Is It Really Depression?

When our friends, family or spouse seem really “down” or apathetic for a while, it isn’t long until we start wondering about the “D word.” Maybe it’s a whispered suggestion: “Do you think they might be depressed?” This might seem completely normal in a mental health-savvy culture. Perhaps wondering if the “D word” fits is even the smart way to care for a person in that culture of medicalized biology and solutions. After all, if there is something wrong with your brain or body, we have a researched cure for that. But what if there was a more robust, holistic, and anthropologically satisfying way to understand ourselves when we get “low” or “hopeless”?

I want to use introduce you to some of Soren Kierkegaard’s thoughts from The Sickness unto Death. Essentially, Kierkegaard suggests that each of us experiences a drive toward completeness, or, said differently, to become a unique human identity, a self, that exposes our God-created design. Our lives are situated in external conditions that each impede or enhance our realization of being a self in God’s world, such as time, place, and physical limitations. Critically though, our attitudes and choices are internal conditions that can jeopardize the process of self and lead to the sickness of despair. But what is despair? It is the painful position of not becoming what we were designed to be because we refuse to accept and embrace what we truly are, and this is often felt as agony, loss, and frustration.

Let me explain that a little further. As we live in our fallen moment, we struggle with becoming what we were designed to be and live what God intended as viable trajectories for the self. Instead, we are disposed to characters marked by jealously, lust, pride, or idolatry. We don’t like that we are limited, cannot achieve something, cannot have what we long for, cannot escape the rigors of time, cannot hold responsibility for hard choices. In short, our becoming self is jeopardized by our inability and unwillingness to rightly relate to our own anthropological reality as it rests in God’s world.

Kierkegaard remarks that we need to resolve three polarities that exist in our lives. First, that we are finite, but connected to the infinite through mind and relationship. Meaning that I have limited time, energy, and ability, but I am connected to, and dream of uniting with the divine, who can achieve all things. Second, we are temporal, but eternal through memory, longing, imagination, and relatedness. I cannot escape my bounded moment and the reality that I cannot live any moment but now, yet I live aware of what is before and after and can order my steps accordingly. Third, that the necessities of life’s provisions and limitations are set against total freedom of choice and action. Our lives are constrained by what we have learned, experienced, gained, and yet we can always choose to act in a manner that accepts our reality or seeks a new one. Kierkegaard suggests a self is a synthesis between each of these polarities, and a synthesis of all of them in God’s redemptive history.  

So, what if we started thinking of our brothers and sisters who are “depressed” as wrestling to reconcile who they really are in this world? Could we love them better by assisting them in this quest rather than medicating their biology (although I certainly recognize the space for medicine!). I can help my sister who now neglects her choices in this world because she has been under the harsh limitations of others for so long. She has lost her self by losing the balance of necessities and freedom. I can help my brother who tries to achieve more than is humanly possible and rails against his limited life. He has lost his self by buying into a distinctly American view of success, or an attempt to win favor that he already has in God. Much of our depression might actually be the despair of trying to be self in a manner that God’s world is not set up to support. For example, being a self trying to win approval, stay young forever, avoid discomfort, be praised, or something else entirely. Said another way, perhaps we leave our despair (and depression) behind when we fully accept and embrace who, how, where, and what we are in God’s world.