Finding Truth in Depression

Here's a nonsensical argument: “stop whining about your sinus infection, there are starving children in third world countries.” I heard a classmate say this in the school café last week, and he was being serious. Besides finding his comment stupid, I also found it offensive. Here’s why:

His statement assumes that all human suffering is relative. It assumes that the subjective experience of one person—however painful or trivial it might be—should diminish when compared with the subjective experience of another person whose suffering is—from an objective point of view—worse. He attempts to draw attention to the suffering of those less fortunate—a noble endeavor—but in doing so, denigrates human experience in its entirety.

Upper middle-class Americans suffer too. So do upper, upper middle class, and upper class Americans, and celebrities, and CEO’s, and rich billionaires; so do pastors and priests, and motivational speakers, and Christians who smile too much. Why? Because suffering is part of the human condition—we live in a fallen world and everybody’s life has its problems.

According to John C. Crosby, author of The Selfhood of The Human Person, “incommunicability” refers to the phenomenon by which a person does not share his being with any other person. A person’s life is unique; what they experience is entirely their own and contributes to the “fullness of [their] self-identity.”

A person’s pain, therefore, is incommunicable—it is entirely his own. Others can empathize with it or sympathize with it but they cannot absorb it. The most they could do is possibly simulate it; they could create for themselves the same kind of pain as their friend, but never the same pain.

I wonder whether my classmate would venture to use that same statement on a person suffering from depression—depression, after all, is very painful. I’d hope he wouldn’t. The sad thing is, however, if he did, the person suffering from depression might actually believe him. Why? Well, because they’re depressed.

I’ll speak from experience: when I’m depressed I usually feel like my life simply doesn’t matter, especially relative to the overwhelming size of the universe. I deceive myself into thinking that God has these moments when he just happens to overlook my situation. I feel weak, small, and—during the moments my anxiety kicks in—psychologically paralyzed; sometimes I simply don’t want to exist. At the same time—and here is a great paradox about being depressed—I find that I’m self-centered and wholly self-involved.

I don’t want to matter, but at the same time—to the extent that I brood over and loath every undistracted, waking moment of my life—I am all that matters. When I recognize this contradiction within myself, I feel selfish and guilty—if I really am as worthless as I’ve lead myself to believe, then who am I to brood over my own worthlessness?

Fortunately, this psychotic, and yet brilliantly constructed syllogism is not true, because it’s based on a false premise. It assumes that I as an individual—as a person—could ever not matter. And this is never true.

In The Selfhood, Crosby establishes a foundational truth about the nature of human beings: “Persons are ends in themselves and never mere instrumental means.” To engage another individual with full respect to his personhood, I must regard him as possessing human dignity. “When I look at others only insofar as they intersect with my projects,” writes Crosby, “then of course I lose them as persons, because I am not willing to let them exist as ends in themselves.”

As Christians we know that all people are created in the image of God and therefore possess intrinsic self-worth, which He confers. A person’s value is infinite, because God's love for him in infinite. Therefore, with regard to the entire panoply of human existence, a person’s value is never relative; it is always absolute. Nor is his personal suffering relative; it too, is absolute.

Crosby has us consider the absoluteness of human persons in this way: If there are 500,000 print copies of a town newspaper, one of those copies is worth very little. If there were only 10 print copies of that same town newspaper, the value of a single copy would then increase significantly. The value of one copy is relative to the number of total copies. People are not valued in the same way.

“According to one estimate,” writes Crosby, “there have existed until now some 77 billion human beings. But no one person becomes smaller in the presence of all these other persons, or is relativized in their presence.” Therefore, before God, each person exists as if he were all there is. Crosby writes further:

“It seems to be a particularly ‘worldly’ way of considering persons to subject them to the laws of finite numerical quantity and to think that each person gets smaller as the number of persons he is compared with gets larger. One recovers a sense of their personhood only by realizing that each person has a certain ‘absoluteness’ of being, by which I mean not a divine self-existence, but rather a curious metaphysical ‘insensitivity’ to the presence of other persons, an inability to be relativized by them in the quantitative sense just explained.”

Because the importance of our existence before God can never be relativized by the presence of others, nor can the weight of our sufferings. It’s easy to think that our problems are trivial or that because others's problems are so much worse, that we have no legitimate reason to be upset. But God does not compare our sufferings with the sufferings others.

Depression hurts, and it compels us to think less of ourselves. The only things worse than suffering from the pains of depression is suffering from the delusions it causes—believing that our pain isn’t pain at all, but rather a selfish impulse. God’s grace, however, abounds whether we recognize that we’re deserving of it or not.

I take comfort in this fact, and I hope you can too.