By Dr. Kathryn Butler
The first day I ventured through the church doors, no one knew I fought the compulsion to throw myself off a bridge.
I had drifted about for months with a shroud draped over my mind. Joy had vanished. As a physician, I understood my anguish and could describe its chemical mechanisms with precision. I could define clinical depression and deconstruct it. Yet as I sat there that day with the Bible heavy on my lap, despair crowded out my will to live. Never before had living felt so much like dying.
Fellow churchgoers noticed I neither lifted my voice in song, nor bowed my head in prayer. Many rightly deduced that church was foreign to me. No one, however, could perceive the severity of my groaning, because like other mental illnesses, clinical depression is a hidden disability. It skulks behind everyday routines. We go to work and pick up our kids from school, but struggle to breathe. We force a smile, while our regard for life erodes away.
As Charles Spurgeon described:
“The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour.”
Unfortunately, misconceptions about depression seep into the church, tainting our words. While the Bible urges us to open our arms to those crushed in spirit, too often sufferers of depression find the church to be a home for ridicule rather than truth and love.
