Dealing With Depression (Part 2)

Depression is hard to wrap your mind around if you haven’t experienced it.

Some people may imply that they know what it’s like to be depressed simply because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or lost a loved one.  While these situations can lead to depression, they don’t create depression by default.  In most cases these experiences carry with them strong emotional feelings.  Depression, on the other hand, is often flat, hollow, and insufferable  literally sapping a person of emotion, hope and reason.

-You don’t feel like yourself.  

-You don’t even feel human.  

-You’re hopeless and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and desperate and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough.  

-You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be better soon,” but you know you won’t.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to take their life doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square, and certainly not because death seems suddenly appealing.  The person in whom depression's invisible  agony reaches an unendurable level will take their own life often in the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows.  Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing at the same window just checking out the view; the fear of falling remains a constant.  The variable here is the other terror, which is the fire’s flames. When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.  It’s not desiring the fall, but the terror of the flames.  And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump.  Not really.  You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The flames of fear produces an atmosphere for depression to gestate and often our fears are many and uncontrollable; but heed the Word of the Lord:

2 Timothy 1:7  “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”