Severe depression: medication as grace

Here's important testimony from a reader who has lived through severe depression and offers some important advice regarding the use of medication.  Depression sufferers and their supporters, please listen to this!  (A response to my recent post: Light on Severe Depression.)

As a pastor who was hospitalized with clinical depression and anxiety and stress syndromes, I can add my personal AMEN to what you have shared, Chris.

The church certainly remains behind the eight ball on this one. In my congregation’s case (at the time), they carried out a better model. They teamed with my presbytery (regional governing body) to create a team to take care of both me and the congregaton’s ministry (liaison with the session [governing board]). The session granted me a three-month, paid leave of absence.

I had the grace, space and time to rest and get well, under the care of an excellent Christian psychotherapist and a quality psychiatrist, who found just the right medication.

Speaking of the latter–STAY WITH YOUR MEDS TO THE END OF THE REFILLS, my friends.

Thinking you’re better just because the symptoms go away is a BAD REASON to stop your meds without careful consultation with your physician(s). You’ll just dig a whole that ends up being harder to climb out of than before.

And depression sufferers: IT DOES GET BETTER. Indeed, it often takes a lot of time, hard work, and trial and error–but you’ll find God in the midst. That’s a promise fulfilled in my case!

Practicing nonjudgment

Nonjudgment is the intentional ceding to God the sole role of judge; we refuse to take God's judgment into human hands. Nonjudgment lives in submission to Jesus' explicit teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

Nonjudgment is a "paying forward" of the grace a mercy received by the sinner from Christ; by practicing nonjudgmental we preach the gospel (John 20.23). Improvising on this text, the Desert Fathers say: "When we cover a brother's sin, God covers our sin; when we tell people about our brother's guilt, God does the same with ours."

This is the strange logic of the gospel--the opposite way.

We refuse to judge just as we refuse to engage in violence--so that we are vanguards, heralds, the New Adam/Eve of a wholly new way on earth and refuse to perpetuate what tearing us apart.

Light on severe depression

A year ago yesterday, I lost one of my dearest friends.  I've written and spoken publicly a lot about mental illness, suicide, and the need for us to become more open and understanding of those who struggle with mental illness and, in particular, severe depression. Here are several links to some of what I've said in my effort to mainstream an all too common silent struggle that isolates the sufferers and their families, and open the doors for us to live more compassionately in ways that foster healing and hope.

One out of every 10 Americans will experience clinical depression during their lifetime.  Dark emotion will become chronic and debilitating, affecting their ability to function, interact with others, and derive pleasure from life.   One out of every four women will be clinically depressed at some point in her life. Because of our increasingly complex and interrelated world, clinical depression has become a modern epidemic.

Says Parker Palmer: “People walk around saying, ‘I don’t understand why so-and-so committed suicide.’ Well, I understand perfectly why people take their lives. They need the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting. It’s why, day by day for months at a time, I wanted to take my life. What I don’t understand is why some people come through on the other side and reclaim life with new vividness and with new intensity. That is the real mystery to me.”

Here is the original post just days after Jamie Evan's death.  It contains links to audio sermons.

And here is a link to a written manuscript of the sermon and a post entitled, God and Suicide: A Personal Encounter.

In addition here's one more link to an audio sermon from summer 2010, "When Depression Seizes You."

Depression is real, common, and treatable.

Contrary to the way it makes us fee, and what we may have been taught, it doesn’t disqualify any of us.

Please join me in standing alongside those who suffer in silence and loneliness.  Pass these on to friends and family members.

The power of words: architects of the new creation

Every word, a meditation. No word spoken carelessly. Let the vocal chords, the lips, tongue, and teeth connect to your heart and soul---to express the reverence, joy, love, and truthfulness dwelling there. Words are sounds that create. Every word, then, heart deep.

Slow down until you learn reverence. Listen to each word until you hear the new creation in each syllable.

Words, according to the lower standard are merely a communication tool. But words, from the higher view and when spoken from eternity, are for creation. As God spoke and brought all things into being, we, God's prophets, speak and in his name remake the world. Adam followed God's example in the Garden, and the New Adam, Jesus Christ, calls us to follow him in speaking the world toward its new and everlasting springtime.

Why you ought to work with your hands

We must learn again to work with our hands. There is a great loss in the modern world in its loss of manual labor. Touching things, sweating, stopping, starting. Manual work gives a person a sense of dignity and worth. How might work, hard work with your hands, provide the necessary antidote to desk work that involves you in the curse of Modernity, the crush of unending responsibility to an electronic universe that, by nature, knows no rest---a cyber world that plays by rules with consequences we don't yet understand?

Not all work can be manual, of course, but how might a rhythm of manual work and prayer teach a way of life that brings intellectual and electronic work into a goodness it might not know apart from it?