Silent Souls Weeping: Depression—Sharing Stories, Finding Hope

by Jane Clayson Johnson

“Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and function as preventative medicine—or treatment if you’re sick—it also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.”

Yesssssss

When those who are depressed lose their fear of being blamed for their condition, opportunities for both love and miracles are created. Healing may not come right away or in a literal fashion, but when stigma is lifted, so too is the heavy burden of shame.

A wise therapist once told me that life isn’t really about being happy. It’s about finding peace.

Depression is a disease, not a spiritual deficit.

conducted a study of 574 BYU students with respect to their experience with legalism, grace, and various measures of mental health. “We found that the more the respondents believed that their salvation was primarily a result of their own good works (legalism), the higher were their scores on measures of shame, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior (scrupulosity). When we examined the influence of grace with these same students, we found that those who understood and embraced the principle of grace had dramatically lower scores on these same measures.”26 It is truly astounding what the Savior’s grace can and does cover!

It took me a long time to realize that people aren’t as mean to you as you are to yourself.”

“I think there’s a lot of shame attached to mental illness because people who are born into a covenant or even converts think that they’re not supposed to have any problems. I feel like we are sent to earth to try to be like Christ. Sometimes members of the Church don’t take into account that having a mental illness is not your fault. Sometimes it’s just a side effect of life, but it doesn’t mean you can’t progress in trying to be like Christ. It doesn’t mean that you can’t recover, either.”

“Sometimes my best is getting out of bed. That was my best for that day. Sometimes I was doing really well, and I was able to do all the things that a missionary’s supposed to do. I had to learn how to be okay with that. I still struggle with that, even today. The Lord just requires your best, and your best changes. And that is okay.”

Dr. Feinauer explains a phenomenon in which members of our Church—and missionaries in particular—turn the gospel into a “hair shirt.” Woven from goat hair, hair shirts were designed in biblical times to be scratchy

and uncomfortable. Some Catholic ascetics wore them to show the Lord how much they loved Him. Still others, called flagellants, whipped themselves. These practices—called “self-mortification”—have no official place in our Church, but missionaries can be susceptible to that kind of thinking.

“All women receiving prenatal care are screened for diabetes, but how many pregnant and postpartum women are screened for depression? PPD is also more common than preterm labor, low birth weight, pre-eclampsia and high blood pressure; in other words, PPD is the most common complication associated with pregnancy and childbirth.”

Letting people into your house when it looks its worst is the best gift you can give. It lets them know that they’re normal too.’”

“If you get cancer, you generally beat it or you die,” Jim says. “With mental illness, it doesn’t kill you unless you commit suicide.

But the thought of living her whole lifetime with this disease—hiding it to maintain friendships and a steady job, trying new medications and enduring the debilitating side effects, believing she’d been abandoned by God—eventually overwhelmed her.