I have been talking with a long-term friend of mine in recent weeks. He’s a believer, who has had a harder-than-average road to walk. That, combined with some bad Christian teaching and an inherent susceptibility, has finally created a perfect storm of mental ill health.
The thing that surprised me when talking to him recently is that as he begins the process of recovering from a depressive/anxiety breakdown, he has had to avoid his Christian friends and family. The reason? They care. And in their care, they inevitably call on him to trust God, to look to God, to place himself in God’s hands or the like. They can’t avoid exhorting him to stir up his faith, however “softly, softly” they venture it.
The problem? His world is little more than darkness without any reasonable possibility of improvement. He is overwhelmed with burdens that seem silly to anyone not him, but to him, they are the fixed compass of his universe. He is barely standing up under the weight of just being himself.
But add an exhortation to do something to that load—especially one like “trust God”—and you have far more than a single straw to break the camel’s back. You have essentially made brick from that straw and hurled it onto the load. You have given him one more thing—and it’s a critical thing at that—to whip himself with as he judges himself to not be trusting God.
Don’t
When someone is really downcast, exhortations are a waste of time. There’s nothing in the tank, there’s no willpower to exert, there’s no courage to screw up so that they can just ‘get over it’. What looks to you like defeatism is, in fact, simply weakness. All that the person has is currently being used just to keep breathing.
Exhortations make the problem worse. The person can’t do it, but already think they should. So your exhortation adds to the litany of failures that is usually part of the ‘self-talk’ of someone who is overcome by anxiety or depression.
Exhortations hide the solution. The very act of trying to get them to do what is good for them (i.e. strengthen their faith) obscures the very thing that could strengthen their faith. In a case like this (and this isn’t true for all situations), exhortations do nothing more than throw people back on themselves and their own resources. Usually that’s not fatal; a person looks in, realizes they can stir up their faith and then looks out to God’s gracious glory shining in the face of his Son. It is a semi-Pelagian (or Arminian) way of going about things, but God’s grace is sufficient to cover it. But when a person is weak, there are no resources there to call on. So they never turn outward to God; they get stuck at the ‘look for faith inside myself to stir up’ part.
Up to a point, people can simply shake themselves out of a funk or mood just by force of will. Or, if it’s got a stronger grip on them than that, they can soldier on within it by force of will—grit their teeth and bear it. But there comes a point where willpower—even faith-inspired willpower—can’t move the mountain. Despite what Disney wants you to believe, you can’t always do it if you just believe you can. Sometimes Mohammed really does have to go to the mountain.
That’s the ‘don’t’ part. The ‘do’ part is more encouraging, and comes in two parts.
Do: carry others’ burdens
Firstly, the church is made up of ‘strong’ people and ‘weak’ people—not in faith, maturity, desire to serve or anything of that nature. Some people have ‘got it together’ at this point in time, and others are ‘doing it tough’. Some people are coping with all their responsibilities, and still have room left over to take on more: they volunteer for things, they lead Bible studies, they look for people to help, they lead churches and the like. They are strong.
Others are weak. Their burdens are more or less equal to their capacity . There’s nothing ‘left over’ to serve others with. Many of them even have burdens a bit greater than they can carry. They are a net ‘hole’ to the church’s ministry, needing ministry done to them, but not being able to contribute anything back.
So here’s the thing: the weak aren’t a problem—a drag on all the strong who could get some real ministry done if they didn’t have needy people gumming up the works. The strong exist for the weak. They do not exist for themselves, nor do they exist just to hook up with and hang out with all the other strong potential leaders out there. We are to carry one another’s burdens. It is not all we are to do, but it definitely is something we are to do. The strong are called to do more than just sit with the sufferers, but sitting with them is part of the job description. That means that the strong take on the burdens of the weak, not the burdens of other strong people who can take up their burdens in return. The wealthy throw parties for the destitute, not for other well-heeled neighbours who can host slumber parties for their kids in return. The strong serve the weak; the weak are, in that sense, worthy of greater honour than the strong. That’s a feature of the body of Christ; it’s not a bug.
So if you’re strong and you’re faced with someone weak, your job is to bend down, get down where they are, and lift some of the burden and carry it for a bit. It isn’t to say, “Cheer up mate! Things aren’t as bad as you think. Be strong and trust God.” That is the perennially instinctive thing to say, and it is so because it is cheap.
It is the same kind of love that says “Be warm and well fed, and, by the way, God loves you” when faced with a homeless person. It costs nothing, but just tries to fix the problem quickly in order to remove its challenge to love that person in their concrete situation. It is like the person who intervenes in a supermarket to give the upset child that lolly they’ve just been denied. That person doesn’t care about the child’s welfare; they just want to stop feeling bad because the kid’s upset. The person who really loves the child did something costly and told them ‘no’ when an easier path was clearly open. In biblical terms, such cheap ‘love’ is ‘hate’ that has simply learned to ape its betters. It is faith that is dead, but dead before rigor mortis sets in.
Carrying the burden will look different for different people, but usually it means letting the weak person talk frankly about their life at the moment—listening rather than offering solutions, allowing them to suck some of your emotional energy away, and giving them some of your excess, even if it puts you in the red for a bit.
Do: be a priest to those in need
The other part is far more important, and so much bigger. It is taking hold of the priesthood of all believers and being a priest to that person in their need. Often when we explain the priesthood of all believers, it is discussed in purely negative and individualistic terms. We say that it means that we have no need of someone standing between us and God. Christ is the one true mediator, and each of us can be our own priest and approach God’s throne and deal with him directly. This is all true and all foundational.
But wait, there’s more, and these steak knives are worth having. The priesthood of all believers means that I am your priest and that you are mine at the same time. I can be an instrument of the grace of God to you, and you can be one for me. I can pray for you and you can pray for me.
There are times when I can stand before God on your behalf when your faith fails you and you need someone to do for you what you cannot do for yourself, but what you so desperately need to have done. Like the four friends of the paralytic, we can carry the crippled, rip open the roof and present our friend right in the presence of the throne of grace (Mark 2:1-12). And like in that account, it might not always be entirely clear whose faith was the instrument for the grace of God to operate.
What does such faith operating on behalf of someone else look like? It is faith that is active, doing what that person would do if they could do it, and doing it in such a way that it overflows and feeds them.
So rather than encouraging them to pray, you pray for them, and as best as possible, try and express their feelings and perspective to God, and hand the problem to God. Do that with them present. Acknowledge and give dignity to their downcast experience by articulating it in prayer. By doing that, you implicitly show that it is not the final word.
So rather than calling on them to trust God, give them a reason to trust God. Just talk about how great and good God is; how his mercies are ever renewed; how we don’t have to muster up faith to get access to his grace; how he holds us up even as we trip and fall; how the Father who gave up his eternally loved Son for us when he and us were at each other’s throats is a Father who is really there for us now that we are his children. Just talk about God to them—as though that is life itself. And don’t finish by saying, “So buck up and trust him, okay?”; finish by saying, “He’s on your side; he’s going to carry you through this, however bad it gets”. Sometimes it’s okay to just declare the promises of God and not ask for any response in the short-term. Re-read Ephesians 1 if you find that hard to imagine—and look for every place where Paul explicitly calls on his readers to respond to the great sustained declaration of the sheer blessedness of God that flows from his pen. If it’s good enough for Paul, we can do it too.
We cannot genuinely promise people that things are going to get better; God offers no such guarantees. We can’t even tell them that it’s not as bad as they think it is; they might see it better than we can. God will not always protect us from everything that harms or even kills us; nor will he always strengthen us so that we bound through life from one victory to the next, overcoming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with even more outrageous success. Sometimes the only victory he offers us is that given to Job—that no matter how low we are brought, we are given the grace to not absolutely and utterly deny our Lord, but in weakness, trust him though he slay us.
Those of us ‘strong’ who are given the great task of strengthening hands that grow faint cannot offer people what God does not underwrite. He will not always stand between them and harm or death. But he will be there for them in it, and will carry them through it. Their life may seem like death, but even death has been forced to bow the knee to the Prince of Life who will carry his own brothers and sisters through the dark gate that he trod, who will hold them as his and their Father completes the great job of putting everything under Christ’s feet, and who will then raise them up and present them to that same Father who loved them in the eternal ages before they ever existed.
Sometimes people need to be told, “Trust God!”; sometimes people need to hear “God can be trusted!” The downcast are in the latter camp. Serve them by sensitively exalting the God of life in the face of death.
A few years ago the daughter of a family at our church was diagnosed with leukemia (praise – she has now recovered).
When diagnosed, her parents asked our minister to remind them of God’s promises.
Great article Mark – platitudes are unhelpful and counterproductive in these situations.
I’m so glad this post went up today; I’ve been thinking about it every since I worked on it (which was only yesterday, but still …) It’s exactly what I have wanted to say to so many Christians for a very long time but lacked the articulation (and probably the grace) to do so. You have done it very well, Mark!
I suppose a related question (which is also linked to your self-knowledge for godliness and ministry series) is how to assess your own situation rightly. How do you know if you’re someone who is carrying a heavy burden (or a burden a bit greater than you can carry), or if you’re someone who really does just needs a kick in the pants? If you’re someone like your friend who is not in the right sort of mental state to make that sort of assessment, you start to rely on others’ perceptions. The downside is that they may not be right. Or you may receive conflicting reports: one person may tell you, “You really need to go easier on yourself! You’re carrying a lot at the moment” while another says to you, “Others have it worse! Look at John and Jane Christian: they’re always willing to serve, they pitch in and they’re keen to do more. Try to be like them!” You start wondering who to believe.
A further downside is if others fail to see the true nature of the situation, you feel like you need to keep on justifying to them why you think your circumstances are the way they are. Worse, you start to doubt your own perceptions of the situation (even if your perceptions are accurate). Then it becomes so much easier just to withdraw and not talk to anyone …
I guess this is a hard question to answer because it’s so subjective. Nevertheless, I’m still putting it out there!
Wow! Very helpful. I especially liked the paragraphs on the weak being part of our calling, not a hindrance to it and on how to bear their burdens.
Maybe there’s a distinction you can draw, but some of the downcast I have known seem to exacerbate their state with excessive self-focus, resulting in a downward spiral of apathy, lethargy, and withdrawal. Some have suggested that part of the healing is found in both service and distraction.
An approx.-to-life example (not my wife and I!): A woman with 3 young children miscarries. 3 mos. later, she is still emotionally/ psychologically “paralyzed”. She is basically shut off to life. Her husband, who works full time, is trying but failing to keep up with the housework, etc. and their oldest (9 yrs.?) is carrying the care of his siblings. She distrusts mainstream medicine. Granted, coping with the death of a family member IS serious and a checkup w/an MD is probably a good beginning, is their any legitimacy to trying to coax her into embracing more responsibilities – for her own health? More generally, if a person’s depression is being fed by harmful habits (i.e. vegging to non-stop T.V.), is there a place for coaching them out of those habits? How do we balance that with the huge importance of simply listening and supporting the weak?
Hi Mark,
This is so important – thank-you!
When I had these experiences myself in my late-teens / early 20’s, Christian help came from those who sat and held my hand – literally – and looked after things that I couldn’t do for the moment, including see the love of God for me. Needless to say, being told I was a sinner for lacking joy, or that I had an evil spirit of depression, didn’t really help …
Pastorally, I’ve recently being trying to approach those with depression in a similar fashion: letting our corporate nature be a reality in the person’s life: praying for them, being their conscience to tell them of who God is when they can’t see it, avoiding any hint of the imperative in it – but telling the stories of God’s triumphant grace.
The wall that I encounter, though, is one that I’m sure I’ve been a part of making: our excessive Christian individualism, and our obession with personal giftedness (even if we phrase it selflessly as ministry potential). I’ve found that because we imbibe secular individualism and ‘my job is my status’ mentality, when it comes to telling someone that it’s okay to take a break from Sunday school, or okay for your family and friends to pray for you for now, they simply don’t believe me.
I can’t help but think of Carson’s advice in his book on suffering and evil: that we need to work hard to prepare people theologically beforehand so that when hard times come, we have the right ways of thinking already in place.
Thanks again Mark,
Scott.
ps – Ephesians is so important with this, isn’t it? From distant cloudy memory, there is only one imperative in Eph 1-3 (2:11, to remember), but in Eph 1-2, Christ is referred to by name or pronoun 40+ times.
Amen and Amen to this, Mark. I could not agree more. SO often, those Christian platitudes are a way of refusing to acknowledge the grief and darkness of this life and of someone else’s experience, because it is too uncomfortable/challenging. SO quickly, our own anxieties make us move from encouraging people to blaming them – if someone remains miserable for a long time, we start to think they must lack faith (though we reject prosperity doctrine!). To carry another person’s burdens is not to bring a casserole one week, send a card the next and then wonder why that person hasn’t cheered up. It is to stick with people for the long haul.
I’ll echo the thanks – well said, and always worth saying.
And I’ll throw in the third ‘do’ that’s implicit in the article: do be a church that can speak the truth to each other. It should never be incumbent on the downtrodden to muster up the energy they don’t have to call for help. If the psalms tell us anything, it’s that this kind of suffering is an inevitable feature of life in a broken world; we don’t outgrow it as the myth of progress would have it.
And so, we must always be on the lookout to spot those who are weak, or on their way there – not to preempt it, but to be serving before they even realise their need.
Great comments guys, I think they’ve all filled out the original post in solid ways. I’ll take a comment or three to interact with them in different ways in the hope that might extend the conversation further down the directions you’ve flagged for us.
Jo and Hamish,
I wholeheartedly agree. I almost never use the word ‘platitude,’ but I agree with you that it is a big part of the problem. I don’t use it because it’s one of those Yes Minister irregular verbs:
No-one ever admits to speaking in platitudes – it’s like clubbing cute baby seals to death; the problem is Somewhere Else (usually the Artic).
And when someone of Barth’s calibre (not an endorsement of his theology overall, but a recognition of his ability) can say that the most profound truth is “Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so” then a platitude seems to be less to do with what is said, and more about how it is offered – whether it is ‘cheap grace’ or, as Os Guinness described Francis Schaeffer, ‘bloody truth.’ So I find I’m not even all that able to explain concretely what ‘platitudes’ look like – although arguably that may be just an occupational hazard that comes with hanging out in academia for *cough cough* number of years.
But I firmly agree, otherwise profound truths offered cheaply generally aren’t that edifying to people who need a lifeline.
Anthony and Scott,
I definitely agree that the real resource we have here is a well functioning Christian community (i.e. the local church) – and that is probably the next place to go to from where the original post leaves us. Moving the game from ‘me’ or even ‘you and me’ to ‘us’ opens up a lot of possibilities beyond pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, or trying to be the sole minister to someone who is downcast. By and large, people in genuine relationships (they don’t have to be amazing, just something with some substance) are less likely to experience the worst kinds of depression. As you have observed, that is going to involve both people being on the look out to offer words of grace and a sharing of the load without being asked (Anthony) and a decent view of life in the last days being taught and owned before problems arise (Scott).
I particularly liked this comment by Scott:
because it reinforces something of which I’m becoming increasingly convinced. Bad ideas invariably do the greatest harm to those most in need of help, and most vulnerable to circumstances. The true cruelty of trying to find one’s identity and worth in achievement can’t be seen until one is no longer able to play the game. That’s when we find that the way it cuts us of from one another – always ‘ministering’ but never being ministered to – really is bad for us.
I think all four comments helped ground the post concretely really well, so thanks for being prepared to comment publicly.
Zeke,
I’m glad you found the tome valuable, Zeke. I love your questions, because I think you’ve flagged one of the areas where the post could do with some supplementing. I think you’ve put your finger on the other side of the coin, that bearing someone’s burden is not an end in itself but meant to be a stage in the path to health:
I would make a distinction, but not quite at the point you make it. I’m no expert – merely someone who has been downcast, and has hung out with people who have been, and who has tried to keep their eyes and Bible open about the phenomena. – but I think I’d say that an ‘excessive self-focus, resulting in a downward spiral of apathy, lethargy, and withdrawal’ is one of the signs that someone is really, really downcast and not just in a funk.
However, someone can have those qualities without being really downcast and at that point they need an intervention – either a good kick in the pants, integration into a group of friends/family who are focused outward on serving others and positive in outlook and won’t take no for answer to that person being involved in what they‘re doing, or whatever other hard or soft technique is appropriate. Those traits will tend to push someone towards being depressed and isolated.
But someone who is depressed and isolated (even if only subjectively – feeling as though no one understands them) will have these traits, even if they aren’t the major cause. It’s a feedback loop, not a case of a single cause leading to a single effect, so challenging the ‘excessive self-focus, resulting in a downward spiral of apathy, lethargy, and withdrawal’ isn’t always the way forward – hence my post. Sometimes we challenge the behaviour, sometimes we bypass it and offer grace. Sometimes the behaviour is the problem, sometimes it’s primarily a symptom. Sometimes the dog wags the tail, and sometimes the tail wags the dog. Wisdom comes in working out which is right in a specific situation.
I think that’s where you take us in your second sentence:
Being ‘weak’ in the way I defined it in the post is not something we should be content with. We should all strive to be ‘strong’. To be an adult is to be someone who carries their load and is able to step up as needed. To be a Christian adult is to be someone who sees that as their calling and to want to do it. Being ‘weak’ is a result of a fallen world, it’s not something to aim for.
That means that the person who gets to the point where they basically collapse under the weight of their ‘load’ needs to be helped back up on their feet, have their hands strengthened and helped to start carrying loads again. That is actually what it looks like to be a healthy adult human being and that is good for them. So sitting with them, listening to them, speaking grace to them, are not ends in themselves. That path locks them into a perpetual position of being ‘weak’ and locks us into being their perpetual enabler – a fate we’ll embrace or resent depending on how co-dependent we are. Our care has as its goal their eventual returning to strength, not simply supporting them in their downcast stage.
So we need to be inviting and encouraging downcast people to exercise their faith – the very thing I railed against at the start of the post. The wisdom thing is working out what kind of ‘faith exercises’ to set before someone. Get them to say ‘amen’ after you pray? Get them to repeat each line of the prayer after you pray it? Get them to pray while we’re there? Set the target too low and it can communicate the kind of lack of confidence in their ‘strength’ that runs the risk of locking them into making being weak part of their self-identity. Set it too high and you can have the kind of problems I flag in the post.
My analogy is with someone who is seriously ill or badly injured. There is a period of time when they have to remain in bed, possibly on life support. Getting them up and around during that time is A Bad Thing. After a while they need to start to moving as part of the recovery process – need to start claiming the life of an adult again, one step at a time (sitting up to eat normal food, going to the toilet, going to the toilet by themselves, going for short walks etc). Eventually they need to move on with life and not see themselves as sick or injured anymore.
I’ll cut here, and conclude in the next comment.
Continuing…
That recovery time will vary from person to person – and this was Jo’s great point.
We have to watch out for malingering. The longer someone is ill or injured the more likely they are to start to hold onto that condition – to define themselves in terms of it. That’s true for mental issues as much as physical ones. But it’s still the case that some problems take a long, long, oh so very long time to recover from. So we need to be aware of the danger for the person, but not have artificial ideas of length of time to recover.
Whatever the length, usually we make a full recovery if we don‘t become a malingerer. But sometimes we permanently lose some ability to function – are less physically able, more prone to illness, less fit or whatever. Sometimes we are left crippled, permanently bedridden or the like. We end up less ‘strong’ than we were before.
But even here, there is genuine recovery. We can resist defining ourselves in terms of our new limits – of submitting to being turned into a permanent victim. We can look to see what we can do, recognise our new limits and make the most of the possibilities left open to us. We refuse to take up loads that are normal loads for adults under normal conditions (like feeding ourselves if we’re a quadriplegic) but still find genuine loads that we can bear in our new circumstances.
That’s just life as far as the physical analogy goes, but I think it applies both to the realm of faith and the realm of mental health as well.
We aim for their recovery and to strengthen them. If they malinger we have to challenge and put a bit a pressure on to encourage them to move again. But we also have to recognise that there are seasons in the recovery process, steps are often small, and sometimes the recovery end point is lower than the start point.
That’ll do for the ‘theory’, let’s turn to your two examples as I think they make things concrete really well.
It depends a lot on the individual. If they’re ‘paralysed’ when there’s three young children and an overwhelmed husband at stake then either there’s a nasty bit of malingering going on or they’re in real trouble. The only way to have any chance of working that out is to spend time in the house and with her. Not even Solomon could work that one out from a distance – even he needed both parties and a sword to hand.
Grief hits different people differently, and three months is a fairly short space of time to process the death of a loved one. If one of the three children or the husband had died would that change what would be a ‘reasonable’ length of time? It is not unheard of for mothers to suffer post-natal depression and be rendered almost paralysed for long periods – it can start months after the birth of the child, and I know of cases that went for a full year (and I wouldn’t be surprised if some go longer). If a good thing (new life successfully arrived) can cause that, I’m not sure that we can say absolutely that grief must not.
I’ll cut here, and conclude (this time for real!) in the following comment.
Concluding…
What I would suggest is that the question has to be: does she need to be carried, or does she need to be coaxed to start taking steps (or does she need a full blown intervention – that’s not off the cards either). The issue of the children, the husband is a red herring. Sometimes your spouse is there for you, sometimes they ain’t. There were vows to cover that: ‘in sickness and in health.’ Sometimes children receive great parenting – other times death takes their parent, their parent walks out on the family, or their parent is in a coma, or is seriously injured, or is emotionally paralysed. That’s tough, it is not good for the children, but God can be trusted, he really is in control, and if those children are his it will be worked to the good.
I think that when dealing with a situation like you describe you have to put the children’s welfare to one side, for the sake of the children’s welfare. If the wife/mother can’t function then she can’t function. But getting worried about the effect that has on the kids could encourage counterproductive help from others. She is a wife and mother and has to be strong for the sake of her family. But, unless she can either shrug it off or grit her teeth and soldier through it by force of will, the fact she has responsibilities may not help her discharge those responsibilities (if she can, then it might).
So, in the hypothetical you offer, I think almost anything might be going on, and almost anything might be needed to address the emotional paralysis. It sounds like a professional is called for (if that is at all possible, given her aversion to mainstream treatment).
But the thing that does jump out at me from your great description, is that there is a big space there for one very strong family or individual or a couple of middling strong families or individuals to do some very practical stuff. Do all the chores. Cook all the meals. Take the children over to their house to sleep, or sleep in that family’s house some nights so the two parents can have some time by themselves or together without serious responsibilities.
Picking up the concrete load might create space for the emotional problems to correct themselves as the couple comfort each other – and would certainly mitigate the effect on the kids. And by getting in there and getting one’s hands dirty people will be in a much better place to have some idea what can be done to address the emotional paralysis.
Absolutely. I’d go back to symptom and underlying problem. Sometimes the harmful habits are the cause (or at least a big contributing factor to a pre-existing susceptibility) sometimes they are a bad response to a more fundamental problem. Either way they’re better off without the habits, but it can matter whether the behaviour is more cause or more symptom. If the behaviour is the problem, then addressing it will have far more positive effect than if it is not.
So in such situations, I’m open to either possibility, and the need to be either ‘nice’ or ‘hard nosed’ with the person. And I recognise that I’ll probably be stumbling around in the dark as I try things out, back off, try something else, and just keep plugging away until I see improvement. Sometimes I can’t even be sure that anything I did helped – but people are generally better off with someone in there with them, even if they make mistakes, than on their own. God’s grace covers an awful lot of sins, even well intentioned and incompetent ones. I find that remembering that is a great way to persevere and not put it in the too hard basket.
Thanks for such great prodding Zeke – hope you found that ‘thinking aloud’ exercise helpful in response.
Thank you for an excellent article, Mark! I know I will be rereading this one. Your exhortations for practical help are great. I have a few comments for the commenters.
Karen, why is it that you are second-guessing yourself? Pray, make your decision about what ministries to be involved in, and assess how your life is functioning after a year. And don’t add more than one new activity in a year!
Zeke, I’m betting it’s depression. Three months is a very short time in the grieving process, and possibly there is still some physical healing going on, depending on how late the miscarriage was. Mothers are often particularly depressed around the time that their baby would have been born, so keep that in the back of your mind. My guess is that the mistrust of mainstream medicine and the obsessive TV-watching are symptoms of depression—I know I veg out with the computer when I’m tired, and fatigue can be a big part of depression. Perhaps you can contact the father and ask what would be helpful—meals? Cleaning? Consider taking Dad off for a blokes’ day to unwind, with other friends looking after the family.
Anthony—for those of us who aren’t very perceptive as to who is weak, what do you suggest? Perhaps it’s part of the perceptive people’s job to tell the unperceptive what to do? Lack of perception is just another kind of weakness…
Thanks for this excellent post. I am reminded of my own helplessness when I hear the story of someone who is downcast. Feeling helpless is uncomfortable for most of us, but I have noticed lately that is leads me to pray.
Trying to decide who is ‘really’ downcast and who is malingering is not an easy or helpful distinction. The behaviour of someone who is depressed or struggling with life can be frustrating, which may lead us to question the legitimacy of their behaviour. This is not usually a judgement we have enough information to make wisely. Sometimes it may help to consider that our frustration may be because we feel helpless, or may reflect their own frustration with feeling helpless.
I was challenged by your final comment, Mark. Sometimes I do nothing for fear of doing the wrong thing. I forget that God can use my bumbling efforts, through his grace.
Ultimately, it would be great if the church could be a place where the weary and downcast could find solace and acceptance, reflective of the love of God.
Hi Karen,
I’m glad you appreciated the post. You do like asking the tough questions though eh? This is going to be a two comment answer.
How do we know that what we know to be true is wrong eh? That even though something appears white to us, we need to treat it as though it is black? I think the question moves us into some fairly deep waters.
I believe there is no silver bullet for this. There is no technique or method that can guarantee that we will not be mistaken, deceived, or self-deceived. That is primarily due to doctrine – the doctrine of sin mostly, but also partly my doctrine of humanity. The human condition is not just that we find that we often choose what is wrong, but that often we aren’t sure what the right course of action is. Even Adam and Eve needed God’s revelation, they couldn’t just do it on their own. And the problem is a multitude times worse for sinners whose hearts take to deception and falsehood like a duck to water.
So the first up answer is, “You cannot know.” You could always be wrong. You could be insane and think you’re sane. You could be disastrously out of touch with reality. You could be the infamous brain in the vat, the hopeless extra on the set of the Matrix as Neo does his thing. You could be living in your own private universe.
That should drive you to godly ‘despair’ – something like ‘what hope is there for me?’ And then throw yourself on God, with a sense that you desperately need grace because you don’t have the resources to guarantee you’ll always judge yourself right, and there’s no way to get those resources. Like the old Warner Brothers Cartoon about the guy stuck on the highway trying to get off, “You can’t get there from here.”
In that sense, the problem of a fatal flaw in our self-knowledge is simply one example of the broader problem of sin more generally. Our only hope is in God, there but for the grace go I. Because God is a person (not a human being, but a person nonetheless), and because he is the senior partner in the relationship there is no mechanism to guarantee God’s involvement. It is entirely in his hands. He intervenes in some cases and not in others – even among his children. His actions are not arbitrary, nor are they toying with us, they are expressions of his holy, righteous love, mercy, and justice. But God’s love, justice, mercy, compassion, holiness and the like do not leave God with only one option – save us from ourselves. God is Lord, and is free to act as he sees fit. In that sense, the question you raise is a subset of the perennial question about the problem of suffering.
What all of that should do is lead us to throw ourselves on God and seek his gracious, merciful face. On our end faith, humility, and prayer are the expressions of someone who is aware that they cannot trust in themselves (in this or any other area) and so turns to the One who can do something about it, and has revealed his gracious Father’s heart in the face of his Son. As Jo observed, there is no real prosperity gospel so that does not mean that God has to keep us from being self-deceived, but I would suggest that, all things being equal, such self-deception is much less likely when such an approach to God is the guiding star of one’s life.
We’ll cut here, and conclude in the following comment.
Concluding…
Once that fundamental orientation is made – no trust in self, throw and keep throwing oneself on God, but don’t presume that that is a technique that forces God to act how you want – then I think there are steps that can stack a few cards in your favour. From this point onwards are my reflections. So take it with a lot of salt, and pluck out what might work for you.
The basic thing, as you allude, is to pursue self-knowledge. Work at trying to get some idea of what you are like, where you can trust your instincts, and where you can’t.
Part of how that occurs is by self-reflection – but a self-reflection that resists the temptation to just keep turning inward (and so, ironically, works at being self-reflective about one’s self-reflection…metacognition really is a strange beast).
The other part is by doing what we’re all supposed to swear off doing. Compare yourself to others. What are you good at, so-so at, and bad at compared to the median of people around you? Where there are qualities you have that are at the extremes – good or bad, just how good or bad are they? Have you met people better or worse on those issues? That can give you an idea of just how much of an outlier you are in your notable areas.
Finally, how do people react to you – what qualities seem to most stand out to them? Here you are looking for quantity of feedback and quality. If lots of people seem to see the same thing about you that is noteworthy. And if someone who appears to be more insightful/more trained in the area or the like sees something that is noteworthy. And then you reflect on that data – what reasons are there to trust people? What reasons are there to trust your judgement if it conflicts? You need to have good reasons to back yourself if your judgement conflicts with the majority verdict or if it conflicts with ‘experts’. And if someone tells you something that disagrees with how you see the world in an area that is not one where you think you can’t trust your own judgement then you need good reasons to back them against yourself.
In all that, the first thing to try and ascertain is how you skew the data. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? are you super-critical or content with yourself? Are you orientated more by a fear of failure or more by a desire to achieve (those two may seem synonyms, but they’re actually opposites). Getting a handle on that will give you a sense of the perennial ‘built-in’ bias you have in how you see reality and yourself – which you need to have if you’re going to try and self-consciously compensate for it.
Behind all this has to be a sense of security. There has to be something that enables you to look yourself in the mirror, or look at yourself as reflected back to you by others’ mirrors, and not edit out what is unpalatable. For me Jerry Bridges Transforming Grace was the key for that – his basic point that we enter the Christian life by declaring bankruptcy and we never go back into credit, gave me the basis to stop trying to be OK. And when I stopped trying to be OK, then I could genuinely strive to become OK as a never-ending project. Getting that from here on I was a failure even in my successes meant that the relationship, and my self-worth, was outside myself hidden in Christ with God. Grace meant I could come to terms with who I really am, which has helped me to try and become someone at least a little bit different. To try and know oneself is to cut against the grain of our self-righteous, deceptive heart and you need something powerful to anchor you for the pursuit.
One concrete thing I think I will venture is that this kind of process is needed less by people whose strengths and weaknesses fit within two standard deviations of the median. It is needed more by those whose extreme qualities really are extreme. The more you are a basically a well rounded individual, I think the more you can just muddle on through more or less fine. People who lie on the margins – the geniuses, the eccentrics, live in a world that is not like everyone elses: that’s part of what makes them more unusual than the rest of us. That is a two-edged sword. Sometimes that enables them to create things, and grasp something genuinely original. Sometimes it leads to bizarre behaviours and decisions – genius is close to madness in a sense. The other people who need it are generally those carrying some kind of baggage from their upbringing – something about how they grew up had some built-in problems for them. Most people I’ve seen who have pursued this self-consciously are usually a little bit odd or eccentric, unusually gifted in some area but trying to function normally nonetheless, and/or had some problems in the growing up process.
So most people don’t need all that, but, as is my wont, there is a moderately comprehensive answer.
Hello Kath,
Thanks for your great comment. I’m glad you found stuff in the post and the comments useful. There’s two things in particular you said that I think open up some new ground, that I’d like to interact with as part of the conversation process.
I heartily agree – hence the post! And few things hit me in the gut more than hearing stories from people about how the church wasn’t like that for them.
But I think my basic stance is: “by and large we are the place where the weary and downcast can find solace and acceptance, reflective of the love of God” – it’s just that it is such a great gift to give that we can always try and do it even better.
Even my friend who inspired the post finds that to be the case. He is, for the moment at least, past the absolute worse of things. He’s been released to return home, with regular and frequent contact from a good psych outpatient network.
And out of all his friends and family, the people visiting him most frequently and most productively are hands down the Christians. He’s now at the stage when light exhortations to have faith aren’t catastrophic (I’m not sure if they’re actually helpful yet, but they don’t seem to cause further problems). So, my impression is that his best and worst days roughly correlate to the days he gets a Christian visistor – and that in turn helps the recovery. And while the contact will no doubt drop off if the recovery period is protacted, I’ll be surprised if the ‘last man standing’ among his visitors isn’t a Christian. (Sometimes that happens, and that’s both a mini-tragedy, and a testimony that the ability to love someone in need is given by God to more than just Christians.)
They mightn’t have gotten something I think matters when he was at his worst. But they are persevering at muddling through – and in the long haul that matters so much more than getting it ‘right’. (Something I’ll use your comment to take this chance to say, seeing the post focuses more on getting the approach right. In my experience the deeply downcast are almost always infinitely better off in a half-decent church than not in one at all.)
We’ll cut this here, and pick up your bigger issue over the next two comments, because it’s worth some serious attention.
Continuing…
You raise an important issue with this next comment, Kath:
I love your point about our frustration. I think generally that when dealing with situations outside our experience, or that make big demands on us, our feelings are a terrible guide. Picking up a bit from the discussing with Karen – these are areas where we can’t trust our instincts. In my observation, people who have no susceptibility to depression and haven’t experienced it, often think people should just ‘get over it’.
I’ve had people who don’t get sick tell me that they suspect most ‘illness’ are people just wanting a free holiday. People who are highly disciplined, socially adjusted, positive, and gregarious listen carefully to an explanation of why someone else is not, take it in, process it, and then say something like, “Wow, that sounds really tough. But have you tried just not being like that?” And the infamous heterosexual asking a homosexual whether they have ‘tried to like girls instead’? I even had one person who finds maths ‘weird’ tell me that they don’t believe in infinity – if you just tried harder you could count all the members in the set.
When on familiar ground, instincts can be a useful tool, but they seem to become counterproductive the more strange the situation we are faced with.
So frustration with a downcast person just tells you that you are frustrated. It offers no clue as to whether that frustration is at all justified.
However, I think I want to ‘defend my corner’ on the usefulness of the distinction between whether someone is ‘really’ downcast or malingering. The ‘really’ there has to do with intensity, not truth – a way of saying ‘extremely downcast’. A malingerer and a non-malinger will both be really downcast – one isn’t downcast and the other faking. But if they are both completely inert only one of them is so because they are in the grip of something bigger than them. The other could start to take some positive steps, but either doesn’t realise it, or finds that path too hard and needs outside help to start on it.
Here’s a few reasons why I think we need a category like ‘malingerer’ in this context.
First, theologicaly, to not have a category like that it is to implicitly suggest that a downcast person can’t be a sinner about their being downcast. Being downcast is something that is only ever done to the person, that they have no responsibility for, and, as a consequence can not be expected to participate in their own recovery process. I think that is true in some cases. But to be human is to be a moral responsible agent. The category of ‘malingerer’ is there to affirm that, even in depression, the person is still in the image of God. They can sin, and therefore they can receive grace, and can be called on to repent. It is a way of treating them with dignity and as a human being – something that I think is important if we’re going to genuinely help them recover.
Second (the points from here are in no particular order), experience suggests that all except the worst cases of depression leave some room for people to take some positive steps – even in only very small ones. And some people won’t take those steps unless pushed. Sometimes they don’t realise they can, they are just caught up in the experience of being depressed and can’t process it to realise that they have more strength than they think they do.
Sometimes they find that, after battling with a sense of loneliness, they are suddenly getting lots of positive attention. Sometimes they find that after collapsing under responsibilities they now have no responsibilities – and it is a freedom they never knew before. In these kind of cases, the living death of being downcast seems better (even if they’re not conscious of this) than what life was like before. Sometimes they just really, really, find change stressful and changing to be not depressed seems overwhelming – and they’re already overwhelmed…they’re depressed!
In such cases, they are making choices, and can make different ones. And that’s important.
We’ll cut here, and finish up with the next comment.
Concluding…
Third, I don’t think we are helping if we offer people support but always expect them to find motivation and willpower to change themselves. It may be that what they need is someone else to give them that – to encourage, to push, to challenge, to not take ‘no’ for an answer. To just get them moving.
I have had only limited contact with institutionalised care of the mentally ill. But in my obersevation they seem to create structures that force the patients to take responsibility for small aspects of their own lives – and these with people on the extreme end of depression/mental illness. They have to get out of bed and shower daily, have to get out of bed and get themselves to meals three times a day. Have to take themselves to the dispensary to get the drugs they’re on. Have to interact with other patients to do certain things. Such strategies reflect a recognition of a category like ‘malingering’ – of getting comfortable in being downcast. They make the experience a little bit less comfortable, and encourage baby steps towards health.
The nineteenth century Baptist pastor C.H. Spurgeon was apparently prone to periods of bleak depression. Apparently once as he was settling into a phase his wife walked down the stairs dressed in the all black mourning garb of the period. He asked her who had died, she said, “Obviously God must have” and Spurgeon snapped out of it. I doubt she tried that every time – but it was the right call that time, that time he could actually stop being depressed but didn’t realise it.
Finally, I want to push people to take responsibility for judging someone to be culpably participating in their own depression. Hence I chose the word ‘malinger’ precisely because it has nasty connotations. It seems to be a trend these days to find words that take the sting out things: abortion not killing (still less murder), voluntary euthanasia not the endorsement of suicide when done by people who are held to have lives not worth living, sex worker not prositute (and still less whore).
It is fairly easy and cheap to say, ‘I know they’re depressed but they’re not doing anything to help themselves.’ But to call someone a ‘malingerer’ is a hard call; all except the most insensitive and unsympathetic will try and avoid making a judgement that serious unless they think they have very good reason to. (And those people are likely to be so grumpy by the post and this comment thread that they tuned out a long time ago.) But here’s the thing, saying ‘I know they’re depressed but they’re not doing anything to help themselves’ is the same thing as calling that person a ‘malingerer’ it’s just nice and polite.
And because it is nice and polite people seem to think that they are allowed to think it and say it, and even act on the basis of it, without needing to have good reasons for that. They aren’t acquainted with serious depression themselves, they don’t know the person really really well, and they haven’t taken the time to get a thorough grounding about the nature of depression and recovery from it. But they don’t need any of that, because they’re being nice and polite.
So, take that away. What they are really doing is calling some a malingerer. That’s rude, it’s hard nosed. That requires some serious justification. Do they feel that confident about their judgement on this matter? Do they understand things that well? If not, then maybe they shouldn’t accuse people of being ‘depressed but not doing anything to help themselves’.
The term ‘ups the ante’ more to where it should be – and so pushes people to recognise that they may well be out of their depth in passing judgement on another. That means the category is part of the tool kit, but it should be one that they reach out to grab with great hesitation and only with very good reasons – which is as it should be.
I suspect you and I may still disagree that such a distinction is useful even once all that is said, but I’m not trying to take back in the comments what you liked in the post. Though it mightn’t look it, it is intended to be part of a strategy of offering a grace, comfort and security to the downcast that is more than just co-dependency and sentimentality but that has substance to it. Please feel free to take this further if you’d like.
Thanks Mark for this incredibly helpful post. And thanks to the others who have contributed to keep the discussion going.
I understand the point you are making when you use the categories “weak” and “strong” and how we carry each others burdens within the body of Christ. I would just like to add a comment about how the “weak” edify the “strong” (while still maintaining what you’ve said about there being times and seasons for the “strong” to support the “weak”).
What I mean is that when the “weak” persevere in the midst of severe depression, and when there is a strong urge to suicide, yet they keep battling on, it can be a great encouragement to those looking on (while those looking on still long for the person suffering to be well). The fact that someone chooses to continue existing when they could make the opposite choice (in human terms – I acknowledge that God is completely sovereign) is a big thing, both for the person with depression and those caring for them.
Hi Mark!
Thank you for your thoughtful and lengthy answer to my difficult question! (Sorry for asking difficult questions; they’re the ones that naturally occur to me.) Sorry also for taking so long to reply; our broadband has been throttled at home because we’re over the limit, and, well, you know, they keep my nose to the grindstone at MM ;P)
That’s a really good point about how sin corrupts everything, even our knowledge. I guess a related point is that it applies to other people too—that what they say about our circumstances and the judgements they make may not always be trustworthy or accurate because they too are fallen creatures. I guess that relates to Kath’s comment—that we cannot always know when we view the downcast from the outside, but we too must keep on throwing ourselves on the mercy of God for wisdom and insight.
Thanks for your thoughts on how to evaluate others’ comments and assessments of your own situation. I don’t quite understand this bit:
Could you expand on that?
I think also a related difficulty is that often their knowledge of the situation is tempered by how much you have revealed to them. And this in turn makes their knowledge imperfect …
I feel like I’m starting to waffle (on a day when I had Max Brenner waffles too—and they were delish!) so I’ll stop now. But thank you for considering not just my but everyone’s questions and comments so seriously!
Concluding…
As far as this little gem:
I was, ahem, too terse. The point I was trying to make is that, in our context, there is a big false track that people have to avoid. It is the temptation to ‘drop out and find myself’. This can be done physically – someone drops out of uni/quits work, leaves their relationships and goes somewhere to gaze inward. Or it can be done mentally – the person is physically present but almost completely disengaged: they aren’t engaging with life, they are too busy always looking at how or why they do things.
Either way it is a problem. To think about one’s thinking (metacognition) one has to move beyond simply experiencing life, and one has to shift one’s focus away from acting, from doing things. If you put too much effort into self-reflection, then you cease to just experience things (the self-reflection activity acts as a buffer) and you aren’t ‘there’ as you go through the motions of what your’re doing – you are ‘located’ behind and slightly above, watching yourself do things and reflecting upon it.
Keep following that rabbit hole of ‘the real me’ down, and you eventually find a vacuum. Our ‘self’ can absorb a seemingly infinite amount of self-analysis for increasingly diminishing returns. Descartes claimed that “I think therefore I am.” And arguably, increasingly since then Western society has wanted all knowledge and action grounded in a robust grasp of “I” as the starting point.
But Hume’s critique continues to be devestating. There is no way to get to “I” except through the thoughts that “I” think. When “I” stop thinking (when I sleep, for example) then “I” have no consciousness of “myself”. My grasp of myself is only ever mediated through my thoughts. The very act of trying to reflect upon those thoughts and then on those thoughts, and then on those thoughts will, if taken far enough, dissolve any sense of an “I” that stands behind them all.
“I” is nowhere near as foundational as we Westerners presume it is.
But putting too much focus there on finding the ‘real me’ can lead us to stop living in the moment, and to trust our self-reflection too much (hence my statement about being self-reflective about it – don’t trust it too much, and ask the question – am I overthinking this?)
The TV show Scrubs is a great worked example of this issue. On the one hand we get little vignettes like the following:
As Yoda would say. “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.’ “ In the end, true mastery of something is intuitive, unself-reflective – like walking or breathing. People who are very good at things are often very bad at coaching others in it – they have no self-awareness of how they do it. So people who are self-aware are often not self-reflective (ironic as that sounds) – they just ‘do it’ – they intuitively compensate for who they are and function fine.
Whereas you get someone like JD on Scrubs. He lives his entire life in his head. He’s always thinking, always ‘learning’. But I’d suggest that he is the character on the show who evidences the least amount of personal development and positive change. The other characters just live, when problems arise they stop and reflect, then move on. But JD’s absorbtion in self-reflecting is arguably the thing that keeps him marking time – the perpetual Peter Pan.
Do or do not. But don’t keep ‘trying’. It’s a Zen thing.
Sigh. Somehow this comment didn’t load first time around. It should go before the one immediately above it.
Hello Anna,
That’s a great point you make. There have been one or two cases in my experience where my telling someone who feels ashamed at their weakness in being downcast, and who feels like they’ve got nothing to offer that I am proud of them for hanging in there, and that even if things get worse that won’t change seemed to give them a shot in the arm. Only a small shot, but in these situations we fight for whatever we can get.
We should be encouraged when we see someone ‘holding the line’ even if it is nothing more than Job’s refusal to ‘curse God and die’. And it is often good to feed that back to the downcast person – we are not ashamed of them being downcast, but think it is great kudos to them in holding in there.
Not everyone downcast feels shame or guilt, but almost all of them could do with some genuine wind fed into their sails. Your point is a great way to do that. Thanks for raising it.
Hey Karen,
You’re welcome for the answer. I figure if people are going to be kind enough to read through my long posts, and then take the time to write and publish and comment, the least I can do is try and give a substantial reply. I figure that if I make them long enough sooner or later people will keel over in exhaustion and not comment any more.
I concur with your reflections. With this one:
I think that is bang on. And that is part of the ‘human but not sin’ limitation – we can only make judgements based on what we know. And our knowledge of people is limited.
The thing to be aware of, however, is that your ability to give relevant information to someone else is limited by your knowledge of yourself. The more there might be a problem with your take on yourself, the less likely you are to volunteer the right information, and the more likely it is that a discerning person might see things about you clearer than you do, even without you having told them much. That’s certainly happened with me over the years.
That’s one of the reasons why I said this is one of those areas that moves us into some deep waters. You have to both back yourself, and not trust yourself, be open to others and at times back them against yourself and yet try and evaluate them. Look for a range of views from others – preferably from people who disagree, and then try and weigh it all up. Apart from humility, a genuine desire to do what is right and to take some chances but be prepared to backtrack if that turns out to be a false trail, and constant prayer, I don’t think there is a clear technique that can be learned and just plugged in for this. It is something that very much involves all of who you are.
We’ll cut here, and pick up your question in the next comment.
Hi Mark,
Just read that through several times. It makes sense! Thanks for clarifying.
Karen.