depression – Houghton STAR

Not many people know that I come from a long line of men and women with depression and suicidal attitudes, including two suicides within my lifetime. In fact, my uncle killed himself the month before I came to Houghton. Firsthand, between high school and college, I have experienced the mind and body numbing effects of depression on my body, my mind, and my soul. As you can imagine, I have spent many hours wondering about my family history, my legacy of mental illness. Now, recently becoming engaged to be married, the fear that I will pass on such a legacy to my future children is crippling. Can there truly be nothing new under the sun? Are we doomed to struggle under the difficulties of our parents, and their parents before them?

Photo by: Anthony Burdo

I have found my comfort in psychology. To those of you not familiar to the discipline, that may sound as though I have found comfort by embracing the cold sterility of scientific reasoning and the dissociation from emotional expression. Quite the opposite in my case.

Echoed throughout all psychology courses and sub-disciplines, students are taught the complex relationship between nature and nurture, which was debated long before psychologists first began questioning this relationship. Are we just a product of our circumstances, our culture, our family and friends, or are we just

pre-programmed by a script of code by a genetic instruction manuals? The simple fact is both nature and nurture are critical to our lives, and they are so intertwined in their effects that is impossible to trace an element about ourselves to one locus point.

Yes, depression seems to run as a swath through the genetic code, but as I realized over my very depression-wrought sophomore year, there is more than genetics involved in the severity of depression in a person’s life. In my extended family, alcohol is a large environmental factor that has systematically ruined many lives. I don’t mean drinking alcohol in moderation is inherently corrupting or evil. However, drinking was, and still is used by large portions of my extended family as an escape, one that they use daily. My uncle was always depressed, but it was when he was drunk that his suicidal thoughts became so severe that he enacted them. He was drunk on the night he shot himself. My grandmother was reduced to a husk of her former self by her alcoholism, which destroyed the relationship my mother wished to have with her in her teenage years. This is why my mother abstains from all alcohol, and why I have determined never to drink as an escape. Alcohol lowers inhibition and lets the chilling claws of depression sink in.

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The failings in family’s legacy also taught me something else important in my battle with depression: the dangers of societal withdrawal. My uncle lived alone in a two story house, my grandmother spent a great deal of time away from her children and husband even within her own house, and my great-uncle’s body wasn’t discovered in his trailer until days after he killed himself. I’m not saying a romantic and/or sexual relationship combats depression (though I believe a healthy one may), it is making connections to even one friend that can act as a lifeline in particularly low times. My girlfriend was my lifeline during my sophomore year, but I learned the value of having many lifelines by finding friends who truly cared about my well-being. Houghton is one of the best places to find those connections, and I urge you to seek them out.

My legacy has left me with a lifelong struggle of depression, but it has taught me what exacerbates depression, such as alcoholism, and cutting off social and familial ties. We are not resigned to the same fate as our generations before us. We can learn from our legacies and fix both our own lives, and those of our children even if we can never solve the entire problem. This is what I seek to do, and I hope you all do as well, whether the topic relates to depression, abuse, spirituality, or sexuality.

Kevin is a senior majoring in psychology and writing.

“What use could God possibly have for a soul that has been completely emptied?” This question encompassed my reflections back in 2011, a darker season of my years-long struggle with depression. Even now, although I would not frame the question in such a hyperbolic sense, it continues to haunt me. On one level, I still perceive my depression as a particular kind of brokenness—a brokenness that has often given me pause to reflect upon who I am as an individual. More broadly, though, I consider what implications this raises for my participation in the body of Christ.

Before I am accused of painting a negative portrait of the subject at hand, I must first clarify that I am not suggesting that brokenness is tantamount to sin, as I have been fighting this notion for several years in my own life. To provide rather extreme examples, I have personally been told by others that I suffer from depression because I have too much sin in my life; that mental illness is a form of demon possession; that depression is merely a sign of a spiritual deadness. Rather, here I associate depression with brokenness in that it disrupts God’s design for human flourishing.

In light of these considerations, I instead want to assert that my personal questions are not completely foreign to the church’s uncertain response to mental illness. Furthermore, how is the church to regard members of the body who continue to suffer in this way, perhaps over a sustained period of time? While I do not intend to present a full indictment of the church on this account, I do wish to indicate a lack of consensus as to how to regard mental illness. In viewing some of the contemporary evangelical responses, I was somewhat astonished by the wide and varied perspectives represented in popular Christian forums. A 2009 issue of Christianity Today featured multiple articles on the contemporary “depressive epidemic.” These articles recognized the perplexing nature of depression within the church, ultimately finding root in meaningful suffering, communion in the body of Christ, and Christian eschatology. On a different end of the spectrum, Focus on the Family published an article, as a part of a series, with a rather telling title: “Depression: Reject the Guilt, Embrace the Cure.” While author Bruce Hannigan clarifies that depression is not in itself a sin, he describes the illness as a propensity that may lead to sin if one indulges in it, comparing depression to alcoholism.

In the midst of these assessments, some helpful and some harmful, I believe it is very much important to maintain the complexities of mental health (especially the often-neglected biochemical levels) as the church continues to struggle in better understanding these issues. Even considering the numerous differing responses among Christians, I remain hopeful that the church may increasingly recognize these complexities and thus better support and affirm those who are battling mental illness.

In returning to my initial question, I want to assert that, in the midst of brokenness, God is redeeming all things to himself. This remains a promise, not a trite solution. It is a promise that implies both a continuing process and an eschatological hope. It does not explain away our present trials; it does not silence our questions. Rather, I trust that it gives us cause to boldly pursue our calling to uphold one another in the body of Christ.