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Tragic Shadow
by Burton Buller
I was in a conversation with an acquaintance recently. We were talking about mental illness, and the devastating effect such illness has on the family. Near the end of the conversation, he stated that he knew a pastor who claimed that most mental illness was really just a spiritual shortcoming. That if people would get their lives straightened out with God, the depression would go away.
He subscribed to that notion.
Really? After all the research that has been done, the brain studies of depressed people, the proclivity for depression to have family connections, we are still back to it being a spiritual problem?
My mother spent a number of years terribly depressed. Some of this time she could hardly function. She seldom got out of bed. Most of the time she functioned but at a reduced level. She seldom exhibited happiness or contentment.
She grew up in the church, and was highly influenced by religious teachings both within the church and by para-religious radio programs that offered the same kind of insights – that depression was really just a dark night of the soul. Psychologists were not to be trusted – they were capable of destroying your faith, and would do so if given a chance.
When she finally found the strength within to seek help, she began with pastors with no counseling training. Of course, she didn’t get good results. She went next to a pastor who’d hung out a shingle as a ‘Christian counselor.” It was good way from home, but she made periodic trips at considerable expense to try to find relief.
The treatment still rested heavily on the spiritual and little on the science of brain disease. This counselor was in way over his head. To the rest of us in the family, he seemed only to make matters worse.
In the end, Mother steeled herself to the reality that she would never find help. She was not about to go beyond the Christian counselor. She lived out her life a tragic and embittered shadow of what she could and should have been.
Since that time the field of Christian counseling has made great strides in delineating the difference between spiritual myopathy and brain disease. It is discouraging that the purveyors of religion still offer up the notion that depression can be cured by getting right with God. I’ve known too many depressed Christians to put any stock in that outmoded thinking.
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