Depression and movement

Here's a link to an interesting study of depression, using cell phone connections with the permission of study volunteers.

One take-away is that good advice to those suffering from the blues is "Take a walk."

Get up and get moving. Depressive states can function in a downward spiral. You want to crawl into a hole and be away from people, which makes the depression worse, which in turn makes you dig deeper into the hole, making the depression even worse.

Another take-away for me, which we talked about in a Bible study class this past Tuesday, is break your patterns. Someone has said that "a rut is a grave with the ends kicked out." Do something you don't usually do:

• Call up a friend to have lunch together.
• Drive to work or home by a different route.
• Read news from a section of your preferred news source that you don't usually read. For example, if you usually devour sports news but ignore business news, flip things.
• Learn something new.
• Pray for others.
• Serve others in Christ's name.
• Some mornings, I decide to shave my face in a different order.

But, above all, cultivate a relationship with the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Even when you feel low, the God we know in Jesus has promised to be with us always (Matthew 28:20). God also makes all things new (Revelation 21:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17).

Most moods--from the blues to profound happiness--come and go. Persistent depression may be a clinical matter requiring a person to seek out medical help.

But the blues don't need to paralyze us. Moving toward--reaching out to--God, the world, and others, and not away from them, is a good way to keep the blues at bay and to lead a productive, God-honoring life in spite of the blues. (Winston Churchill famously called his own depression, "the black dog.")

By the way, if you have a friend suffering from the blues, reaching out to them is also a great way to help mitigate their sadness and give them hope.

Depression...Male AND Female

This interesting article gives the symptomatic clues of depression in males. My guess is that not all of this is exclusive to males.

A few nights ago during studio coverage of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, Charles Barkley memorably said (I'm paraphrasing), "Anyone who has a perfect bracket right now is a lying dog."

Likewise, anyone who says they've never endured what Winston Churchill called "the black dog," depression in any of its forms, is a lying dog in denying their black dogs.

There are differences, of course, between being sad or feeling blue, on the one hand, and being depressed, on the other. The latter is more severe and often, physiologically rooted. Or at least, physiologically abetted.

It's not a black mark on one's character to suffer from the black dog. Nor is it a sign of weakness. Despair is a sin chosen by the self-absorbed; it willfully refuses happiness or hope. But depression in its varied forms, is usually something that happens to us. It comes to us unbidden, like chicken pox or the flu or cancer.

Treatments depend on the severity and longevity of depressive feelings.

But it seems to me that two things are essential in dealing with all the manifestations of depression.

First, you have to acknowledge that you're sad. Don't buy your own schtick, designed, often for very good reason, to keep other people out of your "stuff." At least acknowledge to yourself that you're depressed. To survive from day to day, you may have to wear masks of affability and good humor. But it's essential that at least, to ourselves and, more importantly, to God, we admit that behind the mask is someone wrestling with sadness.

Second, lean on God. Read His Word. Read devotional material from reliable Christian authors. And, by all means, pray. God is the life-giver. He can fill us with new life when even our taste for life is gone.

If you suspect you or people who care about you suspect that you're clinically depressed, then you absolutely should see your GP as a first step toward healing.

But, these first two steps--honest acknowledgment and prayer--will often be what we need to move on with our lives.

They won't necessarily take away our melancholy, because melancholy often is rooted in experiences--the loss of a love, a defeat to our dreams, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the end of a friendship. There are some losses from which we never recover. The hurt is too deep. The loss is too overwhelming. And to "get over" the losses of other people from our lives fully, would be deeply disrespectful of them and of the love we shared.

But we have responsibilities to God, to our families, to those to whom we have made promises, to those for whom we care and who care for us, and to the futures in which God may have our participation planned, to forge ahead, to plod on. (You never know what God has up His gracious sleeve, by the way.)

Honesty with God and with ourselves. Reliance on and trust in the God made plain to us in Christ. This is how we go on. This is how we start to endure even when the black dog plagues us.

"10 Things to Say to a Loved One Who Struggles with Depression"

Here.

A few additional thoughts from my experiences as a pastor...

1. Spending time as an active listener, if the depressed loved one wants to talk, is good and can be healing. Just being heard without judgment is helpful. An active listener is an engaged listener who doesn't give advice or make directive comments unless asked for them.

2. If the depressed loved one is willing to pray with you, it can be a very good thing. Don't use your prayer petitions as a means of convincing the loved one of your preferred course for them, but simply reflect what they have shared with you, asking God for help, comfort, and guidance.

Of course, if the loved one doesn't wish to pray with you, you need to respect that desire. But you can pray for them in private and I think that there's probably nothing more important that you can do for them.

Related: How to Help a Grieving Friend

Robin Williams and the Disease of Depression

Nearly a decade ago now, an elementary school principal in the community where I then lived left a successful faculty meeting, drove up I-71 north of Cincinnati, pulled her vehicle to the side of the road where that stretch of Interstate runs high over a river valley, and flung herself off the bridge to her death. An entire community was shocked, not the least because the meeting which she'd led just before her suicide had found her as her usual bright and funny self.

More than that though, this was a woman who, as an educator, had been passionately committed to doing what was best for the students of her school. She was an encouraging presence in the lives of those kids. She never would have willfully or knowingly done anything to mar their psyches, such as delivering to them the memory of her suicide.

Yet this beloved educator who knew the name of all the students in her building took her own life, an act that deeply risked harming the psyches of her students. But no one who knew her blamed her. It would have been barbaric to do so. People understood, as my thirty years in ministry have confirmed, that suicide is rarely the rational act of a willful, selfish human being. For every suicide bomber or kamikaze pilot who takes their own lives in what are obviously self-centered, hateful acts, there are thousands upon thousands of tenderhearted, loving, caring people who take their own lives. And they don't do so out of selfish rationality or willfulness.

They do it because of depression.

Depression is a disease that can be chronic and low-level. But it also can rage in the lives and psyches of its victims like Stage IV cancer and be every bit as destructive, taking the lives of those who are afflicted by it.

As a pastor, I have observed how the physical disease of depression can undermine the beliefs and values of its victims, leaving them susceptible to self-loathing and self-destruction which is from hell itself. Nobody rejoices over suicide more than Satan.

The death of Robin Williams gives rise to these thoughts, of course. I don't know where Williams was spiritually. But I do know that someone who so cared about people would never have willfully or knowingly committed an act with the potential for plunging so many who relied on him for laughter and uplifting entertainment, not to mention his family and friends, into depression and sadness themselves.

It was depression that killed Robin Williams. And it was Satan, using that depression as a contact gel to Williams' psyche, who overrode the comic actor's better judgment.

When considering his death, it's best of course not to elevate him beyond what he was in life, an imperfect man of massive talent and good will for others who struggled with addictions as well as with depression.

And it is even more important that we not elevate ourselves at Williams' expense by believing lies, such as, that his death was the result of some deficiency in his character. Or that it was the act of a selfish, self-absorbed willfulness. Or that it stemmed from a posited malaise felt by those of his political beliefs, as it least one media commentator has claimed. Such explanations may feed our egos, but they're precisely the kinds of lies that the devil wants us to believe in order to put us off his deadly scent.

Williams was felled by the disease of depression. Period.

Fortunately, we do have means of dealing with depression. There are medications for that depression which is physiologically based or that has become rooted in a person's physiology. There is quality counseling available. There are suicide hotlines.

But the first line of defense is the depressed person's family and friends. It's true that the depressed often become adept at hiding their depression--as was the case with that principal and apparently, with Robin Williams. But when deep depression in those we love becomes known to us, we can say something. We can do something: Talk with the depressed friend, recommend that they see their doctor. Above all, we can pray for them.

These are all the same things we would do for someone we suspect of suffering from other physical maladies--from pneumonia to cancer.

Depression should be thought of in the same way.

3 questions to ask, 5 ways to respond...

when you're depressed.

My experience and observation is that if you do the first three responses regularly, the latter two may not be necessary.

A great passage from the linked article:

Here's a bit of good news: People recover from depression. Treatments are effective and widely available. A Christian colleague of mine—a dear soul who struggled with depression—used to say, "As Christians, we have no right to give up hope." There may be a time to take Prozac, and a time to give it up, but there is never a time to give up hope.