Depression: Tough Enough to Make a Grown Man Cry
By Dr. Don Miles
I know a man who we'll call Luis, a 48 year-old owner of a small, custom cabinet-making shop, has struggled most of his life with interpersonal relationships. He has two failed marriages and no close male friends.
He came to faith as a child when he "walked the aisle" in his grandfather's church and has all his life dreamed of being a pastor. However, his angry demeanor frequently makes his church wary of entrusting him with ministry, much less leadership positions.
Over the years he has changed churches several times and even stopped attending for extended periods of time. He complains about being raised in a loveless home with a sometimes brutal father. He distrusts women and, though lonely most of the time, manages to alienate the women who would be attracted to him. His angry, accusatory side emerges as soon as they become semi-serious about him.
He complains about how disappointed he is with his life and often expresses his desire that the Lord would "take me home now."
His business often is in financial trouble and he has trouble focusing on his work and his customers. Because of his lonely, often ineffective life, he is often angry at God, accusing Him of not keeping his promises. When I suggested that he might be struggling with a life-long clinical depression and that he might find our counseling times together to be more effective if he took an antidepressant, he angrily protested, "I'm not depressed. I just want to die. Besides, Christians don't take antidepressants."
For many years Luis drank heavily, finding companionship in bars. Then, at the age of 40, he decided he was in danger of alcoholism and quit drinking cold turkey. He is now going to an AA group but says, "I'm not an alcoholic. I just like the way those people think."
Trail of male depression easy to follow
Luis's story is not unusual for Christian men with long-standing depressions. Although there are various types of depression with differing details, the general pattern is frequently present: anger, alcohol use, reckless life activities, sleep disorders, and difficulty maintaining a marriage or friendships with either men or women, and a deep underlying feeling of failure and uselessness both to God and to mankind.
According to the most carefully done survey of American mental disorders, the National Co-morbidity Survey Replication, in any given one-year period, 9.7% of the adult population suffers from depressive illness, with women having a rate of 11.6% and men 7.7% The youngest adult group, ages 16-29, have the highest rate of any age group,12.9%. Over a lifetime, 24.9% of women and 17.5% of men will experience a significant episode of depression.
Women are far more likely than men to acknowledge depression, to seek treatment, and to attempt suicide, though men are four times more likely to succeed in killing themselves. Christians are no different than unbelievers in either the frequency of depression or their response to it, except that suicide is less likely because of a fear of jeopardizing their eternal life in heaven.
Confronting depression requires courage
How is a Christian man to think about his depression, down in his heart of hearts, as he outwardly denies having it? Can he overcome it by will power? By prayer? By counseling? By medication?
As I struggled with my own depression for about four years, from ages 18-21, I didn't even know that I was depressed. When I came to faith in Christ at age 21, most of the depression left me within weeks. I realized that I had been depressed, and that there is healing power in the Kingdom of God. But I couldn't grasp how to minister this discovery to other depressed people, either believers or unbelievers.
I went on through a masters and doctors degrees in psychology and counseling, but still, like all mental health professionals, was profoundly affected and hurt when a counselee took his or her life. When teaching a graduate-level class in theories of personality at Georgia State University, I began to seek a Scriptural understanding of human personality and its defects.
I saw that everywhere the Bible considers us to have three constantly interacting aspects—body, soul, and spirit. It occurred to me that when something is wrong with us in any one of these areas of life, the other two aspects are also affected.
As I considered the rapidly growing clinical understanding of depression, it struck me that a Christian must understand that ever since Eden all people have had defects in all three realms. We must consider the consequences of our genetics and body chemistry, our life experiences, and our spiritual condition in order to understand ourselves and to work out a response to our defectiveness. In other words, we need a broader understanding of sanctification than we Christians usually have.
Using spiritual warfare to fight depression
By allowing room in my thinking for medications to confront the biochemical aspect of depression, for counseling in regard to our life experiences, and for a primary focus on our spiritual lives, I began applying this broader approach with both individuals and with groups of men and women with depression.
I found, as now confirmed by research, that about 70% of seriously depressed people achieve some relief from the extremely painful despair by taking antidepressants—deriving just enough relief to make it easier to examine the extremely pessimistic mind-set of depression. For those non-responsive to antidepressants, there are certain life-style things that can be done to also influence the "body" aspect of depression. But I discovered that the key to significant and lasting victory over depression is spiritual warfare.
My experience taught me that people with depression typically find their minds ruminating on an almost identical theme in the middle of the night when they are plagued by the sleeplessness of depression.
It goes something like this: "Everything you try to do ends up in failure. You can't do anything right. No one likes you, no one wants to be with you, and you are inadequate at nearly everything you set your hand to do. When you try to pray it seems your prayers bounce off the ceiling, and when you try to read the Bible, your mind quickly wanders. Why don't you do yourself and your family a favor and just check out of this world?"
The apostle Paul's warning, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms," (Ephesians 6:12) is the key to understanding this battle of self identity.
Many men don't recognize the Satanic lie that tells them that unless they spend regular time in prayer and the Word that God doesn't want them. Someone out there named Satan is devoted to killing, either spiritually or physically, the people for whom Christ died. He is a liar and a thief, but he can be resisted.
Dr. Don Miles spent 20 years as a mental health professional and 20 years as a pastor. He now spends much of his time helping churches establish support group ministry for people coping with depression and other life-controlling issues.
To learn more about overcoming depression through spiritual warfare, visit his Web site at www.livingfree.org. He also teaches on depression at Ruth Graham and Friends conferences throughout the country (www.ruthgrahamandfriends.com).
