Christianity and Depression

Tasia Scrutton

Description

Offering a theological and biblical account of depression, this book considers how depression has been understood and interpreted by Christians and how plausible and pastorally helpful these understandings are. It offers an important and well-informed resource for those with, or preparing for, positions of pastoral responsibility within the Christian Church

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 28 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334058922
• Langue: English

Extrait

Christianity and Depression
Interpretation, meaning, and the shaping of experience
Tasia Scrutton






© Tasia Scrutton 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978-0-334-05890-8
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd





For Simon, with thanks for invaluable conversations,
encouragement and, most of all, love.





Contents
Foreword by John Swinton
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Sin
2. Demons
3. Biology
4. The dark night of the soul
5. Can depression help us grow?
6. Can God suffer?
7. Would a suffering God help?
8. Towards a Christian response to depression

Glossary
Further reading




Foreword
JOHN SWINTON
At different moments in history (and still today in different cultures and contexts), the same experiences that some now call ‘mental illness’ have been described quite differently: problems of living, deviant behaviour, criminality, problems with the unconscious (unconscious desires, repression, sublimation, denial and so forth), chemical imbalances, misfiring neurology, trauma, genetic predisposition, demons and angels. At different times, any one of these explanatory frameworks can become the ‘standard account’; the go-to explanation that the majority hold as most accurate and significant. Those who live with unconventional mental health experiences also draw out different interpretations and descriptions of their experiences. These personal descriptions contain deep and challenging insights, perspectives and accompanying possibilities for response which are easily subsumed to more powerful cultural discourses. Those living with unconventional mental health experiences push against the idea that what they are experiencing is best explained as ‘mere symptoms of underlying pathology’. Within these narratives we find deep and rich narrative descriptions of what it means to live with voices, to have unusual elations of mood and to deal with troublesome negative feelings that are deeper than sadness.
It is clear that the human experience of mental health challenges is contested and contestable. It’s important that we recognize that our interpretations of unconventional mental health experiences matter. They matter because they deeply impact upon the ways in which we think about, interpret and respond to those who live with such experiences. Each of these explanatory frameworks leads to different forms of practice. The way that we name things determines what we think we see. What we think we see determines how we respond to what we think we see. How we respond to what we think we see determines the faithfulness of our actions.
The power of medicine
One powerful explanatory framework which guides a good deal of the current conversation around mental health comes to us from science and medicine. Within this conversation the assumption is that mental health challenges are basically the same as physical illnesses and that, eventually, we will discover a biological cause. Within this explanatory framework the root of all mental health challenges lies primarily within the purview of biomedicine. Despite the fact that we don’t currently have biomarkers for the majority of mental health challenges, we are told that eventually we will discover a biological explanation that will explain the nature of mental health issues and provide us with the most appropriate medical responses. It may well be that we do in the end find biomarkers for mental health challenges, but even if we do, that won’t help us fully explain the nature and cause of unconventional mental health experiences. Many people’s challenges emerge from things such as deep trauma, broken relationships, loneliness, isolation, war and social injustice. These are things that cannot be altered by improvements in biomedical knowledge. It seems unlikely that medical science can offer the ultimate solution to mental health challenges that emerge from human selfishness and social and personal evil. Tempting as such simplicity might well be, biomedicine and the gifts of science are not the only ways or even necessarily the best ways in which we can understand and respond to people’s unconventional mental health experiences. It is important that we pay attention to the gifts that medicine brings. However, we must be careful lest paying attention to one aspect of the issue distracts our attention away from other vital aspects that emerge from other ways of looking at the issues. The issue of paying the right kind of attention to mental health challenges is crucial, but actually quite difficult at least for Western people.
Paying the right kind of attention
In his fascinating book The Master and his Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World , 1 Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist makes an interesting observation. After millions of years of evolution, the brain remains split into two asymmetrical hemispheres. This seems more than a little odd bearing in mind that the power of the brain is determined by its ability to make and sustain millions of connections. The number and complexity of these connections is what gives it its computational power. So why is it that the brain has come to be split into two hemispheres, connected by a bundle of tissue that passes messages between them: the corpus callosum? The corpus callosum spends much of its time blocking and inhibiting the communication between the hemispheres. Even more oddly, the corpus callosum has been getting smaller rather than larger over the course of evolution.
Arguing against previous views that suggest that the left hemisphere of the brain deals with reason, facts and hard logic, with the right hemisphere focusing on such things as emotions, feelings, imagination and aesthetics, McGilchrist points out that in fact both hemispheres participate in both sets of perceptions. In his view the difference between the two hemispheres is not in the way that each hemisphere processes things. The significant difference between the hemispheres is the way that each sees the world: their different ways of paying attention to the world . The left and right hemispheres of our brains have radically different and contradictory ways of looking at the world. In making this move, McGilchrist shifts the neurological question away from ‘What does the brain do?’, a question that conceptualizes the brain as machine-like, towards a different and more profound question: ‘How does the brain see the world?’ This revised question, inter alia , brings the brain into the realm of the personal.
The brain thus has two very different ways of paying attention to the world. McGilchrist offers the example of birds feeding on a pebbled surface to illustrate these two modes of attention. A feeding bird needs:
to pay narrow-beam sharply focussed attention to what it has already prioritised as of significance – a seed against a background of grit or pebbles, or a twig to build a nest. At the same time, it must be able to bring to bear on the world a broad, open, sustained and uncommitted attention, on the look-out for whatever else may exist. Without this capacity it would soon become someone else’s lunch while getting its own. Birds and animals all have divided brains, and regularly use one hemisphere for vigilant attention to the world at large, so as to make sense of it, including to bond with their mates, and the other for the narrow attention that enables them to lock onto whatever it is they need to get. 2
What is true for feeding birds is also true for human beings:
we use our left hemisphere to grasp and manipulate, and the right to understand the world at large and how things within it relate to one another, as well as our relationship with it as a whole. It is the left hemisphere that controls the right hand which for most of us is the one that does the grasping, and provides that aspect of language (not all of language) that enable us to say we have ‘grasped’ something. But it is the right hemisphere that is the basis of our nature as the ‘social animal’, which Aristotle saw as our defining feature. 3
The issue between the hemispheres is therefore not thinking versus feeling, as has been previously assumed, but rather two very different kinds of thinking:
each hemisphere has a quite consistent, but radically different, ‘take’ on the world. This means that, at the core of our thinking about ourselves, the world and our relationship with it, there are two incompatible but necessary views that we need to try to combine. And things go badly wrong when we do not. 4
McGilchrist is convinced that things have gone badly wrong, at least for Westerners. He argues that various changes within post-Enlig