The Symptoms of Depression
I don’t need to go into a lot of detail to identify the
existence of depression, because we have all been there. But negative feelings do not
always mean depression, so it might help to see when you are in the throes of this power
that brings your life to a halt. Depression affects every part of us, so I am going to
look at some of the effects it has in each part of our being – spirit, soul and body.
The first and most obvious sign of depression is that everything comes to a grinding
halt. Your life comes to a standstill, and you are unable to accomplish anything. The
first sign of depression in the life of a person is their failure to carry out what would
be normal daily tasks or duties. For the housewife, it means the housework is not done and
begins to pile up. For the executive it means failing to stick to his schedule of work.
For the student it means failure to finish homework and projects.
So it is very easy to see when depression is taking its toll in the life of another
person. They begin to slacken on their responsibilities.
Effects in the Spirit
When you are depressed, you feel like your spirit is completely blocked. Since your
spirit is the part that communicates with the Lord through the Holy Spirit, the first
thing you feel is that God is not there any more. It feels like He has forsaken you. You
can’t sense His presence when you pray, and it seems as though your prayers are
bouncing off the ceiling.
If anything, it seems as though your conscience has flared up and you have a sense of
guilt or accusation. You feel weighed down with care about your failures. You think that
God will not hear you because you have sinned, or fallen short of what He required of you.
And when you try to hear the Lord’s voice, it seems that He is not talking to you.
Even opening the Bible and reading it yields nothing that makes sense.
Effects in the Soul
The most obvious effect in the soul is that your emotions are completely out of
control. You want to be happy, but feel this negative weight bearing down on your
emotions, making you sad and unhappy. You feel like weeping instead of laughing. What
makes this extremely difficult to handle is that you can find no explanation for your
feelings. In other words, your mind cannot reason out what is happening. There is no
logical explanation for the way you feel. It is as though a huge cloud has descended on
you like a blanket, and you cannot lift it.
This is of course one of the other effects on the soul, since the mind lies in your
soul. You are perplexed and confused about what is happening. You cannot seem to figure
out how this thing started or why it is that you feel this way. And any attempt to
rationalize it away only leads you deeper into your negative state. You start to feel
quite helpless and hopeless. This is when despair starts to set in.
The third part of the soul is the will. And although this might seem to be the
strongest part of you, and one that you can use to solve the problem, you soon find that
it has become paralyzed. It seems that no matter what you do, nothing helps. You have
tried to figure things out and couldn’t come to a solution. And you have tried to DO
everything you could think of, and nothing you do helps.
In fact the bottom line is that you don’t feel like doing anything. Your emotions
have taken such a control of you, that you want to just sit in a corner and mope. The last
thing you want to do is get into some activity. The last thing you want to do is work. So
your soul, like your spirit comes to a grinding halt.
Effects in the Body
Since depression takes its toll on the spirit and the soul and brings them to a
grinding halt, it is not at all surprising to find very similar effects taking place in
your body. In fact what happens is that all of the normal functions of the body begin to
slow down. Your pulse rate will slow, your breathing will be affected, and even your
digestive processes start to slow down.
This has the effect of making you feel very sluggish and weary. You might be overcome
by an extreme sense of fatigue and weariness. Even lifting your hand becomes an effort, so
that you tend to just sit there doing nothing. Your appetite becomes suppressed, so you
don’t feel like eating. The passions are stilled, so that the sexual relationship in
marriage is affected. And any effects from the self-defense mechanism that normally cause
you to react quickly to defend yourself become dulled. You don’t respond to things
that normally affect you.
These and many more similar things are the effects that you can see in a life that is
affected by depression. It doesn’t take a medical degree to diagnose it. A depressed
person has simply come to a grinding halt and has ceased to function normally. The effects
might be different in different people, and they might be worse in some than others. But
they are basically the same in everyone.
Let’s look at these in more detail, and see if the Scriptures can shed some light
on them for us.
Failure to Obtain Recognition or Acceptance
The need to be recognized and accepted lies at the base of all human existence. It is
what drives us in life, and motivates most of the things we do. It lies at the base of and
is the basic cause of all depression. I remember years ago when I was in a job that
involved sales of Life Assurance, we were given a questionnaire to complete that was
designed to find out what motivated salesmen. Amongst them was the obvious thing for
someone doing that kind of job – the desire to make a lot of money.
It was amazing to see the answers that came out of that questionnaire. One would have
thought that making money would be a strong factor in the lives of these people who were
on the cutting edge of the investment industry. It was a job that offered the greatest
financial returns for the effort. But money was low down on the list of every single
person there – especially those who held the top positions in sales performance.
What came to the top always, was the desire to be recognized. Each one wanted to
achieve something in life. And money was just another means that they were using to reach
their goal. If making more money meant getting greater recognition and acceptance, then
making money was the activity they were going to use to obtain it.
It is this inner need that pushes a person to study hard and obtain qualifications in
life. For many, having a title to go with their name or initials to put after their name
is a great achievement and brings the recognition they seek. Others use their physical
strengths rather than their intelligence. They set out to develop their bodies to compete
in sporting events or to break records in athletic events. The Olympic athlete dreams of
the day he or she will be decorated with a gold medal.
Others use their natural talents and good looks to obtain this recognition and
acceptance. The beauty competitions and body building championships of the world are a
clear sign of this. We all seek to do something that is either different to or better than
what others do. Something that will cause us to stand out and be seen by the world.
Something that will make people say, "Isn’t he great? Isn’t she clever?
Don’t you envy them?"
Take away this inner motivation from a person, and you remove from them all reason for
living. Take away from them the ability to succeed in their efforts to accomplish this and
you produce that horrible thing called depression that we are discussing here. Let’s
see if we can find the first case of depression mentioned in the Bible, and see what
caused it. You will find it in Genesis 4:3-5
3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of
the fruit of the ground an offering to the LORD.
4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat of it. And the
LORD respected Abel and his offering:
5 But to Cain and to his offering he had no respect. And Cain was very angry, and his face
fell.
I don’t want to go into the details of what happened here, and why God accepted
Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. But what is important here is that both of these
men wanted God to accept them. So they brought an offering from their efforts to see if
they could get this acceptance from God. This is a clear picture of how we all live. Each
one had put all his effort into his work. And then he had brought God some evidence of
what he had done.
God accepted Abel’s offering, so Abel was happy. But Cain was rejected. He did not
get the recognition and acceptance that he was hoping to get. And he became angry and
depressed. How do I know he was depressed? Because he showed one of the signs of
depression - his face dropped. You will see this in every person that is depressed. They
tend to stare at the ground and their condition is written all over their face. No smile,
no joy, only sadness and misery.
I am not going to look at what God said to Cain for now, because we are going to
consider it when we come to our final section on the solutions to depression. I just
wanted you to see the first recorded case of depression, and what caused it.
Failure to Attain a Goal or No Clear Future Goals
Life is a long journey that leads from the cradle to the grave. We spend 24 hours every
day, seven days a week, traveling that journey that leads eventually to the end of our
lives. At times the journey is fun, and at times the going gets tough. There are
uphills and downhills and times of change. There are stresses and times of pleasure. But one thing
keeps us moving throughout the journey. It is the goals we are aiming for.
Imagine a journey where you do not know how far you will travel, when you will arrive,
or what you will find when you arrive. It is like traveling through a desert where all
you see is sand and there seems to be no end in sight. No one would willingly walk a path
like that unless they knew for certain that it would end eventually. You would not cross a
desert without hope of an oasis somewhere. You would just sit down and die.
That is the condition of someone who has lost their life’s goals and cannot see
the future clearly. Life has become like a journey in the desert. You see no hope for the
future, nothing to aim for any more. You are like the traveler who can only see himself
dying of thirst in the heat. He has no reason to go on. He sees a mirage of water flowing
over the sand, and runs towards it gleefully, hoping to find what he is looking for. But
when he arrives he finds it was a delusion. It was not real.
Perhaps that is what life has become to you. You thought you saw a goal that was
exciting, and you ran towards it with great gusto and enthusiasm. But it suddenly vanished
into thin air. And now all you have is ‘sand.’ You are too afraid to hope again
or try again in case it is just another mirage in the desert. So you sit there in despair,
not knowing what you should do next, or whether you should even bother.
Let’s look at some people who faced that problem in the Scriptures. One of the
earliest mentioned was Moses. He was convinced that he was to deliver his people the
Israelites from the Egyptians. And he tried hard to do this by defending his people. But
when he killed the Egyptian taskmaster and the thing backfired on him, he gave up all hope
of this. Then he ran away and hid in a foreign country, looking after sheep in the desert.
When God approached him to go and lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he was still
suffering from the effects of depression. He just did not feel like doing it any more. And
God had to argue with him and virtually push him into it before he finally went.
Another very clear case mentioned in Scripture is that of the prophet Elijah. He was a
man with a big vision to do things for the Lord. He wanted to see God’s people turn
their backs on the worship of the false god Baal and return to serving God. This goal
within him kept him going even when he was forced to live a restricted life. He knew that
he would one day face the enemies of God and bring about a victory.
You can read all about his moment of glory when he finally accomplished this, in 1
Kings 18 as he faced the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. I’m sure you know the
story of how he told them to make an altar and lay a sacrifice on it, and then pray for
their god to bring fire down from heaven. Then in a magnificent victory, he called fire
down from heaven to burn up his sacrifice and wiped out every single prophet of Baal.
This was the moment he had lived for. It was the goal that had driven him for years and
kept him motivated. But suddenly it was all over. He had accomplished what he set out to
do. And he had dreamed that when this finally took place, God’s people would once
again turn to God and serve Him. He believed that he would cause everyone to turn to God
and turn their back on Baal. But it did not happen.
Instead of seeing a great revival take place as he had imagined, Elijah simply incurred
the wrath of the woman who was behind the worship of Baal in the first place – Queen
Jezebel. King Ahab, who was the leader of Israel did not turn his back on the evil and
return to the Lord. He went and told his mother what had happened, and she sent a message
to Elijah telling him she was going to kill him.
You can read about what happened to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:2-8
2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, So let the
gods do [to me], and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by
to morrow about this time.
3 And when he saw [that], he arose, and ran for his life, and came to Beersheba, which
[belongs] to Judah, and left his servant there.
4 But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a
juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now,
O LORD, take away my life;
5 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and
said to him, Arise [and] eat.
6 And he looked, and, behold, [there was] a cake baked on the coals, and a cruse of water
at his head. And he ate and drank, and laid himself down again.7 And the angel of the LORD
came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise [and] eat; because the
journey [is] too great for you.
8 And he arose, and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and
forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.
Elijah showed all the signs of depression. He lost all of his enthusiasm and
didn’t feel like doing anything. He dumped his servant and went into the desert to be
alone. Then he sat down under a tree and did nothing. He didn’t want to live any
more. But he knew that it would be wrong to take his own life, so he asked the Lord to
take him. What a pitiful state this was for someone who had believed that he could single
handedly conquer all the enemies of God. Now he felt condemned because he had failed.
You can see some of the other effects of depression in Elijah also. He was overcome by
extreme weariness, and wanted to just lie down and sleep all the time. He had lost his
appetite and was not eating anything. But God still had a job for him to do, and He sent
an angel to help him break out of his depression. We will look at this more shortly, but
you can see that the angel had to wake him and make him eat something.
What had happened to Elijah? He had lost all of his goals because things did not go the
way he had expected them to. He had hoped that his efforts would lead to recognition and
acceptance by the people. But they seemed to have rejected what he was saying and did not
turn to God. And now he had no further goal to look forward to. He had no reason to go on.
He was afraid to try again in case he failed again. So depression took control of him, and
he wanted to sit down and die.
Two of Jesus’ disciples faced a similar temptation. Simon Peter who was one of
Jesus’ closest disciples had such high hopes of what he was going to do for the Lord.
He had visions of being a great leader and the one who would defend Jesus to the end. But
it all collapsed at his feet when he denied his Lord three times, and saw his master being
led to the cross to die. Now it was all over. All the hopes of being one of Jesus’
right hand men when He became King were gone.
In the end he gave up all hope of being a great spiritual leader, and went back to the
fishing trade he was in when Jesus first called him. At least that was one thing he was
good at, and it gave him a sense of achievement. We will see later how Jesus brought him
out of his depression, and how we too can break free with the Lord’s help.
Judas also must have had dreams about what it was going to be like as one of
Jesus’ disciples. But he messed things up badly. We are not sure if it was just his
greed for money that motivated him to betray Jesus, or whether it was an attempt to force
Jesus’ hand and make him become the king he had hoped Jesus would be. But in the end
his goals collapsed around him too, and he realized that he would never see the things he
had dreamed of. Depression took hold of him and he went and hanged himself.
Reacting Incorrectly to Situations
We have actually seen this in all of the examples we have considered on depression from
the Scriptures. That is because the problem of depression is like all other problems that
we face in life. You can say it something like this.
It is not what happens that is the problem. It is the way we
react to what happens that is the problem.
OR
It is not the problem that is the problem, but it is the way we
handle the problem that is our problem.
Cain responded incorrectly to the problem of his gift not being accepted by God and
became depressed. God told him that it was not necessary for this to happen. If he did
right, he would be accepted. It was not only Jezebel’s threat to Elijah that was the
problem. It was when he ran away in fear and rejection, and gave up trying to fight, that
depression took over.
So you see it is not what happens to us that causes our depression, but it is the way
we respond to it that causes it to take hold of us. How should we respond to problems?
Well put simply – we should respond Scripturally. When we fail to respond in a
Scriptural way we open the door to depression and allow it to take control of us.
Or to put it plainly, when you respond to the problems of life sinfully, you open the
door to depression. Sin brings a guilty conscience and this brings condemnation.
Condemnation in turns brings a sense of rejection. You do not feel accepted or recognized.
You feel like you have failed and that no one – not even God will accept you. So
you’re back to the first and basic cause of depression that we mentioned above.
Triggering to Past Events
This is a study in itself, and if you want to understand the mechanics of how it works,
I would like to point you to my book The Way of Blessing found at GMR
Publishing. There I have covered the concept
of sinful templates and emotional triggers. But I will just mention here briefly how it
works.
First let me describe the situation. You might find sometimes that you face a
particular set of circumstances in your life that cause negative emotions to suddenly
arise in you with no explanation for why you feel the way you do. You suddenly become
overwhelmed with feelings that you cannot control, and you do not know where they are
coming from.
A close examination of the situation you are in will often show that something has
happened, or a set of circumstances have come about that are very similar to something
that you faced before in the past. And as you examine your feelings, you find that you are
now feeling exactly the same way you felt when you were in this situation before. Often
you are not even aware of this and you cannot remember the past event.
It is as though the past has suddenly surfaced again, and you are again living in the
same situation. This is something I call an emotional trigger, because it causes certain
emotions to be triggered off in you without you realizing where they are coming from.
Often just identifying what is happening will set you free. You realize that what you are
facing now is actually different to what you faced in the past. And now you are more able
to handle it, whereas back there you were ignorant in some areas and made some mistakes.
I will deal with this in more detail when we look at the solutions for depression. For
now I can only offer the following guideline. If an emotion suddenly arises unexpectedly
that you cannot explain. If the feelings that are troubling you are very strong and you
cannot explain them or shake them. If no amount of praying seems to remove them. Then
suspect that you are experiencing a trigger. Have a close look at your current
circumstances and events, and see if something similar did not happen to you in the past.
You will be amazed at how often you will find what you are looking for. And with the
Lord’s help you will more easily find it. And then the way to victory will be very
easy. Where this happens frequently and you keep finding negative emotions arising, then
you need to look deeper to identify certain ‘templates’ that exist within you.
These must be identified and dealt with before you can come to a place of victory.
If you are a person who often suffers from depression, or tend to go through phases of
manic/depression, then there is a good chance that there is a template from the past that
needs to be identified and dealt with. The important thing is that there is a solution.
You do not need to be condemned to a life of negativity. You can walk in the victory that
the Lord has for you.
epression is a very serious problem. It can lead to
a person so despairing of life, that they begin to contemplate suicide. So it is very
important that we understand the mechanics of this weapon that the enemy of our souls uses
so often against us. I want to say right from the start that depression is a spiritual
problem, not a physical problem, and it has a spiritual solution. 
