One of the laws of life is that pain cannot be shared. Two people can experience the same pain simultaneously but pain cannot be transferred. The best we can do is share burdens. So we come across someone with a blinding headache and we might say, Let me finish this job for you and you go and lie down. The person may appreciate that but they go off and lie down with the same pain. Transferring pain in the medical realm might well be what perpetual motion is to the mechanical realm. It’s interesting to think about isn’t it – what if everytime you had a headache you could go to ten people and transfer part of the pain to each one of them? Each person would only have to deal with 10% of the original pain. Make things easier and more bearable wouldn’t it. But, that’s not the way it is, is it? And perhaps it’s better the way it is for good reason for who would really want to transfer pain to others? It would be christian to volunteer to endure pain for someone else, but I don’t think it would be christian to give suffering to another in that manner.
Pain is private. Oftentimes we can’t even describe it – I’ve got this pain and it feels like a knife has been plunged into my shoulder and someone is twisting it. The problem is the person whom we are telling this to has never had a knife plunged into his shoulder and twisted so communication is minimal. Even something as common and ubiquitous as a headache has its limitations. I was in preaching school with Bill Hardin, and at age 43 he had never had a headache in his life to that point. He had heard about headaches all his life but had never had one – he didn’t know what they were. But even for those of us who have experienced them, the best we can do is approximate, sympathise, and empathise. How bad is your headache? Oh, it’s a blinder! But the experience on the one hand and the imagination on the other hand may still be a long way apart because of either exaggeration or playing down, differences in pain toleration and so on. I don’t think I have ever had a migraine, but I know of others who have spent days lying very still in a dark room to get over one. I can only guess what that must be like.
Pain is private, and this is possibly never more true than of depression. One of the debilitating and frustrating aspects of depression is the isolation of it. You could have two people with broken legs in beds side-by-side in a hospital ward who could have a fairly decent time of it and could share conversations, jokes, chess, banter with the nurses, despite the pain and discomfort. The pain and discomfort is in the leg, progress is made each day, and the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter quite rapidly.
But it is not so with depression. If there were two depressed people lying in adjoining beds in a hospital the interaction between the two would be different than the two with broken legs. It’s a different kind of pain. In depression we retreat; there is no silver lining in the clouds; there is no light at the end of the tunnel; seems almost impossible to share the frustration of feeling because there is no x-ray you can point to, to show the break in the bone. It’s an aloneness, an isolation. John Milton in Paradise Lost said, The mind is in its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, or a Hell of Heaven. We see it in Jeremiah’s lament in Lam. 1:12.
I can remember as a child feeling as sick as a dog for a week with suspected Hepatitis. I remember lying in bed and wondering how the rest of the family could be eating what was on the table (veal and gravy, roast potato and pumpkin – all stuff I normally loved) and could not even imagine that I could ever eat such again, and maybe the rest of the family were probably wondering why I didn’t feel like eating good tucker.
Depression today is being called The Common Cold of Mental Health. Estimations are that one in four suffer from it to varying degrees at any one time. It may be true as one researcher said, The medical world has experienced more joyous breakthroughs in dealing with depression in the last thirty years than in all the rest of history, but it hasn’t stopped depression. Henry David Thoreau in the 1800’s said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, from the desperate city we go to the desperate country, stereotype but unconscious despair is concealed under what is called the games of the amusement of mankind. What did he say? – man struggles and puts on a front! One thing the Bible does not give is a guarantee that we will escape depression. In fact, we have about as much chance of avoiding it as we do of avoiding death and taxes.
Life has its storms that must be endured. There are storms of sickness, storms of divorce, storms of death of loved ones. And in the midst of a cyclone all sorts of thoughts run through the mind. How long is this storm going to last? Is the wind going to get any stronger? Will the roof of the house be torn off? Security and certainty are replaced with insecurity, uncertainty, and apprehension. And in the storms of life other more crucial and disturbing thoughts rise to the fore: Is God really with me? Does he really care? If God is for us why has this befallen us? (cf. Gideon)
Job raises this, and so does David. Many a Bible character has felt pressed down in spirit. We’re familiar with the likes of Jeremiah the weeping prophet, and Elijah who ran off and hid in a cave on Mt Horeb, and Jonah who said It’s better for me to die than to live. Perhaps we’re not as familiar with Paul’s struggles in this department (2 Cor. 1:8). More importantly, what about Jesus? Now is my heart troubled (John 12:27) and he was troubled in spirit (John 13:21). And who can forget Matt.27:46 My God my God why have you forsaken me? He knew the answer to that theologically (see this in John 12:27). But anguish of spirit and pain of body take their toll on our perceptions. Depression distorts perception. When we are depressed we view life through a glass darkly. The way we perceive the world is the way we respond to the world. we don’t need rose-coloured glasses but clear glasses so we can perceive the world accurately – both its good and its bad. It’s easy in depression to think that the world has declared war on us when the truth is the world does what it does no matter how depressed we become about it. There are three aspects to life: (1) what really happens (2)how we perceive what happens (3) how we react. Most of our problems come about at (2).
And depression colours how we think, feel and act toward a spouse, friend, boss, co-worker, parent, child. Troubled relationships are the rule in depression. Another hallmark of depression is rigid inflexible thinking. Words such as must, should, never, bad, have to, only, and ought to create emotional states (anger, fear, hurt, guilt, aloneness) which, naturally, contribute to depression. Where does depression originate?
Sometimes we are depressed, know it, but don’t know why. Sometimes it is an altogether right reaction such as when we lose a loved one. In fact, so much, if not all, depression can be traced to loss – loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of health, loss of a friend, loss of opportunity – or fear of what we may lose: I may lose my wife or my health or my super etc. Whether real or perceived it often stems from loss.
It was often the case that depression was believed to be something restricted to the middle years and beyond. In the last forty years things have changed – depression has become a young person’s dilemma and now we struggle with teen suicides. University stats have shown an increase in IQ for the last 50 years or so, but the dropout rate has stayed the same – about 25%/class/year. Forty percent of those who drop out require help with depression. Why? There is a great gulf between what they know they are and the ideal they have set for themselves. Japan has been, perhaps, the worst in this.
But we are told by Jesus be ye followers of me – but there’s a gap isn’t there between Jesus and us and if we don’t handle it right then that gap can become depression along the way. The Thessalonians were troubled about certain things. 1 Thess. 4:13 speaks of those who have no hope – tough words aren’t they. People die when there is no hope, or rather, when they think there is no hope. Pointing the bone worked and gave the illusion of mystical powers, but it ‘worked’ on the basis of removing hope from the victim. 1 Cor. 15:19 – If we have hope in Christ only in this life we are of all men most miserable. This is especially true when you consider the tribulations the early Christians endured, because for many of them, including Paul, following Christ had made their physical life more difficult and precarious. The vast majority of people live their lives in quiet desperation because they have no hope beyond the grave and they know it. They may laugh at being dead all over like Rover, or being like a bit of road kill, but the fruit of that is despair. And this despair is evaded by drinking and other forms of distraction.
Where does depression originate? Christopher Latch wrote a book called Cultural Narcissism. The subtitle was The age of diminishing expectations. Increasing numbers of people have no hope, and when we think there are no better tomorrows, then depression sets in. The 20th century was a century of unparalleled development in many fields, and there was a sense of great optimism at the beginning of that century that we were on the brink of a brave new world. Even the first world war couldn’t dampen it and they called it the war to end all wars, but in the matter of a short twenty years the league of Nations was dead and World War 2 broke out. At the end of WW2 with the dropping of the atomic bombs there also came dreams and expectations about what atomic energy would deliver – cheap energy which would do away with our dependence upon fossil fuels. I have a piece of memorabilia – an article on an engine developed in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s by Napier. It was a turbo compound motor which was the most efficient in the world, putting out 100HP per litre. The end of the article reads, In fact, it is certain that no other engine can at present match the economy of the Nomad – nor, in all probability, will any engine, until such time as an atomic power unit is developed. Such was the optimism, but 70 years on and there is no atomic engine in existence. We might well ask, “Will there ever be?” All our advances have been beset with corresponding setbacks – even basic things like mechanization and computerization to do away with menial and back-breaking work have created challenges of unemployment and so on .
So where does depression originate? It comes with loneliness. The ironical thing about loneliness is that it can easily exist in a big city. You can feel very much alone in a crowded air terminal absolutely buzzing with people and activity. People can be lonely in a church building filled with people just as easily as when they go home to an empty house. Or the person they share the house with might be somebody they find increasingly distant. It may be children who say My parents just don’t understand me, which may be in part a cop out, but may also in part be true. Many people are depressed because they have an inability to express. The depressed expression may be tenderness, assertiveness, joy, anger, or love and because they cannot express they enter into the depression of loneliness.
What can we do with depression? To this day, when talk of faith and the faithful takes place the discussion will turn to the young lad who with a sling and the power of God slew a giant. The man described as a man after God’s own heart. As you go through his psalms you note though, that he was a man at times quite disturbed. In 6:1 he pleads O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. Why such a request? You only have to read vs. 2-7 to find out what sort of a state David was in. In Ps. 13:1 he cries How long will you forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long will you hide your face from me? Why such a cry except that he felt forsaken and abandoned. And who can forget Ps. 22:1? My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? There was no settled composure there. Perhaps Ps. 31 is the most revealing of David’s low times. In v.9 he says I am in distress and he goes on to say in the following two verses that his body is wasted away and he is filled with sorrow and sadness. He expresses deep fatigue when he says his strength has failed and the awareness of his iniquity speaks of guilt. In v. 11 he writes I was a reproach among all my enemies, but especially among my neighbours, and a fear to my acquaintances: those that saw me outside fled from me. No doubt David had his enemies, but had the whole world turned against him? Did people in the streets really flee from him? Or was David expressing a perception of life that is not at all uncommon for one struggling with depression? He concludes in v.12 with I am like a broken vessel. What’s that worth? Nothing. Finally he expresses sheer hopelessness when he says in v.13 terror is on every side. He felt trapped with nowhere to go – except God (v.14).
That’s the difference between the child of God and the world. Heb. 6:19 says we have an anchor for the soul. The storms will come, but if we are anchored in Christ we will ride out the storm and the storm will pass. It is no coincidence that a drift away from faith in God has seen a rise in suicides in the world. The atheist Satre said If God is not then everything is permitted, and he chose that road only to discover that if God is not, there is no reason or meaning to the universe and to man himself and he said man is therefore forlorn.
But if God is, and He is, and I am anchored in Him, then I can ride out the storms of life and experience again the joy of my salvation.