels and frays. Everything gets confusing. Life comes apart. The thought of being one who is irretrievably lost and damned, it saturates my thinking. The despair is beyond belief, I have no words to describe its special variety of darkness.
Anyone who has walked into this hell will understand.
Am I ‘less’ a Christian because of this vicious despair? Some would say so. The writer in verse 1-2, calls out to God. (I guess this what you are supposed to do). There is a sense of consistency in his cry. In verses 3-5, we see him evaluating his position. Again, there is a underground current of despair.
There is simply no help, no deliverance for him.
It’s a bitter and painful place to be. There are no explanations why life has gotten so nasty and bitter and out-of-control. But one thing that Psalm 88 does quite well, it strips you of any dignity that you have left.
(Does this make any sense at all?)
There is so much embedded in the book of Psalms. Comfort, faith, victory and hope are what we find. But in Ps. 88, we find a black pearl, the only one of its kind. Somehow, we dare not leave it behind, just because we don’t understand it.
I’m convinced that it has tremendous power to the disciple who is in endless pain. Just vocalizing this Psalm does something to us. These real words help. This Psalm is ours.
“Lord Jesus Christ, you are for me medicine when I am sick; you are my strength when I need help; you are life itself when I fear death; you are the way when I long for heaven; you are light when all is dark; you are my food when I need nourishment.”
Our theology makes all the difference in fighting depression, writes Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Author of “Darkness, Is My Only Companion” and Episcopal priest.
Here is an excerpt where she introduces the depression of Christians:
In his Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says that suffering is uniquely difficult for the Christian, for the one who believes in a good God. If there were no good God to factor into the equation, suffering would still be painful, and ultimately meaningless.
For the Christian, who believes in the crucified and risen Messiah, suffering is always meaningful. It is meaningful because of the one in whose suffering we participate, Jesus. This is neither to say, of course, that suffering will be pleasant, nor that it should be sought. Rather, in the personal suffering of the Christian, one finds a correlate in Christ’s suffering, which gathers up our tears and calms our sorrows and points us toward his resurrection.
In the midst of a major mental illness, we are often unable to sense the presence of God at all. Sometimes all we can feel is the complete absence of God, utter abandonment by God, the sheer ridiculousness of the very notion of a loving and merciful God. This cuts to the very heart of the Christian and challenges everything we believe about the world and ourselves.
I have a chronic mental illness, a brain disorder that used to be called manic depression, but now is less offensively called bipolar disorder. I have sought help from psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health professionals; one is a Christian, but most of my helpers are not. I have been in active therapy with a succession of therapists over many years, and have been prescribed many psychiatric medications, most of which brought quite unpleasant side effects, and only a few of which relieved my symptoms. I have been hospitalized during the worst times and given electroconvulsive therapy treatments.
All of this has helped, I must say, despite my disinclination toward medicine and hospitals. They have helped me to rebuild some of “myself,” so that I can continue to be the kind of mother, priest, and writer I believe God wants me to be.
During these bouts of illness, I would often ask myself: How could I, as a faithful Christian, be undergoing such torture of the soul? And how could I say that such torture has nothing to do with God? This is, of course, the assumption of the psychiatric guild in general, where faith in God is often viewed at best as a crutch, and at worst as a symptom of disease.
How could I, as a Christian, indeed as a theologian of the church, understand anything in my life as though it were separate from God? This is clearly impossible. And yet how could I confess my faith in that God who was “an ever-present help in trouble” (Ps. 46:1) when I felt entirely abandoned by that God? And if this torture did have something to do with God, was it punishment, wrath, or chastisement? Was I, to use a phrase of Jonathan Edwards’s, simply a “sinner in the hands of an angry God”?
I started my journey into the world of mental illness with a postpartum depression after the birth of our second child. News outlets are rife with stories of women who destroy their own children soon after giving birth. It is absolutely tragic. Usually every instinct in the mother pushes toward preserving the life of the infant. Most mothers would give their own lives to protect their babies. But in postpartum depression, reality is so bent that that instinct is blocked. Women who would otherwise be loving mothers have their confidence shaken by painful thoughts and feelings.
Depression is not just sadness or sorrow.
When I am depressed, every thought, every breath, every conscious moment hurts.
And often the opposite is the case when I am hypomanic: I am scintillating both to myself, and, in my imagination, to the whole world. But mania is more than speeding mentally, more than euphoria, more than creative genius at work. Sometimes, when it tips into full-blown psychosis, it can be terrifying. The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off or pull out of it: there is no pulling oneself “up by the bootstraps.”
And yet the Christian faith has a word of real hope, especially for those who suffer mentally. Hope is found in the risen Christ. Suffering is not eliminated by his resurrection, but transformed by it. Christ’s resurrection kills even the power of death, and promises that God will wipe away every tear on that final day.
But we still have tears in the present.
We still die. In God’s future, however, death itself will die. The tree from which Adam and Eve took the fruit of their sin and death becomes the cross that gives us life.
The hope of the Resurrection is not just optimism, but keeps the Christian facing ever toward the future, not merely dwelling in the present. But the Christian hope is not only for the individual Christian, nor for the church itself, but for all of Creation, bound in decay by that first sin: “Cursed is the ground because of you … It will produce thorns and thistles for you …” (Gen. 3:17-18).
This curse of the very ground and its increase will be turned around at the Resurrection. All Creation will be redeemed from pain and woe. In my bouts with mental illness, this understanding of Christian hope gives comfort and encouragement, even if no relief from symptoms. Sorrowing and sighing will be no more. Tears will be wiped away. Even fractious [unruly, irritable] brains will be restored.
“Darkness: My Only Companion”
Kathryn Greene-McCreightis assistant priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church in New Haven, Connecticut, and author of Darkness Is My Only Copanion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos Press, 2006).
Broken Believers 