It's Time to Talk About This: Depression, Suicide, and the Church

When I read that Rick Warren’s 27-year-old son had died, my mind immediately raced ahead because, well, 27-year-old people don’t just die. And when the rest of the statement confirmed that he had committed suicide, my mind jumped ahead again: “I’ll bet he struggled with depression.”

Right again, and how did I know? Because this script – person with a longstanding struggle that few people know about ends up taking their own life, to the shock of many who say they “never saw it coming” – is all-too-common. And because most people who commit suicide are, at the time of the act, depressed. Which means that the potential for this to continue shattering the dreams of so many families is great, in light of the fact that about 1 in 10 American adults have some kind of depressive disorder in any given year – 18.8 million people.

I’m one of them. Beginning with a terrible night in September 2004, when I had a panic attack that lasted more than four hours followed by five weird days of Xanax-induced fog, I sank into a depression that kept me tight in its grip for about the next six months. And it has really never left. Although the worst has passed for me, I still take my medicine, every day. I “live with” depression and, well, it sucks, because you wish you could get over it, the way you get over a cold: you feel it coming, you suffer through the worst of it, and then you start to feel better. Depression doesn’t work like that. The onset is often sudden, almost violent, and just when you think you’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel, the flame goes out. After a few cycles of that, you learn not to get your hopes up. Hopelessness then breeds helplessness, and the long-term price of untreated depression is usually schizophrenia or death.

I’d wager that every depressed person has at least thought about suicide, because you begin to believe that nothing short of dying is going to deliver you from that personal hell. That’s why I was particularly moved by the chilling anecdote in Rick Warren’s letter that when Matthew was 17, he said, “Dad, I know I'm going to heaven. Why can't I just die and end this pain?”

What keeps many people from acting on those thoughts is the fear of Hell, which points out a peculiar paradox when it comes to Christians and depression. You’d think this is a good thing, that it deters Christian believers from taking their own lives. The eternal fate of Christians who end their lives is a thorny theological issue and I won't try to answer it here (as if I have the answer). But let's just say the whole prospect sets you up between a rock and a hard place. The choice is between hell on earth, or hell in Hell? Great.

And what’s worse is you feel that you can’t talk about it. For all kinds of reasons, mental illness is taboo. It’s dark and, well, depressing. And that points to another paradox that exists in the church: the very things that will help depressed people get better – bringing it into the light, addressing it honestly and openly, getting people connected with treatment providers, surrounding them with people who can offer support and hope that life can be “normal” again – are the things that, for various reasons, don’t easily happen in church culture. They should, and they could – but they don’t.

I felt bad even bringing up what happened to Matthew Warren with some co-workers on Sunday morning, like I was raining on the Happy Parade. I apologized for doing so. Can you understand why someone who is depressed would feel even more inhibited about talking about their own issue? So instead, you withdraw. You isolate. You hold back from the very relationships and connections that could make you well. And you know it – but at the same time you feel powerless to act on your own behalf.

Depression robs you of your sense of self-empowerment. You feel like you’re inhabiting an empty shell. Like a cloud of discouragement and hopelessness is following you everywhere, and it always will. (Those commercials that say, “Depression hurts”? They’re dead-on.) Like the life has been sucked out of you. You lose the motivation to eat, to work, or to go anywhere. You become fearful and indecisive. You spend mornings agonizing over which shirt to where, or you stare endlessly at a restaurant menu before giving up and having nothing. You make plans to go somewhere and do something and then, predictably, back out because you’re not feeling up to it.

“Why don’t you just snap out of it?” No one was ever cruel enough to state it that directly, but that pretty much sums up a lot of the well-meaning advice and “encouragement” you get from other people. What’s doubly frustrating is that a depressed person asks themselves that very question, and gets no easy answer. It seems like fixing your problem should be simple, right? Go do something fun, go to a party, make yourself laugh. Look on the bright side. Get over it. But then you try, and fail. So you eventually fail to try. Or worse, things get better for a while, and you feel like, “All right – I’ve got this. I’m turning a corner…it’s gonna be over,” and then the sadistic hand of depression slaps you back down again.

Don’t get me wrong. There is recovery from depression. You can go from major depression to low-grade depression or even no depression; there is hope. But almost nobody gets better without help. And people don’t know how to help. And because of the nature of the disease, the depressed person will often reject offers of help. In fact, maintaining a friendship with someone going through depression is extremely challenging, because they’ll say they don’t want or need your help when actually, it’s exactly what they need. But it can’t be forced. Sometimes when you ask, “What can I do?” and the answer comes back, “Nothing,” that truly is the answer, for that day.

Unwavering support helps. Being patient and not forcing advice helps. Talk therapy helps. Medicine helps. And to Christians who criticize the use of psychotropic drugs as somehow unspiritual – because depression is all in your mind, and after all, Christ promises to renew our minds, doesn’t he? – I would urge you to slow down and reconsider that. Jesus made lame people walk. Yet it would be shockingly inappropriate to go up to a person in a wheelchair in one of our churches and tell them that if they had enough faith, they wouldn’t be in a wheelchair. Jesus gave sight to the blind. Yet we would never think of telling a blind person if they prayed more, they’d be able to see again. But people with depression hear these things all the time. And it does not help. It makes them feel guilty and responsible for what’s happened to them, driving them into an introspective spiral of How did this happen?/What did I do wrong?/Why can’t I be different?/Will it always be like this?

Yes, there are often identifiable events that trigger depressive episodes, and yes, understanding those circumstances and a person’s response to them is part of the therapeutic process. Depressed people are often plagued with self-defeating ways of thinking. But it cannot be ignored that depression affects (or is caused by, sometimes both) the chemistry in your brain. It is sickness, not just sadness. Everyone gets sad. Not everyone has altered levels of serotonin that need adjustment. So while it’s tempting to know what caused someone’s depression because that will help you jump to the solution, it’s just not that simple. Leave that to a therapist to help untangle. In the meantime, many – no, most – people with depression benefit from medication. It restores them to a level of functionality, so that they can think and do the things they ought to do to get well. Drugs will prop you up, albeit artificially – they’re not a cure, but they are part of the package of answers. (And a frustrating part, I might add. Some drugs work for a while, and then they don’t. Some actually induce thoughts of suicide – which is not an argument for abandoning medication, but for close monitoring of it.)

So who cares what caused it? Because even for disorders that are someone’s “own fault”, like obesity or heart disease or lung cancer caused by smoking, we don’t go around blaming them for their condition. Justified or not, what good would it do? To me, the very fact of disease and the presence of behaviors that enable it is evidence that something is very wrong with the human condition. In my religion we would call that sin, which is rightly viewed not just as individual transgressions, but more broadly as the brokenness (literally, the “not-working-ness”) that has beset us all. Bodies shouldn’t get cancer. It’s an abnormality. Knees shouldn’t blow out. Memories shouldn’t be stolen by dementia. And, people shouldn’t get depressed.

So if mental illness is part of the package of a fallen humanity, why doesn’t the church in America help? Because it ought to. But Matthew Warren’s suicide shines the spotlight on the fact that this is largely a hidden epidemic. Somehow we just can’t talk about mental illnesses – our own, or a family member’s – openly, the way we would acknowledge cancer or diabetes or a broken leg. I have to think that not wanting to bring people down has something to do with that. So does the fact that people just don’t know how to appropriately help. Unless you’ve been there, you don’t really get it. But I also sense the reluctance has something to do with not wanting to unleash something the church can’t deal with: that if you acknowledge it you somehow normalize it, and then people lose their motivation to change.

My response to that is that it already is normal; the breadth of this problem is huge. This reality is not shocking once you’ve experienced depression; suddenly, you become adept at picking out people in crowds who appear anxious, or you hear someone’s story and think, “I’ll bet there’s a family history of depression.” You’re usually right. The question is whether the church will face this head-on or if mental and emotional wellness will become one more thing that people have to go outside the church to find, because Jesus apparently doesn’t care about such things.

Secondly, the pressures of conformity and silence are not causing depressed people to change. As I mentioned above, getting out of the rut of depression means balancing out brain chemicals and overcoming ingrained patterns of thinking, and is not a matter of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. So if you think that giving people roles to play – like that of a hyper-spiritual, joy-of-the-Lord, only-heaven-matters cheerleader – is “curing” their depression, it’s not. They’re not changing; they’re acting.

But theologically, there is a fundamental misunderstanding the American church has adopted, that withdrawing love is the way to change behavior. Give that any amount of thought, and it fails. The way to change someone is to hang in there with them, giving them enough space to grow and to fail while knowing that you haven’t rejected them. I think we step away because it’s easier, like giving a child a time-out is easier than talking them through misbehavior: you stay over there until you can act decently, and then you can come back. What a horribly untenable position for the church in this day and age, and how contrary this is to the gospel! Instead, the plague of depression is a perfect metaphor for someone in need of salvation: you’re in over your head, you know what you ought to do but can’t do it (Romans 7:19), and you need the help of some outside source – first to do something for you, but then to do something with you. That second part – the walking it out – we’re not so good at. In the church we’re impatient. We want deliverance, healing, answers, victory! Getting into the mechanics of other people’s problems is messy. It’s hard for us to accept that some people who are depressed will always be depressed on some level; they will need constant, faithful support; they will not be cured.

Even now I struggle to see a redemptive purpose in anyone going through depression. It gives you empathy for others experiencing the same thing – but even then, for what? Some suffering makes us stronger, or more resilient, or softer, or more appreciative. Depression just beats you up.

It’s a little easier to see something redemptive for the people who have to deal with depression in a family member or close friend. I suppose you learn your own limits pretty quickly. It tests your patience over the long haul. I hope it teaches you that the solution is so much bigger than one person’s efforts, so that when things end tragically as they did with Matthew Warren, you don’t blame yourself. But I fear that’s not the case. I think there’s a lot of self-blame, and a conspiracy of silence in society and in churches doesn’t do anything to alleviate that. Let me encourage you that your efforts do count. And ultimately, you can’t make anyone get help, and even some who get very good help don’t get a whole lot better. But you feel alone when you battle this, and anyone reading this who has depression or deals with someone who does knows exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s unveil this thing, somehow, so that we all can be reassured that’s not the case. Statistics about how common depression is are one thing; meeting actual people who deal with it is another, and it immediately puts the scope of the problem into perspective.
And if you don’t know anyone with depression – think again. You probably know them quite well; you just don’t know that about them. Are you caring enough to listen; are you safe enough to tell?