Darkness
This is the time of year when many people dear to me are bottoming out in their annual struggle with depression. It strikes early—as early as late November—and may be momentarily disrupted (or exacerbated) by the light and color and levity of the holidays. At least, there are usually other people around to distract us from the voices in our head telling us how bad things have gotten, cycling through the viciousness of isolation, depression, isolation, depression, with a little shame thrown in for good measure. But then the trudge through January, February, March…and April is the cruelest month, at least according to T.S. Eliot.
The good news for those with bad blues is that the stigma surrounding mental illness, and depression in particular, is not what it once was. We make cracks about going into therapy to undo what our parents wrought, and compare notes on our prescription medications.
Problem is, we can talk about depression from a safe distance, we just can’t actually be depressed in front of one another. As one of my peeps recently said to me: “it’s funny how legitimate mental illness is these days. We all have our diagnosis: seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder, panic attacks. We all talk about it over coffee or beer. But it’s still not acceptable to actually exhibit our mental illness in front of people.”
And yet we become more and more aware of the multitudes among us living with depression, anxiety, or worse. Is the problem growing? Or is it merely that we live in this densest of cities, and therefore live with very little privacy, and have ever-larger social circles? So inevitably we notice when our roommate sleeps till 3 in the afternoon, or our coworker has shallow scratches on her arms from cutting, or our blind date is panting and looking pale. It’s enough to make one, well, depressed and anxious.
There have been very few tests to my religious faith. I suppose I’ve been through as much as your average 30-something straight white American woman, and been able to reconcile all my trials with the idea of a God who is good and wills the best in all situations. But when I see people I love struggle day after day, do the right things, eat the right things, visit the right therapists and take the right meds, and still feel hopeless and helpless, or want to end their lives, it makes me want to turn my back on God.
Just what place do depression and other challenges to mental health have in what Jesus has called the Kingdom of Heaven—if God is in charge, what business does He or She have letting these gatecrashers in?
Is God responsible for smiting certain people with suicidal depression, or crippling social phobias, or schizophrenia? Or are the individuals themselves responsible for not being able to get out of bed, or hold a job, or talk with strangers? If they tried harder, could they not be well?
To blame it on God is to yank out the thread holding the fabric of our faith together, a belief in a God who loves us and wants us to be whole. But to blame the individual is to further disable someone already crippled by self-doubt. This dilemma puts us, to paraphrase Cab Calloway, between the devil and the deep blue funk.
There are various accounts of mental illness in the New Testament Gospels. Although they happened to be called exorcisms. Jesus encounters a man with “an unclean demon” in the synagogue at Capernaum, as he is teaching. Later, a wild man meets the disciples at a cave in the Gerasene countryside; he is the neighborhood crazy and the people are terrified of him. Still later in the gospels, a father brings his son, who has violent fits, to Jesus, seeking relief.
Demons were a relatively new concept in first century Israel; belief in them had crept in from neighboring cultures. Not everybody believed in them, but they did serve to explain why some people’s behavior was so unpredictable, and dangerous to themselves or others—the kind of behavior we moderns now know as severe mental illness.
The first demon faces down Jesus and cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” We might well ask the same question of the demon. Those of us who have suffered ourselves, or been close to someone with poor mental health, can feel as if we are being utterly destroyed by its influence.
Since every one of his exorcisms is successful, Jesus’ answer might be, “YES! I have come to destroy you—I’ve come to destroy anything that keeps the human spirit from fully experiencing life, and participation in meaningful relationships.”
There are a few messages to take away from these demoniac stories. The first is that, in none of the accounts of exorcism, is faith a prerequisite for healing. In direct contrast to physical healing stories, in which Jesus says to the wounded, “Your faith has made you well,” faith is not demanded of the demon-possessed in order for them to be freed. Jesus never says to them, “if you just try harder—just have enough faith—you’ll be better in no time.”
So we can let go of the idea that when people are mentally ill, their failure to believe sufficiently in God keeps them so. Interestingly, when faith is demanded of anyone in these accounts, it is only demanded of Jesus himself, or of the disciples who have been given authority over unclean spirits, or of the friends who bring others for healing. So there is a clue here if faith is going to work miracles, it is not the faith of the sufferer, but the faith of the healers or friends who will work it.
The second thing these stories have in common is what they do demand of the demoniac, or at least of the demon, is that while the demon does not have to have faith, per se, the demon must acknowledge the authority of Jesus. In other words, the demon is cast out because it believes that someone else’s power is stronger than its own.
For those suffering from mental illness, thoughts have a way of crowding out reality, and gaining an undue influence over how one perceives the world. From the anorexic girl to the brilliant poet, feelings of worthlessness become so real and insistent that they displace the truth. They no longer believe their friends or family who insist they are loved, they are beautiful, they are gifted—they think they know something their friends and family don’t. Loving words have no authority for them. If the demon is going to leave, it must acknowledge an authority higher than itself, and outside of itself.
The last thing these stories have in common is that the sufferers becomes so closely identified with their illness that they cease to see themselves as a person apart from their symptoms. The cave-dwelling man of Gerasene whom the townspeople fear doesn’t ‘have a demon,’ he is a demoniac. And so we label ourselves or others: depressives and ‘phobes and loonies, oh my. What Jesus does is separate the person from the diagnosis—and open up a chink that will free them.
The biblical demoniacs agree that the one who is ill can’t trust his or her own inner voice to tell the truth, and so they must rely on their community to tell it for them, and to hold them through the madness, to chain them with determination and love, as it were. Like the Gerasene demoniac, they may break the loving shackles of our words and affirmations and do themselves further harm, but we can still try to hold them tight and keep them from hurting themselves during the worst times.
We can establish expectations around behavior and treatment for the people we love. We can tell them a different story than the one their brains do. We can remind them that they are not their illness. We can offer them alternately tough love and tender, as it is demanded, but a continuous stream of love regardless.
Maybe part of the problem is that chronically ill people and those who care for them feel defeated if there is not a dramatic, miraculous exorcism a la Jesus. Those who live with compromised mental health face a lifelong, daily struggle to function and maintain social relationships, self-esteem, jobs. It’s not about being well; it’s about being as well as one can. The miracles are small, often invisible when you’re too close to them.
One of the most popular songwriters in the Christian canon, William Cowper, was an 18th-century basket case. He believed most fervently and faithfully in a good God, and wrote enduring hymns about that God, even as he suffered terribly from lifelong depression. He was such a failure, even at depression, that he even bungled his multiple suicide attempts (he ultimately died of dropsy at the not unrespectable age of 69).
But he wrote beautiful, hopeful hymns. And he had many, many friends along the way that took him in, and held him tight, and reminded him of who he was—not his illness.
The cold comfort in Cowper’s story is that one is not either faithful or sick, but that both properties can coexist simultaneously. In fact, we might argue, with an eye not only to Cowper, but to many of our greatest artists and poets and mathematicians, that creativity and madness are inextricably linked in some great minds. It seems we can’t have one without the other, but must accept them as part of the gift of this human.
GOD moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
~William Cowper, Light Shining Out of the Darkness
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