Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness (11 page)

Start with outside events. Even though the connection between certain events and the feelings of depression might have faded over the years, depression can often point to something or someone—a divorce, a serious accident, or an abusive past, to name a few. Perhaps one event can’t accept all the responsibility, but it can still be significant because it was either first or most intense. It provoked an approach to life that eventually, sometimes only after many years, culminated in depression.

The basic categories for external events are other people, the general curse on creation that came through Adam, and Satan (see chap. 4).

Other people are the easiest cause to identify. Whether through an abusive past or a recent rejection, other people bring the greatest pain into our lives. Although the connection is usually obvious, this cause can get harder to identify when the sins of others have become either so distant or so habitual that we don’t recognize them as a serious offense.

Linda, now thirty-eight, said that her circumstances couldn’t be better but her depression couldn’t be worse. Her husband loves her, her children are healthy and growing in Christ, and she has enough money to pay bills with cash to spare at the end of each month. When she reviewed her past, it, too, seemed relatively smooth and uneventful. She was raised in a prosperous home, her parents were still together, and she was offered guidance by both of them.

Her childhood home, Linda said, had been structured. There were clear guidelines and expectations, which made her feel “secure and loved.” When asked for specifics, however, Linda recounted expectations that were inordinate and oppressive. Grades, future career, the résumé of each prospective spouse, clothes, all school decisions from elementary to graduate school—these were just a few of the areas her father controlled. Tears, apparent weakness, and independent choice were unacceptable. What was odd was that Linda appeared unaffected by all this, as if her past were good and normal.

When asked about her history of depression, she calmly summarized that she had been hospitalized in a psychiatric institution at age thirteen “because I was never hungry.” She started taking psychiatric medication at that time and, except for pregnancies and times when psychiatrists changed prescriptions, she had been taking something ever since.

What would it be like to live in a world where mistakes, as defined by a father, were unacceptable? What would it be like to live in an environment that was controlled to the last detail? To this day, when authority figures speak, Linda seems to become glazed and subservient, never questioning, even when requests are ungodly.

Thus depression, in a strange way, suits her. She is numb, so she doesn’t have to live with the sadness and regret. She feels like she can’t think clearly, so outside authority isn’t questioned. Every act of submission or doing the expected then contributes to a sense of depersonalization and loss of identity.

Making these connections was an important start for Linda. She began to see that what she was feeling was most likely linked, in some way, to the daily patterns of the home in which she was raised. Once she saw this, she was pointed to issues in her relationship with God. Her operative belief system embodied significant falsehoods.

When you partner with someone who is suffering, you will often find that people were part of the difficult circumstances. Pain is usually tied to something that happened to us. Does this matter anymore? Does it matter to God? God’s sovereign control over history and our own personal stories make past situations
more
important, not less. What happened to us was not a series of random, unrelated events.

When Adam sinned, the creation that had been blessed and pronounced “very good” by God fell under judgment. Work suddenly became difficult, relationships had tensions, physical bodies were prone to disease and would waste away, and death cast its long shadow over everything. Even weather would no longer cooperate. Instead of a predictable mist watering a fertile garden, droughts, typhoons, tornados, floods, and earthquakes would remind us that even the earth groans. Nothing in all creation is quite right.

Physical ill health.
The decline of our physical bodies is one possible cause of depression. It may seem odd to locate this cause among other external circumstances in our lives because the physical body
is
us. But we are more than our physical body, and the body has much in common with other external causes. Most prominently, external causes are largely out of our control. We don’t always like them, but there is not always much we can do about them. In this sense, the body that is wasting away is another problem that comes at us—another circumstance of our lives.

Physical appearance, chronic disease, and chemical imbalances are a short list of significant physical contributions to depression.

Misery in work.
Also included under the curse is the fact that labor seems futile and much more difficult since sin discolored the world. You spend years working on your house only to sell it and watch the next owner tear it down for something more contemporary. Enter data all day, but try not to think of how irrelevant it seems in the broad scheme of world events. With the curse, work has changed from a pleasure to a drudgery. Yes, there are times when God’s original intent breaks through and we find satisfaction in our labor (even if it isn’t going to change the course of history), but misery is never far away.

The perceived meaninglessness of work is often part of depression. It usually, however, is a sign of depression rather than a cause.

Death.
The worst of the curse is death. You have lost loved ones, you will lose more, and they will lose you. There is no good death. If you lose someone to a sudden heart attack, you miss good-byes and closure. If you lose someone whose chronic disease made death more predictable, you agonize with him as the disease changes him into someone he was not. Death, indeed, is a tireless enemy.

It’s said that depression welcomes death, but it is not so much death that is welcomed as it is the alleviation of mental pain. Death itself is an enemy to everyone, and there is good reason to think that it contributes to the cause of depression even more than it is a result of it.

Isn’t it true that death—especially when it isn’t aggressively interpreted through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
—should
leave us depressed? Death renders everything meaningless. Why work? Why love? Why seek pleasure? It is fleeting. Death swallows everything. Its tides wash away every footprint we hope to leave.

Not that we are always thinking about it. Modern society has distanced us from death, and we do everything we can to avoid it. Physicians use a string of euphemisms, such as “passed away”
and “resting peacefully.” Comedians specialize in human frailties, but they won’t touch death unless they quickly evoke images of angels and bliss. We might not consciously think about death, but be assured that, unless this enemy is dealt with head on, it leaves its mark on all earthly misery.

Age-defying lotions, the worship of youth and the marginalization of the aged, “free-floating anxiety,” panic attacks, Type-A personality, boredom, the obsession with health, the status of physicians, purposelessness, hopelessness, and most fears—you will find death and the fear of death right below the surface.

Satan is another external cause of depression. We are already aware of the way his most vicious attacks question the power and love of God. But he does most of his work through strategic partnerships. Partnering with the curse, he apparently can affect weather (Job 1) and bring disease. Partnering with our own hearts, he causes oppression, murder, and inhumanity in its manifold form.
When
he partners is unclear. The curse on creation and our own tendency toward sin can affect us without his assistance, so there is really no way for us to know the precise percentages of who contributes what. That is why, when depression persists, we don’t immediately say, “Satan did it.”

Why is it that some people who experience these circumstances spiral into depression and others don’t? It is because these circumstances do not cause depression by themselves. They are usually
necessary
to the depressive cycle, but they are not
sufficient
—that is, they can’t make you depressed all on their own. These circumstances must also connect with an internal system of beliefs or an interpretive lens that will then plunge you down into depression. Even chemical imbalances usually need help if they are to become
depression, especially a depression accompanied by hopelessness and self-accusations.

We all know people who have gone through the most tragic of circumstances and have remained hopeful. “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8–9). Some people avoid the deeper reaches of depression because they are constitutionally steady; others because their beliefs and confidence in God catch them before they fall too far.

It is not especially encouraging to review the various contributors to your depression, but, if possible, generate a short list of the most obvious ones. It will remind you that depression usually comes from somewhere.

“Raise your hand if you have ever experienced depression.”

In another era, no one would have raised his or her hand. It would have been too self-revealing and embarrassing. Certainly none of the men would have raised their hands.

Half the hands went up.

After adding the question, “Who knows and loves someone who experiences depression?” it was unanimous.

The world around us has become the perfect incubator for modern depression.

There is no limit to the number of influences on depression. Scripture mentions the larger categories of other people, Satan, and the Adamic curse; and it gives many specifics, such as parents, teachers, peers, poor health, poverty, demons, and others. Yet the list is not intended to be exhaustive. Depressed people have suggested connections with the phases of the moon, stress in the
womb, changes in the ozone layer, diet and exercise, and maybe they are right, in part. Some contributions, however, are more likely than others.

Over the past twenty years, those who study depression have observed that depression is on the increase. The incidence rate of depression for those born after 1950 is as much as twenty times higher than the incidence rate for those born before 1910.
¹
Like all statistics, these can be molded to suit many different agendas, but it is a commonly accepted observation that depression has significantly increased over the last three generations. The question, of course, is why?

The most popular theory of depression today is the biochemical hypothesis, which suggests that depression is a consequence of serotonin deficiencies in the brain. No one, however, has succeeded in squaring this genetic hypothesis with the dramatic increase in the rate of depression. Instead, the best explanations point to some kind of cultural changes that have been shaped by us and seek to shape us in return.

Culture provides a way for us to see ourselves and the world. It emerges whenever people gather together. Therefore, families, schools, and church denominations all have particular cultures. Culture oversees the unwritten guidelines for manners, traditions, and relationships: whether or not we have dinner together, how we celebrate our holidays, whether we raise hands in worship or kneel, how we greet each other, and so on.

Infused through culture, however, is what Scripture refers to as the
world.
The world was created by God as the abode of human beings. As created by God it is good, but as our abode it bears the mark of our sin. Therefore, in the New Testament, the term
world
is used to denote the order of things that are alienated from God. In this sense, it is morally corrupt (2 Pet. 1:4), peddling foolishness as
wisdom (1 Cor. 1:20), and interpreting God’s wisdom as foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23).

The world can be defined as the “corporate flesh,”
²
as if our sinful tendencies were singing in unison. As such, the world consists of patterns and structures that come from us.
We
are responsible, for example, for the unrestrained sensuality in our culture. But there is also a sense in which the world comes
at
us. Even though we don’t need any assistance in sensual indulgence, the world plants the message that unbridled sensuality is good, thus abetting the tendencies of our own hearts.

Recognizing that the world is outside us heightens our awareness of the spiritual battle we must fight. Not only do we have to fight against our own sin; we also have to fight against aspects of the culture that applaud our sinful tendencies rather than rebuke them.

The following short list identifies features of our culture that have been linked with depression.

Martin Seligman, a world-renowned researcher on depression, has suggested this explanation for the increase in depression: “The modern individual is not the peasant of yore with a fixed future yawning ahead. He—and now she, effectively doubling the mar-ket—is a battleground of decisions and preferences.”
³

In previous generations, an implicit caste system kept us in the same jobs as our parents, and most of the major decisions in our lives were made before we were born. Your father was a blacksmith; you were a blacksmith. A boy in your village comes from the right family and his parents go to the right church; he is the one you will marry when you come of age. It was a system that had its problems, but the pressure of decisions was not one of them. Now, education, career, marriage, and even sexual preference are up for grabs. Life is a maelstrom of decisions.