Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Nightmares of the Spirit: Depression and "Choosing Joy"


The death of the actor Robin Williams, long known for being able to seamlessly move between comedic roles (as a standup comic) and dramatic ones (Good Will Hunting, What Dreams May Come), has brought about a national conversation on mental illness. This is nothing new. We talk about it regularly following mass shootings (Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Tuscon), though the conversation often flows downhill quickly to a debate we are much more comfortable with: guns. It's an easy debate we can all understand. Are you for or against this policy? Yes or no? As Will Ferrell (as Harry Caray) once said, “it's a simple question...a baby could answer it.” This isn't to diminish the the importance of the issue, but that's beside the point today. Today we are left wondering why someone who seemingly had it all, who seemingly portrayed a man filled with joyful energy and got so much in return, would take his own life. Unlike those previous aborted conversations, now the mental component is squarely at the forefront.


We've all heard the stories of the stars who “have it all” and then go home to a lonely life (remember? There was a Britney Spears song about it!). But why did this one take his own life in a calculated way? No overdose. No alcohol-borne accident. Just a choice to end a life.

A choice.

Are you sure?

There has always been, among evangelical Christians of the right (and Catholics, though to a different extent due to cultural differences), “hard truths” and an affirmation of what's commonly called “traditional values” among the American right as we've understood it since the 1960s. It used to be that these sorts of “truths” came from a pulpit presided over by a Jerry Fallwell or, for a softer version, the Billy Graham Crusades. Man, rule your home. Woman, submit to your spouse. Children, obey your parents. Man, be manly. Be strong. Obey your boss or, if you work hard enough and are blessed by God, be the boss. Work harder. Do it with joy.

All things, do it with joy.

Now, Fallwell was a “Free Will Baptist” as I recall. I'm very familiar with this strain of Baptism. It wasn't dissimilar from the Southern Baptist Convention I grew up in and attempted to immerse myself in as a young man. My mother's family came from the FWBs. The FWBs had the largest church in my hometown in North Carolina. I was friends with FWBs, and was actually very close friends with and dated one. All while I was fighting a battle that I thought was spiritual. A spiritual battle which evangelical Baptists like myself believed would be won by a triumph of Will. A spiritual battle that can be solved by choosing joy.

I chose joy. Over and over. I attended every “uplifting” event that my church was involved with. I tried to immerse myself with music with “a positive message.” I prayed. I thought about being a missionary and bringing the joy of the Lord to the world.

But how can you bring others that joy when that joy hasn't stayed with you?

At the root of the civic ideology we call Americanism, an ideology affirmed if not promoted by most American churches, is the individual. The individual is endowed by their creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We can pursue it. We may never get it. But traditional American values say that we are in control of whether we achieve that destiny. Why? Because we are personally empowered? Because we believe in the power of Tony Robbins?

Or is the alternative, that we are NOT in control, just too scary?

From among the collective voices of the media in the aftermath of Robin Williams' death, there has emerged one voice from a Christian perspective which has garnered much attention from Christian and secular audiences. While it's important to understand Matt Walsh in context before reading into his attempt to merge the message of “suicide always as a choice” with his brand of “prophetic truths,” (this is a man who a few days earlier was fighting with aWal-Mart employee in a blog post in which he made generalizations about that store's employees based on a negative personal experience), it's more important to understand that his perspective is not new. It's one I've been acquainted with for some time.

It was sometime in later summer of 2002 when it all began to come to a head for me. Memories I have of the period roughly from 1999 to 2002 are foggy, and what ones I do have are tinted gray. I was in high school then, and I was lost in my own mind. Teenagers are notoriously narcissistic, but this wasn't a sort of self-consumed obsession with my image or future or something. This was a self-consumed conversation with myself.

Or someone else.

I sometimes have a hard time pulling visions out of my head and translating them into words. I can't paint a good picture of what the scenery was like up there in those days. Part of my own illness has been memory problems, anyway. But I can certainly remember the deep grays and occasional darkness of my mind at that time. People who knew me then might not have noticed it, but when I look at pictures of myself now from that time, I see someone who looks like they're a tourist locked in a box, flown around the world, and released in the middle of a traffic jam in Bangalore, eyes distant and scared of what's around him. There was no rational reason for this. I was on my way to college. Heck, I had my selection of colleges to attend, as far away as I wanted to go. Any trouble at home or at school or around town would be gone. But there was no trouble at home, or school, or around town. Or excitement to spread my wings and fly away and start over in that young adult way. If there was a precipitating event for my depression, I could get as far away from it as I wanted. But there was no external inspiration for it. It was there, over me and swirling around as if I was in the eye of a hurricane.

How to escape it?

It was August of 2002, and I was very close with a girl I worked with at my stereotypical teen Christian job at Chick Fil A. She attended a private Christian academy, attended a Baptist megachurch, and was known for her bright dimpled smile and infectiously joyful faith. We'd dated on and off. I told my friend that I was tired of life and I had no solutions for solving my malaise. The only solution I could think of was to shock my senses by running away. I told her that if I didn't feel like I was worthless and drowning in shameful sadness by October (her birthday), I was going to just leave. I don't remember her saying anything at the time. Maybe just an "I hope you stay" or something like that. My memory is fuzzy. After that day, sometimes she'd tell me about some way she'd thought of to get me out and away from everything around us that was lighthearted. She'd say things like "let's just get to graduation and then move to the beach and open a restaurant!" or "let's just go all-in on going to college in Manhattan! That'll get you away from here!" It was a nice try, I suppose, and I thank her for at least trying to turn my spiraling depressed thoughts into manic dreams. But as I said, there was no person or place I was trying to escape. Just myself. And anywhere I went, I'd still have to deal with myself. 

When you are the source of your sorrow and you can't seem to bring yourself out of the pit you are in, you suddenly realize something very frightening about depression: something else has control over you. It's possibly the most frightening realization a person can make, and it's very much in opposition to what our civic religion of Americanism, and in many ways, Christianity, teaches us: that you are responsible for your life before God, who is sovereign over all.

By October, this conflict came into sharp relief. I received a call from my friend one night. I remember taking the call in my car, on the cordless. It was brief. My friend told me she had been talking about me with her mother and they came to a conclusion: I was somehow rejecting God and Christ. As evidence of what accepting Christ was truly like, she used herself and her family. They had reason to deny God. They'd had financial struggles. They'd had illness in the family. They'd had depression. They chose Christ's Joy and triumphed. Maybe they still didn't have the big nice house and maybe they still didn't have perfect health, but they had accepted Christ's Joy and knew that the love of the Lord was preparing them for greater things.

And I was someone who was rejecting joy and choosing to be surrounded by these feelings.

Our relationship reached a head finally in November when, during an argument at our after-school Chick Fil A job, she pulled me into the back of the restaurant to tell me something. She'd once again been speaking with someone about me, and God had told her that my choice to continue to be depressed and, increasingly by this point, angry, was evidence of my lack of salvation. Once again, if I was truly saved, I would have invited the joy of the Lord into my heart, and it would be evident to all that I had been transformed. Apparently my acceptance of Christ in the 6th grade, admittedly spurred on by the first time I was taught of the visions shown to John the Revelator.

My acceptance of Christ into my heart and my emerging from the baptismal pool at my church as a Born-Again Believer might have been birthed in fear, but I had remained faithful and sought the Kingdom of Jesus Christ and the joyful message it brought. I chased joyfulness through Christ the way Lebron James chased an NBA title. But unlike today's King James, the people I surrounded myself with, who were good fellow Christians who did all the stereotypical suburban teen Christian things like listening to Jars of Clay and attending summer mission trips, didn't bring about the prize I sought. Neither did my daily devotions, Sunday School attendance, or seeking out of Christian colleges to attend to "get myself right with God."

I was devastated by my friend's words regarding my salvation. Regardless of what the Bible truly said about depression, I felt like I had been sentenced, having heard this from the person I most looked to as an example of Godly love, who had seemingly stood beside me throughout my ordeal. I scrambled for a scriptural response. I couldn't find anything aside from the same scriptures we use to encourage those who are physically ill. I didn't think of myself as "sick" at all at this point. I just thought of myself as worthless and heading for even more sadness and worthlessness as a person, no matter what I did have going for me. I felt like I'd been sentenced to be some sort of outcast who's inner voices were constantly reminding him that he was one of God's unwanted children.

I attempted to take my own life on December 18th, 2002. Details aren't important. I do remember it was just hours after returning from seeing 2nd Lord of the Rings movie. I don't remember being in control of the situation at all. I was pushed forward by dark forces towards the only solution I could possibly think of. I had actually been on medication and was seeing a therapist by this point after one particularly awful fight with my parents weeks earlier where I revealed my feelings of worthlessness and sadness to them. After being found by my father that night, I proceeded to fight with my parents until the early hours of the morning. I was held out of school briefly, but I still graduated and moved on into the future.

Eventually medication solved some of my problems, and I am thankful for that. The clouds lifted a little, the darkness subsided a little, and I started looking forward beyond the abyss. I attended college close to home and still tried to at least appear to be staying in Christian fellowship by occasionally attending a friend's church, but there was a period of about 3 or 4 years there where I was questioning and skeptical of the whole idea of God. It wasn't until after college that I eventually came to my current home in the Episcopal Church following a chance meeting with the pastor of a Parrish around the corner from my first post-college apartment. On the walls of his Parrish was a simple, black and white sign reading "He Died To Take Away Your Sins, Not Your Mind." I also need to thank my best friend and his example of great faith in his own times of illness, as well as my cousin, a pastor who may be more theologically conservative than me in many ways, but who listened to and understood me when I spoke to him about my illness, reminding me that we live in "a fallen world." He works as a military chaplain, counseling soldiers returning with debilitating mental illnesses of their own, and his admission of the non-spiritual side of mental illness is absolutely necessary in dealing with these wounded veterans. I admire him greatly.

The best medical studies we have of the mind confirm that Major Depressive Disorder is the result of a chemical imbalance. Such an imbalance causes not just the familiar depressed feelings, but a complete reorganizing of certain thought processes in the brain. Some of this can be corrected via medication, and behavioral techniques can be used to overcome certain fixable behavioral hurdles in much the same way occupational therapy can help a physically disabled individual overcome a handicap, but it cannot cure it. While some with depressive disorders can make great headway by choosing good behaviors, many severe cases are not as susceptible to having a strong spirit or will. Such a severe sickness can cause all sorts of disordered and uncontrolled thoughts. We refer to the field related to these sorts of conditions as Behavioral Health not because they are "disordered behavior," such as that of children who disobey their parents, but rather because they alter our behavior in profound, harmful ways. The idea that one can control all their mental processes via "choice" isn't born out by the science. We accept this easily for other mental illnesses. No one tells a schizophrenic to just shut off the voices (to mention an even more stigmatized mental illness that I've seen kind friends succumb to).

Thankfully some faith traditions recognize this, at least a little. The Catholic Catechism, while suggesting that suicide is sinful, it does mention that "Gravepsychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship,suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the onecommitting suicide." 

But within conservative Christian communities and American society at large, suicide remains solely regarded as a choice. This goes back to the core of our civic religion: that we are sovereign individuals who's happiness can be fulfilled through hard work. In the workplace, this is one thing. In the inner realms of the mind, it is entirely different. In saying that many aspects of mental illness are not a choice, I am not trying to create, as some would allege an "excuse" or a "culture of selfishness and entitlement." I am simply relaying the truth of a fallen, broken world where not every solution fits into the idea that we are in control. Indeed, such an idea that one may not be in control of their very being in some way is quite scary. That's why we need each other. That's why Christians need the message of a healing Christ to give us hope to move on and out of the darkness.

I've been taking one medication or another for 12 years now. I've managed to graduate college, get married, and hold down a job I find meaningful and fulfilling working with disabled individuals. I am by no means cured. I never will be. The biological nature of Major Depressive Disorder doesn't allow for that. I have had other instances of being pushed towards dark forces in these past 12 years. With behavioral modifications and medication, I can resist them. But they are still there, and they will always be hiding in my nightmares and the deep parts of the attic of my mind. It is because we live in such a broken and fallen world that can manifest itself in these ways that we need the redeeming love of Christ to heal us.

If you take anything away from this piece, let it be this: that you likely know someone fighting mental illness, that their disease should be treated with the same care and compassion you treat a physical illness, and that it is not simply a problem of the spirit, even in its darkest forms and behaviors.