LIVING WITH FAITH AND DEPRESSION
Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel.
“The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth. Complacency then replaces sheer delight in God’s unconditional love.
….. Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology.
It is an act of faith in the God of grace.”
Frederick Buechner, in his sermon “The Great Dance” takes a stab at one of the many ways people distinguish the two.
“Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us.
Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening.”
Amen. But I think most of us, myself included, unconsciously pick happiness seven days a week — including Sunday.
That’s because we’re, from birth, so wed to “things going our way” that it’s a supernatural act of grace for us to look at life through a different lens. To be okay when things don’t go our way. Which we try for, but which we mostly fail at (or at least I do).
Frederick Buechner, in A Crazy, Holy Grace.
“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”
Quite the study.
Australian researchers took a look at stool samples of children at one month, 6 months, and 12 months old, and then measured their anxiety-like behaviors at 2 years old.
They found that infants with a low level of the gut bacteria, Prevotella, were much more likely to exhibit anxiety-like behaviors such as shyness, sadness, and internal focus.
That, in turn, may lead to greater likelihood of childhood and adult anxiety.
Low levels of Prevotella are also a risk factor for things like autism and Parkinson’s Disease, and low levels are much more common in western societies.
So what should you do? Feed your kids a varied diet and don’t overdo the antibiotics, if possible, because they lower levels of Prevotella.
Beyond the practical implications, there are so many spiritual implications for the church.
So often, we’ve been taught that anxiety is a spiritual issue (lack of trust etc) when study after study is, over and over, showing it’s a medical condition. One that often begins very early. Over simple things like gut bacteria.
How many parents see their anxious two year old or toddler (and yes, they definitely can show abnormal anxiety at that age) and say, “Hey, that little fellow definitely doesn’t have enough gut bacteria.”
None of us says that, but that’s a really plausible explanation.
Same situation for adults. How many times do we insist on a spiritual explanation when it’s often just a matter of gut bacteria?
We need to change how we talk about every one of these mental health conditions and, instead of automatically ascribing a spiritual cause, recognize that these are medical conditions.
That doesn’t mean spirituality can’t speak to it. After all, our Christianity has everything to say about how we approach cancer, mentally, but not too much physically.
There’s tons of evidence suggesting yoga fights depression, anxiety, and even PTSD.
There are a number of reasons why — breathing and posture seem to be a part of modulating the stress response, and now researchers have unearthed another reason.
Yoga increases activity of an incredibly important neurotransmitter amino acid you may have heard of — gamma aminobutyric acid. More commonly, known as GABA.
What’s so fascinating about this?
Benzodiazepines, which you probably know are pretty powerful at fighting anxiety, work by acting on, you guessed it, GABA receptors.
Basically, the more GABA, the less anxiety.
Now, according to the study, yoga is another way to affect your GABA levels, and here’s the pretty cool thing: The lead researcher of the new study, Chris Streeter from the Boston School of Medicine, says just one yoga session per week can affect your GABA levels for the entire week.
After 8 days though, GABA levels start to fall again, so it’s important to get that one session per week.
Here’s the science behind how yoga affected brains — as measured by MRI’s and MRS various stages.
“The region of interest was the left thalamus. This area is functionally connected to brain regions associated with mood regulation.
GABA levels rise and fall with progesterone levels. Progesterone is metabolized to allopregnanolone, which directly binds at GABAA receptors and modulates the function of the GABA system. Allopregnanolone has anxiolytic and antidepressant effects.”
From Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen (one of my favorite books).
“Without trust, I cannot let myself be found. Trust is that deep inner conviction that the Father wants me home.
As long as I doubt that I am worth finding and put myself down as less loved than my younger brothers and sisters, I cannot be found.
I have to keep saying to myself, ‘God is looking for you. He will go anywhere to find you.
He loves you, he wants you home.
There is a very strong, dark voice in me that says the opposite: ‘God isn’t really interested in me.’
By telling myself that I am not important enough to be found, I amplify my self-complaint until I have become totally deaf to the voice calling for me. At some point, I must totally disown my self-rejecting voice and claim the truth that God does indeed want to embrace me.”
In her book Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris writes about just how important humility is when trying to fight despair.
Then she points to a passage on despair from one of Kierkegaard’s journals, in 1847.
Soren The Spell-Check Murderer Kierkegaard:
“I must never, at any moment, presume to say that there is now way out for God because I cannot see any.
For it is despair and presumption to confuse one’s pittance of imagination with the possibility over which God disposes.”
True and wonderful.
But in keeping with the site’s mission, I offer my continual “But remember.”
If humility doesn’t help your despair, don’t despair! It doesn’t mean your humility is defective, it probably just means your brain is.
Remember, spiritualism can combat some spiritual despair, but for most depressives, despair — even spiritual despair — doesn’t have a spiritual basis.
Medical depression leads to existential despair, which includes spiritual despair.
And it’s absolutely vital to remember that you must treat medical depression, first and foremost, as a medical condition and with the medicine God has given us.
After all, spirituality might help us battle cancer, emotionally, but we use medicine to treat us.
So, as much as we should value and consider what Kierkegaard says, again don’t despair if humility doesn’t help your despair. You’re not a bad Christian. You probably just have a medical condition that leads to despair.
Talk to your doctor.
The Week has a good look at how kids react to their anxieties (some throw tantrums that are part of the fight response; others disappear inward, as part of the flight response).
But the particularly interesting part for those of us with clinical anxiety was reading just how incredibly important it is for parents to model healthy responses to anxiety for their children.
Claire Gillespie, writing in The Week:
“Kids learn what they see. “Parents should evaluate their own anxiety and make sure they’re not modeling any excessively anxious thoughts or behaviors,” Krawiec says. “Of course, some anxiety is good, keeps us safe, and helps us to know right from wrong, but too much of it can be limiting psychologically, socially, and developmentally. Kids can learn anxious responses, and interpret anxiety, from their parent — trauma reactions can be passed through generations.”
There’s a name for this in psychology: social referencing. “This refers to the idea that children look to adults to understand how to regulate and manage their own emotions, says licensed clinical psychologist Melanie English, Ph.D., MSW.
“An adult might imagine being on an airplane with some turbulence; we might look around at other passengers to see if they are concerned or not with the turbulence,” she says. “If those passengers aren’t bothered we might feel fine; if we see others becoming upset, we might also feel upset. Like this example, our children will look to us to interpret a situation and how to react to it.”
If parents can positively address the negative feelings they experience (anxiety, stress, conflict, etc.), they can mirror that their kids — and you have a potentially life changing teaching moment right there. “Our children will inevitably see our anxieties, struggles, conflicts, bad days, and worst moods (welcome to life!), but we can identify and model to them why we might feel that way and how we handle it,” English says. “In turn, they will understand that there are sometimes uncomfortable feelings and emotions in this world but there are tools to try and address them.”
Now, the article goes on to make a very important point.
You don’t have to hide your anxieties from your kids. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
Kids need to see that we struggle with life the way they do, and it can turn into a net positive if we show them that a) we’ve got anxieties, too and b) there are ways to cope with them.
It’s enormously helpful for kids to feel they’re not alone in their anxieties, that it’s a normal human response God put in our brains, and that there are ways to cope with it.
The 17th century London bookseller, Edward Fisher — quoted in Michael Reeves’ book, Rejoicing in Christ.
“Whence it must needs follow that you cannot be condemned, except Christ be condemned with you; neither can Christ be saved, except you be saved with him.”
Most people who have depression also have anxiety. And vice versa.
Although, at a gut level, it makes sense (after all, if you’re extraordinarily anxious about something, it makes sense that might lead to depression), researchers haven’t been able to figure out if there’s a genetic link between comorbid anxiety and depression.
But now they’re starting to understand more, thanks to a new study.
From Yale.Edu:
“A massive genome-wide analysis of approximately 200,000 military veterans has identified six genetic variants linked to anxiety, researchers from Yale and colleagues at other institutions report Jan. 7 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Some of the variants associated with anxiety had previously been implicated as risk factors for bipolar disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia.
The new study further contributes the first convincing molecular explanation for why anxiety and depression often coexist.
“This is the richest set of results for the genetic basis of anxiety to date,” said co-lead author Joel Gelernter of Yale, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, professor of genetics and of neuroscience. “There has been no explanation for the comorbidity of anxiety and depression and other mental health disorders, but here we have found specific, shared genetic risks.”
Some variants were linked to genes that help govern gene activity or, intriguingly, to a gene involved in the functioning of receptors for the sex hormone estrogen. While this finding might help explain why women are more than twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety disorders, researchers stressed that the variant affecting estrogen receptors was identified in a veteran cohort made up mostly of men, and said further investigation is necessary.
Another of the newly discovered anxiety gene variants, MAD1L1, whose function is not fully understood, was also highly notable. Variants of this gene have already been linked to bipolar disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia.”
Painting: Untitled by Monica Rahen