Christians Get Depressed Too

by David P. Murray

Then we will look at the different approaches to helping people with depression. We will look at what the sufferer can do, what caregivers can do, and what the church can do.

The Psalms treat depression more realistically than many of today’s popular books on Christianity and psychology. David and other psalmists often found themselves deeply depressed for various reasons. They did not, however, apologize for what they were feeling, nor did they confess it as sin. It was a legitimate part of their relationship with God. They interacted with Him through the context of their depression.

depressed believer cannot concentrate to read or pray. As she doesn’t want to meet people, she may avoid church and fellowship. She often feels God has abandoned her.

There is also the oft-mistaken tendency to locate the cause of our mental suffering in our spiritual life, in our relationship with God, which also increases false guilt and feelings of worthlessness.

An additional benefit of having some knowledge about depression is that it will prevent the dangerous and damaging misunderstanding that often leads people, especially Christians, to view medication as a rejection of God and His grace rather than a provision of God and His grace.

is absolutely vital for Christians to understand and accept that while depression usually has serious consequences for our spiritual life, it is not necessarily caused by problems in our spiritual life.

In this complex area, it is presumptuous to view one’s own experience as the norm for

everyone else.

Depression is caused by sin; therefore, rebuke, repentance, and confession are required.

evangelical church, largely as a result of the writings of Jay Adams’s1 nouthetic counseling movement and of those who have followed him in the modern biblical counseling movement. I will summarize Adams’s approach and then highlight the strengths and weaknesses of his reasoning.

Adams’s emphasis on the need to accept personal responsibility in these situations was necessary.

Adams’s approach is especially useful in situations where the problem is everyday mood swings and simply feeling down. There are times in our lives when, often in response to difficult personal situations, we allow ourselves to wallow in hopeless self-pity and slip into blaming everybody else for our problems. At such times nouthetic

counseling is exactly what we need.

Weaknesses. While Adams is to be commended for giving an important place to personal responsibility, he errs in placing all responsibility on the depressed patient. Adams fails to appreciate the significant difference in kind between bad moods or short-term depressions of spirit, which are sometimes sinful and to be repented of, and the deeper kinds of depression, which often have far more complex causes than the sinful

To put all the blame for depression on the individual is wrong, damaging, and dangerous, as it can only increase

feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Such mistaken views have

While Adams did address sinful behavior (unlike secular counselors), he has been criticized for not going much beyond the external. His remedy of “do

right and you will feel right” fails to address heart idolatry and also the faulty thought processes that may have contributed to or may have even caused the depression (ten faulty thought processes will be discussed in the next chapter). Such superficial behaviorist solutions will usually fail in the long term.

However, in the valiant and commendable attempt to secure a much-needed place for Christian pastors and counselors in the treatment of mental illness, the nouthetic counseling movement has often gone to the opposite extreme in

attempting to exclude doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists from the treatment process. In both cases the sufferer is the one who loses out.

However, I agree with the general stance taken by the authors of I’m Not Supposed to Feel Like This, that we should, in general, reassure Christians suffering from depression

that most often their damaged spiritual relationships and feelings are not the cause of their depression, but the consequence of it.

Charles Spurgeon, who suffered from frequent deep depression and anxiety and who could hardly be accused of mental weakness, addressed this fallacy in the quote we looked at previously: “Reader, never ridicule the nervous and hypochondrichal, their pain is real; though much of the [malady] lies in the imagination [thought-processes] it is not imaginary.”8

For Christians there will often need to be a balance between medicines for the brain, rest for the body, counsel for the mind, and spiritual encouragement for the soul. Recovery will usually take patient perseverance over a period of many months, and in some cases, even years.

Avoid dogmatism and seek humility. Avoid extremes and seek balance.

While we often cannot change the providences we are passing through, we can change the way we think about

them

so we can have a more ac...

positive view of our lives, thereby lifti...

When we are depressed, we tend to pick out the negative in every situation and think about it alone, to the exclusion of everything else. We filter out anything positive and decide everything is negative.

Another aspect of depression is that we transform neutral or positive experiences into negative ones. The depressed person doesn’t ignore positive experiences; rather, she disqualifies them or turns them into their opposite.

Our lives may be dominated by “shoulds” or “oughts,” applied to ourselves or others. This heaps pressure on us and others to reach certain unattainable standards and causes frustration and resentment when others or

we fail.

This is when we assume responsibility

and blame ourselves for a negative outcome, even when there is no basis for this.

False thinking patterns are compatible with being a Christian. False thought patterns will have a detrimental effect on our feelings, our bodies, our behavior, and our souls, usually in that order. One of the first steps in getting better is recognizing these false thinking patterns, which do not reflect reality. While we can do little, if anything, to change our providence (our life situation), we can change the false way we may think about our providence.

Pray for yourself and others. Tell the Lord exactly how you feel. Job, David, Elijah, and Jeremiah did

not

hide their feelings from God. Seek the sympathy of Christ. The words used to describe his mental sufferings in Matthew 26:37 and Mark 14:33 may be translated “surrounded with sadnes...

However strange it may seem to you, God wants you to go through this depression—so look at it positively, not negatively. What does He want you to learn from it? What can you gain from going through it?

When you begin to think in this fashion your guilt feelings start to drop away. You can begin to understand that what is happening is part of God’s plan for you—and so your depression is not a punishment from God. You are actually where God wants you to be, even if it is emotionally painful. To put it another way, if God wants you to go through this it would be wrong for you to avoid it, wouldn’t

We will consider five triggers of depression: stress, psychology, sin, sickness, and sovereignty.

David and other psalmists often found themselves deeply depressed for various reasons. They did not, however, apologize for what they were feeling, nor did they confess it as sin. It was a legitimate part of their relationship with God. They interacted with Him through the context of their depression.

If we come to the point that our default position in dealing with the causes of depression is that it is sin until proven otherwise, we are getting painfully close to the disciples’ position: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents?” (John 9:2). It is also a position that is somewhat akin to the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel, in which the diagnosis for trials is personal sin and the prescription is more repentance and faith.

One final cause of depression in the Christian is the sovereignty of God. Hard though it may be to accept, the ultimate cause may be, “It pleased God.” This, however, is not some sheer arbitrary, sadistic, and pointless infliction of suffering. Not at all. God has wise and loving motives and purposes in all His dealings with His children. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that God will sometimes allow His children to descend into the depths of depression “to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled; and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon Himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends” (WCF 5.5, emphasis added).

Now we turn to consider the “wiles of the devil” as they are to be seen in the confusion he creates between the physical, the psychological and the spiritual realms.... The subject is one of the most practical we can ever consider. We are strange creatures,

Routine One of the keys to a

balanced

lifestyle is regular routine. This is also one of the first things to fall by the wayside when someone becomes depressed. Depressed pe...

being guided by their...