Depression and religion often have a very complex relationship.
Friends have said God is bigger than depression, if you don't claim it he will heal you. Fellow Christians have said you need to have more Faith, let go and rely on God and your worries will go and you won't have depression anymore.
"There’s a difference between, you know, God loves unconditionally in my feeling and religion loves conditionally. Religion spends an awful lot of time dictating who God can love and can’t love." Sinead O’Connor
According to all I’ve read there is a positive link between depression and religion. It seems for most having a religious belief system helps them to cope better with their depression, however for me, it find it quite the opposite. I grew up going to church with my grandmothers, as I got older and they became ill and died I stopped being active in church. I never lost my faith in God or my belief that we weren’t in this life alone. As a teen I felt a huge void in my life, I felt like I wasn’t living up to my full potential and I felt it was because I was no longer taking religion seriously and had grown away from the church. Around this time I met members from my current church and I made the decision to be baptised and to become active in a new congregation.
Finding A New Faith
This church was different to the ones I grew up attending, and for the first time in my life I felt like I knew God personally. I wasn’t just going to church because it was what was expected of me, I was going because I had found purpose, I felt alive and secure in whom I was in Christ.
The Ebb And Flow
Over the years I drifted in and out of church but I never felt disconnected, just physically absent. My battles with depression as a young adult, and throughout my twenties had never drawn me away from church. It was always based on my social life, my friendships, relationships etc. and never on church itself.
Fast forward to my early thirties and I was working really hard on my mental health and felt stronger than I did in years, I was active in church, was in a relationship, doing well in school and life felt pretty comfortable. Then I had a series of upsets, that relationship ended due to infidelity, and the pressures of school and not working increased and I found myself falling headlong back into depression.
Who I Thought I Needed
At this time I felt like I needed my church family more than ever. I had given up the world, the friendships, the family and support system I had built out there and I needed support. I turned to my church family, after all every week I heard messages about love like Christ, Shepherding, Ministering and I knew what these things meant and how important they would be in my struggle with depression. Unfortunately, that love never came, that support was non-existent and I learned to rely more on God instead of the church.
God In Me
I have heard some really strange things where depression and God are concerned. To the point it actually at one time made me guilt ridden, made me feel unworthy and inadequate.
As I felt more separated from the church, I felt more connected to God. In my deepest moments of depression, in my attempted suicide and in my subsequent recovery I felt Gods love. I had been though my whole life that I needed church to know god and to have God be with me. In those moments I learned that he was with me, even if the church wasn’t.
I have found that being spiritual, forming a personal relationship with my creator and going directly to him has worked better for me than being religious. In religion I suffered the pain of unfair judgment, disregard for my mental health illness and being treated like an outcast. With God I’ve never had to deal with any of those things.
These days I have avoided attending church because I always feel anxiety when I think about going. However, I pray a lot more, I am more calm and in tune with myself, and a lot happier just embracing my walk with God than I was being religious.
Accepting My Journey
Through counselling and deep prayer, I've come to understand that I am no more responsible for having depression than a person is for having seizures, cancer or any other medical condition.
Everyone experiences life differently, for me religion did not help my depression, it actually hindered my healing process. The important lesson I have learned from this experience is that you can’t expect to fit yourself into someone else’s mold. I could have beat up on myself because religion wasn’t helping my depression to lift, instead I embraced that my journey was different and that I didn’t need to be like the general populace to be okay.
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Faith
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