Depression: Motivation, Momentum, and Suicide

"My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the country side nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books of poetry...

Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?"

St. Augustine. Confessions

“The worst part of everyday of my life is when I have to put on my socks.”

Louis C.K. Oh My God

I’ve been thinking about Matt Walsh and Pat Robertson the last couple of days.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

It’s stupid and not productive but I can’t help but think there are people out there listening to the both of them and being influenced by their words. 

“Suicide is a choice.” Says Mr. Walsh.

“You won’t want to commit suicide after you have come to [God].” Says Pat Robertson. 

Mr. Walsh shoots down the argument that he doesn’t understand because he has “struggled with this his entire life.” And then adds, “I know that in my worst times, at my lowest points, it’s not that I don’t see the joy in creation, it’s just that I think myself too awful and sinful a man to share in it.”

Mr. Walsh, I’m sorry you have low points but what you described is not depression. Most people with depression would love to have your low points as their high ones.

Depression is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease.

Depression is living in the swamp of sadness from The Neverending Story. Everything is hard. Walking is hard. Running is impossible and every activity is draining. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually draining. There is no joy in living constantly on the edge of exhaustion.

When you live in the swamp there is no momentum. No completed action feels like a way forward. Every step feels like an isolated event too demanding to be repeated. People who live in depression keep doing these things anyway because they know what it means to stop even though they are so tired.  But like Artex, sometimes exhausted people give up because they can’t see a way out.

The worst thing someone can do is tell them how if they only had God or if they just made different choices things would be better. There would be joy.

Do you really think people suffering from depression don’t want things to be better? Depressed people pray, exercise, join support groups, take medication, go to church, change their diets, and the thousand other things their friends and family offer as advice because they want to feel better.

Rorschach from the Watchmen captures the despair of it:

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Life seems harsh, and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says: "Treatment is simple. The great clown - Pagliacci - is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. "But doctor..." he says "I am Pagliacci."

They want joy. They just don’t know how to get it.

What is amazing is that even when they don’t know how to get to joy most people don’t give up.  

Even when people complain about them, don’t understand them, and condemn them to hell. Even then most of them don’t give up. To the one’s that do I stand close to Luther:

I don’t share the opinion that suicides are certainly to be damned. My reason is that they do not wish to kill themselves but are overcome by the power of the devil. They are like a man who is murdered in the woods by a robber. . .

If you want to help someone who is depressed, sit in their pain. Follow Paul’s instructions: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” The only good thing Job’s friends ever did for him was sit silently with him for seven days. Once they started speaking, they only increased his pain.

In this way, Robin Williams taught me more about fulfilling the Law of Christ with a fictional character in What Dreams May Come than these men who claim to speak in the Name of the one who emptied Himself and took the form of a man in order to be obedient to God’s will – the laying down of His own life.