Preach Grace Until You Believe It: Depression and Mental Health.

I have a lot of thoughts about Robin Williams, and the response to Robin Williams’ death, and various ideas about depression and mental illness.

I was not planning on writing about any of these thoughts — and maybe not even sharing them — because I generally think there are enough people wiser or better informed than I, and I never want to be that person whose words cause harm, or add to the noise.

But tonight I had this clarity to share some thoughts, because there’s a chance others may need them, and while I cannot be responsible for all discourse and how it shapes people, I certainly am responsible if I have hope and do not share it. And I have great hope (but that is a post, and probably a book of many volumes, for another time).

While I have much I could say about Robin Williams, whose work I loved and whose attitude and ethos I greatly admired, I don’t know that I have enough of a grip on the situation and how I feel to write a cogent piece. (Me using the word “cogent” is the first sign.) I’ve been struggling with some physical infirmities that make even basic typing painful, as well as with overall pain that has made basic mental processes that were once easy for me very difficult. (I used to be able to think fast, as if I had constantly just had an espresso, and now, when the pain hits, I think slow, like I just woke up and will never see a cup of espresso ever again. It’s not only hard to function and write, but it’s also hard to realize I’m in one of those stages where everything is foggy, because I fully expect to be able to write, express myself, or do complex math at any time. However, I cannot.)

So, I haven't had the strength, energy, or will to write anything for months, but gosh, the Christians got me fired up tonight.

My brethren in Christ, as I’ll call them, have been my target before. I don’t seek this out or try to dismantle people or ideas that I know are under God’s sovereign control, but I’ve also seen great effects in my life when I pick through why some things in Christianity happen the way they do. These observations have helped me and some fellow Christians see the world in a way that moves us closer to living lives deep in the love of Jesus, and so I share them, even though I know I am picking on a behemoth of a body that is both flawed and good in many ways. As a final note, I’m not a super Christian, and I need all the help I can just to freaking look at Jesus, accept His love, and not live like a moron every day.

The first thing that caught my attention in the conversation that arose about depression and mental illness after Robin Williams’ death was the amount of people who urged others to get help if they were struggling. This is a usual thing — this outpouring of sympathy for all sufferers and offering aid the only way we know how. Attempts were made not only to help individuals but also to destigmatize an issue that is difficult to understand or talk about.

All the chatter looking to help, though, in some ways fueled the problems at the core of depression and mental illness — that people don’t know what’s going on and don’t know how to talk about it. This is not bad; trying is good. Learning is better.

A couple things that were said that stood out to me, and what I’ve learned: Telling people with mental illness or depression to "seek treatment" or "talk to someone — they want to listen" is maybe not the best terminology.

People who are struggling with depression or mental illness do not want to be told that what they are suffering from or dealing with is something that needs "treatment." They want to be addressed as a person. Calling it treatment pushes it into the arena where, if you admit you have dark thoughts, you feel that all you have ahead of you is a scary future that includes antidepressants, psych wards, and people not wanting to hire you for jobs. Conversely, telling someone to maybe “find someone who can help you” instead introduces them to a relationship where someone loves them or cares for them. That someone may be a doctor, and they may get treatment. But they’ll enter that world of getting help feeling like it’s something good they have done for themselves and the world, not that they’re an issue that must be neutralized or solved.

As for the other one — telling people to talk to someone, and assuring them that people will listen — is probably just naive. They’ve probably tried to talk to people. And they either couldn’t express what they were dealing with, the person they were talking to didn’t know how to help them (or, as often happens, just didn’t have the immense amount of time needed to listen to them, or was overwhelmed by an area outside their expertise, even if they could commiserate), or — as I often suspect — the people they tried to talk to haven’t listened to them or helped them, and that’s why the person is depressed in the first place. So many people who go through dark times do so because they feel alienated from people, and their attempts to close those gaps are met by people who implicitly or explicitly communicate that they need to clean up their crap before they can do life together. It creates a cycle where the worse a person feels, the less they can summon up the basic social skills needed to just be around other people, much less be a good friend. And let’s face it — when people are busy with life, they tend to weed out the people who carry too much “crazy,” who “just don’t make me feel better,” or who are a drain on their time or emotions. So it makes sense that depressed people aren’t talking to people — because people, normally and very understandably, don’t want to or don’t know how to talk to depressed people.

So, don’t assure people someone will listen to them. Instead, encourage the person to talk to someone with the goal of making a plan, even if it’s just a two-step plan, such as getting the person another trusted person they can talk to. That takes the pressure off the listener to relieve all the person’s need to be heard, and it takes the pressure off the person to not drive this listener away, too. It’s OK to admit that we all can’t help each other the way we’d like to, but we can help a struggling person find the next step even if we can’t help them right away ourselves.

That’s the docile part of this piece.

The real cranky showed up when I started reading not what well-meaning people were writing and posting about depression and mental health, but how Christians had decided to bless us with their knowledge.

I will pick on one I saw that I particularly did not like: A link to an article that explained that depression is not a disease — it’s a choice!

I did not read the article. I did not click through and see whether any of the points had merit. (My issue is not with the article’s content — it is about the attitude of people posting such an article.) I am simply going off the person who posted it and their comments in posting it, which were along the lines of “all this sadness and all this talk about mental illness, but people need to remember we can’t act like this is a disease because people just need to make better choices.”

There’s just so much crazy going on in my head right now that I’m not sure I can give a summary of the outrageousness of that kind of comment. There’s the obvious — the preachiness. There’s the ignorance — that [insert anything you want in here about how good intentions to raise your child are ultimately flawed, how the government is ruining this country by helping poor people, or how a story of God’s goodness in this world shouldn’t be supported because of someone’s lack of doctrinal integrity] because your personal beliefs on something don’t line up with this person’s ironclad view of a Word of God that’s actually very complex and nuance-oriented, they can say you’re just wrong and thinking of things incorrectly. There’s the arrogance — people are depressed, so let’s tell them how to think and see the world! There’s the shallowness — that there couldn’t be another way, another contributing factor, than just living right and perfectly all the time.

But I’m just going to shoot from the hip: Good job, Christians. Way to kick people when they’re down.

I've got a real beef with when tragedy happens, and Christians' first response is to critique however the secular world says to care for those people. This does not come across as helpful Christian advice. It comes across as attacking the people who are in the tragedy.

It does not matter if depression is a disease or not. Are people suffering? Are people shaken by what's just happened? Are they looking for deep answers?

I have yet to find any Christians who are experts in mental health, but I know plenty of Christians who should be experts in hope. Can we maybe use what we know about the Bible to strengthen people and lift them up in this time instead of crapping on how they're trying to make sense of it?

I mean, for God's sake, how on earth are people supposed to get to the truth unless we tell them? Sitting there and picking on whether depression is a disease or not is not only foolish and a waste of time, but it makes us look like snotty rear ends.

Hooray! We know something scientific! And meanwhile, the entire world is swirling around in sin and hopelessness, and we're critiquing one link in the mighty chains that ensnare us all.

You know, maybe depressed people are depressed because all the Christians are posting on Facebook and not taking time to listen to them or love them or learn what it's like to feel like there really, really is no hope. They may have gotten to that place because they were told once that their feelings were a choice, and if they kept feeling that way, they were wrong. Then, those feelings continued — for whatever reason, whether it be prolonged grief (normal for any person), physical imbalances (pretty real and documented for making normal "down" feelings get increasingly worse and create a snowball effect biologically), or even what we can call "sinful choices," just to throw you folks a bone — and they had nowhere to go, because all they knew was that they were wrong to feel that way. Probably wrong to just be, too.

Don't tell the Christians, but we're all wrong. It's called sin. And you know what? God knows about it. He even knows whether these people who say they're depressed or mentally ill are making bad choices or not. He knows whether they should "get their act together" or whether they're "allowed to feel that way." He knows whether they’re in sin and why they can’t just make the choice to get out of it. He knows that even if depression or mental illness is not a disease that slowly kills you, people in that situation do not feel they can make choices to get out of it (especially if they’ve already tried) — they feel controlled by it.

And, while I would love to sit here and debate the merits of all of this, disease vs. choice, my basic Christianity has taught me this: God's grace covers it all.

GOD'S GRACE COVERS IT ALL.

God's grace covers the people who can't keep their crap together and make the "choice" of not being depressed. God's grace covers the people for whom it may be a disease. While we're on it, God's grace covers all the people who are messed up and just can't stop sinning. His grace covers the people who are addicted to anything — yes, drugs, alcohol, women, men, but also work, approval, money, food, and any other form of self, self, self.

So why does it matter that we diagnose the sin or the root of the sin if God’s grace covers it all?

Shouldn't we just be helping people get to the doctor and know that they're not only allowed to be forgiven, but are forgiven?

(The only unpardonable sin is believing you can’t be forgiven, a key belief for many with mental health concerns.)

There’s a liberating way to tell these people that life — in any form, not just depression — is a choice, but it’s by driving them to the choice of grace, not picking a petty fight with one of the few caring communities that is trying to figure out how the heck to treat all these down people. Sure, depression is a choice. So is everyone’s pet sin, and following God. Knowing they’re choices you should make doesn’t make them any easier to make. And if people start treating depression like a disease — well, maybe they’ll fly through treatments until they get to the only one that works. (Terming it a disease does not mean releasing people from culpability. It does not have to be regarded as controlling, and certainly not terminal (a fear some people have, thinking that leads to suicide). Calling it a disease also opens people to taking steps to fight it, such as good ... choices.)

For those who still disagree, who say it is important that we clarify these things and make sure that people aren't thinking incorrectly about things that are sin and are choices that people should make, to make sure everyone acts right, I think it is very nice that you find grace so dangerous that we must make sure people come to the throne of grace appropriately. If we start letting anything go, after all, the kids will misbehave. People will sin. People may realize that all their crutches and attempts to be OK don't work, and they need something more than themselves.

What will we do if the humans — the good, Christian humans — aren't in control anymore and sin is just running rampant, with God's grace running rampant behind it?

That's a good question. I guess it depends on whether Christians can fulfill their real duty and help those people swallowed up by sin — help them toward grace. That's how they find it, you know. Sin helps the schoolteacher of the law point people to their need for a Savior, but it is our job to explain that there indeed is a Savior. If it’s a choice, someone has to be there to help those people make the choice (or even know of it), and you usually don’t get close to people by telling them that if they just made better decisions, they’d be fine.

We’ve all had times when we haven’t exactly been the love of Jesus to people and instead just told them to get it together — or, the more common, explained and prescribed acts that come after salvation and a changed heart to people who still aren’t in touch with the love of God or what that love really means in their lives. It’s hard to know what to say and when, but sensitivity — and listening instead of telling people to act — has strong echoes of Jesus.

Whether Robin Williams died of a disease he couldn’t control or made a poor choice is an issue I don’t think many Christians will disagree on. The Bible is clear about our freedom and the great choice all people must make. It’s also clear, however, that the way Christians lead people to knowledge of such freedom and choice is not through preying on suffering and correcting (unsaved) people’s thought processes. It’s by showing them the love of God and telling them of His saving grace — introducing them to a higher affection. What He does with their beliefs after that is up to Him.

If you're maybe feeling that you spent some of your time assessing people instead of pointing them to God with the love that God has shown you, don't worry: Grace covers it all. Even those whose attempts at dispensing truth could have come off more lovingly.

God's grace covers those sinners — and He probably covers the depressed, too.



Links worth considering:
"What the Church, Christians Need to Know About Suicide, Mental Health"
Russell Brand on Robin Williams
Anne Lamott on Robin Williams

Hang on.

Just hang on
Hang on, you know
Until the day is bright and it's all better

Hang on
Just hang on, you know
Until the place where you can remember to think, to feel

The place where it can be different
The place where hope is real

And colors aren't in danger of losing luster
And shapes aren't in danger of losing form
And songs aren't in danger of falling flat
And rhymes aren't in danger of dying young.

Hang on
Just hang on
Because Jesus is there
Waiting to make it all new
Wanting to make it all new
For those who ride hope to tomorrow
And just hang on
To Him.

Sandy Hook Elementary, and Salt.

Fridays are my day off, so I'm generally disconnected from the world. I usually walk from my home in Cambridge, Mass., across the Charles River to Boston, where I get a slice of amazing pizza from New York Pizza. Yes, the pizza there is better than in New York.

Then I go to Starbucks, where I bury myself in magazines and newspapers I haven't had time to read due to work. I am perfectly content to let myself get lost in old problems or synopses, knowing that the world can't have changed too much to make what I'm reading outdated.

So by the time I arrived home late Friday evening to check the news for the first time that day, I was coming up on 12-hour-old information about what happened in Newtown, Conn., at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I was quickly dismayed -- of course, by the news. But also by how I found out.

My social media feeds are sprinkled with Christians and non-Christians, blue-staters and red-staters, diehard liberals and old-school conservatives.

So what does it tell you that the first way I found out that 28 people had died is by one person going on about the Second Amendment and the other pressing legislation for gun control?

The best one was a former classmate from Liberty University, who posted a link to school killings in China, saying that happened without guns, so it wasn't time for restrictive gun laws. I also liked the many posts full of this original thought: "GUNS don't kill people -- people kill people!"

Right. Because on a day when people die, when children die, when the world has another gigantic reason to argue against the existence of God and the redemption of man, that is what we are worried about. That guns shouldn't be blamed. And that tragedy happens in repressive countries, too. (I'm sure God is pretty happy, too, that all those Chinese children died so my former classmate could have that great rebuttal to everyone who didn't like what he said about the Second Amendment.)

What does it tell you when the more sympathetic responses come from your non-Christian friends than your Christian ones? What does it say when the quickest solutions offered are about things like rules and laws, and not about the state of people's hearts? What does it mean when we are on Facebook instead of rushing to the site of the disaster, much like those parents rushed to find their children Friday morning, leaving their cars parked a quarter of a mile away, still running with the keys in the ignition, to push past policemen for glimmers of hope? Don't we, as Christians, have a greater, life-breathing hope, and a greater reason for urgency?

Christians, I am ashamed. And I ashamed again that you are most likely dismissing what I have written already. I understand that we see our freedoms being infringed upon, and our world turned away from what we believe is right, but get a grip. It's one thing to see the world deteriorate; it's another to use its deterioration to start whining about people who we think are wrong, and to suggest human solutions to fix outward effects of problems. We know a King Who says He wants to change hearts.

Since when were we called to rub it in people's faces when their sin leads them to heartbreak? Since when were we called to rub it in people's faces when other people's sin leads to their heartbreak?

Give me arguments about why we should be involved in politics and vote for this or that -- sure, I will listen. I'm not necessarily the biggest cheerleader when it comes to legislating morality, but I have voted for things that I think will give this country a better environment for good to win out. But it's one thing to carefully weigh issues and elect officials based on beliefs and creed. It's another to flood your Facebook feed with garbage about guns when hearts need healing.

If this entire country was overrun with gluttonous, arrogant, baby-killing socialist pigs, our response as Christians should still be the same as it is when we have a praying president. Love. Be kind. Share hope. Preach peace. Practice graciousness.

Be freaking salt in a world that needs it.

Do you think that it helps? Do you think that it helps when you tell people that guns don't kill people, people kill people? And not just the right wing -- left wing, you too. Do you think that it helps when we carp about mental health programs and bullies? Do you think that it helps when we act like legislation will change people's hearts?

Why are we not out there, binding up the broken-hearted? Why do we think any amount of law or crap is going to change people? Why are we content to just change outside forces and think that people won't feel pain anymore, or need our God in their lives?

People change by the power of Jesus Christ, and we as Christians have been called to share that very same Jesus Christ with a world that has no clue Who He is and what He really means. It's bad enough that we don't do this. But it's even worse that we lead people to think that Christians are obsessed with picking political fights when 20 kids get blown away at close range by semiautomatic weapons like the ones soldiers use in dusty wars in the Middle East. It doesn't matter if you're right -- kids are dead, and insensitivity will remain in people's minds for a long time.

It's one thing when Mike Huckabee gets up there and says what Christian leaders tend to say at times like this: That this happened because of a deterioration of values in life and the classroom. Personally, I may agree with him on a large scale -- we need God in this nation. But you don't say that, and you especially don't say it at a time like this, because you're not God, and you don't know that.

Being right is not the goal of Christianity. Reconciling mankind to God is, and that usually means providing help after people have messed up, not telling them they've messed up from a soapbox miles away.

We can tie everything bad back to politics. We can tie everything bad back to Christians not getting their way. We can tie everything bad back to things not happening the way we think they should. And you know what? Stuff still happens. People still get hurt. People sin and maim and die. And even if we're right -- even if we have the "I told you so" -- they're still lost unless we help them. (But please, keep track of the "I told you so" count, like any loving parents would when their kid burns his hand on the hot stove yet again. That is love.)

I took a moment from being ticked off Friday and talked to God, asking Jesus why all this had to happen, and what I could possibly do from my little, removed perch so far away. And all I could think of was when Lazarus died, and when Jesus showed up. He should have been there sooner. He could have healed him. He was about to raise him anyway.

And Jesus wept.

He just cried. He groaned in the spirit. He did that deep, guttural, heart-wrenching noise that lets someone know that you care, and that this should not have been.

He didn't chide them for not being good people. He didn't call them sinners. He didn't strategize about ways to change things. And He certainly didn't pin the deterioration of this world on a lack of gun control, mental health problems, or student supervision.

He just cried, His message to the world being that sin happens, but that He's there, and He cares.

So I cried, and then I slept on the seeds of this post for two nights and decided it was worth a shout.

I read stories of the Middle East every day, and I see that dozens of people get killed each day in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And I wonder what it must be like to live in those places, and to hear that a bomb has just killed 42 people. What do you do? It's normal, right? It happens, and you just have to move on.

I hope that random death never becomes commonplace for us here in America, where it's getting closer to that as office killings, school shootings, and other tragic events happen more and more, and at levels that were shocking just years ago. We may be getting into that type of situation.

If we are, may it shine a light on Jesus Christ, and may it highlight the followers of Him who weep when it is time to weep. May messages of hope be as synonymous with violence as the questions of why and attempts to solve the problems have been. (And remember, these "solutions" and feeble fixes are coming from people who have nothing else to trust in. It makes sense to try all they may.)

I find it odd that so many people out there think a bunch of liberals or conservatives could thwart God's plans -- that a gun law here or lax control there could ruin life in a way that 28 people dying could not. But that is where we seem to spend a lot of energy these days.

Being salt in this world is a radical idea, and difficult. I struggle to do it.

But consider this a challenge you can hold me to at any time, even if you won't pick up the call.