"Thanks for your prayers, I've upped my medication" is the summary of what a friend said to me recently in one of those brief "we gotta leave in 2 minutes" exchanges. I've got no idea what the medication was but I'm going to guess it was antidepressant medication. It's one of the few medications we talk about "upping".
In a recent Richard Fidler interview Ethan Watters suggested is that one of the reasons there are currently so many people diagnosed with depression is that this is how our generation and our culture exhibits psychological distress.
There is something about what he said that really resonated with me. I suspect that for many of us who have suffered depression it is much more than just the medical explanation of a chemical imbalance in the brain (although it is of course that too).
For me, I believe I experience a psychological distress manifesting in depression when my spiritual ideals do not match my material reality. Which being an affluent white male is quite often. Jesus strongly confronts my own way of life and change is hard. This is perhaps one of the reasons Xns are tempted to divorce the "spiritual" world from the "material" world.
Surely, if any group of people should be struggling with depression it should be Christians. As my friend said "Thanks for your prayers, I've upped my medication" my urge to take the kids home trumped my urge to say we (a collective of Xns) should do something about this. This is pretty normal, it's also pretty lonely. But, if you're a Xn and you're taking Jesus seriously, I'm going to venture and say, it should be expected. If we are called to swim against the tied of what our culture dictates as "normal" we will have to expect some level of psychological distress.
Love and grace to anyone on, upping or about to start medication.
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