Depression

Depression is actually selfishness and an unwillingness to get better.  Some have defined depression as "learned helplessness."  So instead of learning how to help yourself, you learn how to never help yourself. 

Most say it has a medical explanation.  That serotonin levels drop.  But one's serotonin can simply be raised by walking every day. 

Did you know just walking 30 minutes every day is the same as taking an anti-depressant?  It literally has exactly the same effect on the body. 

But doctors/psychologists want you to think if you have depression they are the only ones that can fix you.  That simply is NOT true.  You can fix yourself, if you really want to.  If you want to get better, you can.  Simply by eating better and walking every day.  And by changing the way you think and letting God transform your mind so that you think more positively about everything.  If you change your thinking you will change your attitude. 

There is a story of a man by a pool side and Jesus asks him if he wants to get well, which seems odd, of course he wants to get well right?

But sometimes people don't really want to get well.  They like their sickness; they actually like their misery.  They like people to feel sorry for them.  They like their bondage.  Some people actually like having a disability of some kind because they can use it to manipulate others and get whatever they want from them.  And so then when others try to help the mentally or emotionally disabled person that's why it doesn't work.  They enjoy their sickness and want to stay in it, because it's comfortable, because it has been advantageous and worked for them for so long.  You can't help someone who doesn't want to help themselves.  Don't try to save someone who is drowning but actually wants to be drowning or you too may drown with them in trying to save them.  Try to only be around people who are always wanting to get better and become more healthy. 

Depression comes from an inability to move on, from being stuck in your past.  It is a refusal to never move on from a certain event or memory.  Depression is not letting yourself forget the past so you can live in the present.  As long as you are still living in the past, you cannot really be in the present. 

Scripture on this, "Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past."  And Paul says, "Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal."

Depression is a kind of mentally giving up on life.  It is sitting down when you need to keep walking.  It's folding too early in the game.  It's sitting on the sidelines when you still need to be in the game.  It's cutting your legs out from underneath you so that you can't walk anymore.

It is self-imposed torture.

Often depression comes from an inability for forgive either yourself or someone else in your past.  In which case it is bitterness and that is sin.  As long as you hold onto bitterness that bitterness has power over you, you open a door for Satan to have power over you. 

Depression is self destructive.  It is a way to slowly kill yourself, emotionally.  Most people who are depressed hate themselves.  But hating oneself is not ok just because it is yourself.  God still created you and loves you and wants you to love and care for yourself.  Hating yourself is no different than hating another person in God's eyes. 

Depression is to give up the desire to be alive anymore.  Some say suicide is the most selfish thing someone can do, because you are only thinking about yourself and not those you might leave behind.  Depression is the second most selfish act a person can do, because it is to emotionally shut down to those around you.  You shut yourself off from others so that you are there but not really there.  Your well is dried up.  No one can get anything from you.  It is also to cut yourself off from the eternal source of living water as well; you stop letting God help you and comfort you.  You isolate and feel sorry for yourself.   You say no to everything and everyone in the world.

But God wants to bring us back to life!  Like the valley of dry bones he can resurrect things that seem dead.  He can bring a dead heart back to life.  He can restore and heal the broken hearted.  But we have to really believe that he can.  And we have to trust him, with all that we are. :)

How does God heal us?  Through time alone with him and through other people.  But we have to let other people in.  Take the walls down and let others in, and watch the depression melt away.  If you want God to heal you, he will.  :)