Staring into the Darkness: Depression, Suicide, and Faith

Robin Williams' recent suicide brought back some painful memories.

Some months ago, the daughter of our former neighbor, a beautiful 21 year-old with a talent for the graphic arts, blew her brains out with a shotgun.  She had just broken up with her boyfriend of many years.  She bought the shotgun and some ammo, drove to a secluded place and ended her short life with the pull of a trigger.  She was her mother's only child.   A few months earlier, my cousin's son, a 23 year-old community college student and computer buff, ended his life.  He had discovered online how he could kill himself painlessly, using helium.  He ordered a helium canister and an oxygen mask, drove several hundred miles away, checked into a cheap motel, and lay down to die.  Both young people seemed absolutely determined to ensure there would be no second chances, no last minute interventions.  These weren't the proverbial cries for help.  These were expressions of ultimate despair.

Suicide among young people is an epidemic in this country.  It is the second most common cause of death among 25-34 year olds, after traffic accidents, and the third most common among 15-24 year olds, narrowly edged out of second place by homicides.  In 2011, 15.8% of high school students surveyed said they had at some point in the year preceding the survey considered attempting suicide.

Suicide or suicidal thoughts is usually prompted by depression, though very occasionally by an impulsive response to a moment of despair.  Depression is an odd illness.  While for some people it is a consequence of chemical imbalance, usually manifesting as bi-polar disorder, clinical depression more frequently seems to arise out of some precipitating life circumstance.  Sometimes the cause seems to be one specific event, like the breakup of a romantic relationship or a major career disappointment.  Other times, it is a constellation of circumstances that make the sufferer feel trapped, leading ultimately to despair.  This implies a spiritual component to the illness, at least in certain circumstances.  The circumstances precipitate an existential crisis, which gives rise to a questioning of the purpose of continued existence.  When no answer comes that is satisfactory, the depressed person feels driven to self-annihilation.

There are many who would have us believe that depression is strictly a matter of biochemistry, that it can be treated like many other biological disorders, by altering our internal chemistry with drugs. For some who have attempted or contemplated suicide, this is a consolation.  It deflects the charge that suicide is on some level a moral failing, an act of cowardice and selfishness driven by an unwillingness to confront the necessity of pain and struggle.  There are others, though fewer in number these days, who would argue that depression is strictly a psycho-spiritual response to life circumstance, rather than anything predetermined by one's particular biology, and that treating it with drugs alone is simply a way of managing the symptoms, an avoidance of any confrontation with the underlying causes of the malady.  Many with this perspective are profoundly uncomfortable with the notion that biology in any way determines personality or behavior.

I think both of these approaches are too simplistic.  I suspect that depression is brought about by a complex and varied constellation of biological, psychological, and spiritual factors and that each case must be evaluated based on its unique set of circumstances.  One of the great revelations of the health sciences in the past few decades has been how deeply body, mind, and spirit are connected and how what affects the one affects the other two.  We have long known, of course,  that what happens to our brain shapes our experience, but we now also understand that our brains--their actual physiology, not simply their informational content--can be shaped by our experience.   When our biology, or our state of mind, or our spirituality is out of whack, the other two can be knocked out of balance as well.  I believe that in the cases involving my cousin's son and my neighbor's daughter, it may well have been the spiritual factor that was most deeply out of balance and what ultimately led to their suicides.

After the funeral of my cousin's son, his sister pulled me aside and said that many of her peers, including her brother, struggled to find any sense of meaning in their lives.  They often felt directionless and without hope for doing anything significant with their lives.  Many seemed trapped in a deadend "party" lifestyle that included sex, drugs, and booze, often to the point of addiction, all chosen either to stimulate a feeling of being alive or to deaden the pain of a life that seemed pointless.  The economic malaise and the high level of unemployment and under-employment among young people only exacerbated their sense of diminished possibilities and a darkening future.

All of this was conveyed to me almost as if it were a confession, as if she herself had confronted these same haunting doubts about her own life.  Unlike her brother, however, she seems to have resolved to make her own meaning and avoid the trap swallowing up so many of her contemporaries.  She was in love, about to be married, had finished college and was starting a career in health advocacy, but I got the feeling she had at one time struggled with the pull of the same darkness that had overwhelmed her brother.

I am made to wonder how our own modeling and presentation of the search for meaning affects our kids. Often parents talk to their children about the need for an education, applying oneself to get a good job, getting married and having a family of one's own (i.e., getting set up in the world), but it has become increasingly apparent to me as a pastor that we are often at a loss when discussing broader issues of meaning and significance.  Among churchgoers, it seems a common assumption that Sunday school will fill the gap, while parents of a secular orientation often ignore the issues altogether.  It frequently seems as if the guidance we give is tailored to material needs and aspirations, rather than spiritual ones.

At the same time, the media culture our kids live in stresses glamour, looks, stimulation and excitement, the trappings of wealth; religion, philosophy, and the broader questions of meaning are absent from all but a few isolated programs on NPR/PBS, which few young people access.  There is religious programming, to be sure, but it generally presupposes a set worldview--usually conservative, evangelical Christianity--and does not ask the questions many young people ponder: Why should I believe?  How would one know there is a God?  What is the relationship between faith and science?  What is religious experience?  Why are there different religions?  How do I fit into the grand scheme of things?  Such questions go largely unaddressed.

There is also a kind of tyranny children are subjected to in our culture that sets them up to feel like "losers." Ironically, it is tied directly to our national understanding of freedom and potential.  We tell them that in America, the land of opportunity, they can grow up to be anything they want to be if they just apply themselves.  But of course, the truth is much more complex, and many who strive have to settle for less than their dreams.  Often those who do cannot help but feel that somehow it must be their fault that they have not achieved the success they envisioned.  After all, this is America: if you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere.  Psychotherapists over the past few decades have been struck by how many seemingly successful people come into their offices complaining of feelings of inadequacy, often rooted in the small "failures" of their lives (e.g., not getting into Harvard, being passed up for promotion, not having as tony an address as their friends, etc.)  These failures somehow loom much larger than all of the good things in their lives... in large part because the culture has told them they should have been able to attain them.  Parents are often complicit here, sowing the seeds of such feelings by expressing their disappointment, directly or indirectly, when a child does not attain the goals they (or the child) have set, implicitly linking love and achievement.

We place our young people in a very difficult spot, telling them their fate in their own hands, but giving them few tools with which to integrate that fate into a larger, more embracing perspective.  It is hardly any wonder so many feel lost.

Mind you, I say none of this glibly. I have had my own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.  In my mid-20s, I suffered from clinical depression.  It came with a range of physical symptoms that included repetitive nightmares of rocket launches that ended in disaster, night sweats, low energy, joint pain, and an inability to walk at a normal rate.  At the same time, I lost the desire to reach out to others and began to focus very narrowly on my own needs.  Oddly, in the beginning, I felt no sadness.  It was only once I had begun to address the causes of my depression that gloom and sadness came to dominate my inner life.  I had just graduated from seminary but had been told by my diocese that I had experience to gain and marital issues to address before they would consider ordaining me.  Married only two years, my wife, a child of divorce, was struggling with fear of commitment and having second thoughts.  I was all dressed up, alone (I thought), with nowhere to go.  Somehow I had managed, initially at least, to cut off the feelings these challenges would have ordinarily brought to the fore. I suppressed the emotions, and so they took over beneath the level of consciousness.  Therapy helped me bring them to the surface, but once they emerged, I felt wretched, only exacerbating my fall inward.  I became a real pain to live with, unresponsive and self-centered, testing my wife's patience and inflaming her doubts about our marriage.  It was at this point that I started to experience "suicidal ideation," in the jargon of the psychotherapists.  Sometimes, walking along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, I would stop, stare over the guardrail, and consider hurling myself down into the docks of the East River.  (After all these years, writing this last little confession still ties my stomach in knots.)

The great turning point in my healing came not in a doctor's office or on a therapist's couch, but at an altar.  In the spring of 1985, having just received communion at St. Luke-in-the-Fields, weeping to God for help, I heard a voice in my head say, "Buy Ann a rose."  It came abruptly, as if out of nowhere.  I wasn't thinking of Ann or anything else other than my own pain.  I chose, that afternoon, to obey.  It was the first thing I had done in many months that took me out of myself, that compelled me to think of someone other than myself.  The gesture opened a door, light peered through, and I followed that light.  The voice that prompted me, I can't help but believe, came from God.  In retrospect, I am likewise convinced that it was my faith and the support of my parish church that kept me from utter despair and prevented me from following through on my thoughts of suicide.  Because of the embrace of the church, I did not lose my tenuous grip on hope.  I had to believe that God loved me, because they believed that God loved me, and that he would not abandon me. My life did have meaning and I could not squander it.

Robin Williams was, like me, an Episcopalian, a fact he incorporated into a few of his stand-up routines.  He put together a humorous list, "Ten Reasons to Be an Episcopalian," that is now used as an evangelism tool throughout the church, plastered on thousands of posters and t-shirts.  His faith was not enough to save him from taking his own life, however, perhaps because he was bi-polar.  His suffering would have been more deeply rooted in the biochemistry of the brain than mine was.  I can't really say, either, whether faith would have saved my cousin's son or my neighbor's daughter, had they been believers.  I like to think it might have.  The only thing I can say with certainty is that it did save me.