Many in the Mormon community are saddened by the recent passing of Stephen H. Webb, a well-regarded Christian theologian who worked closely in recent years with Mormon scholars. A few weeks ago, Webb wrote an article articulating the dearth of Christian theological understanding regarding depression. Theological understanding is necessary, he argued, because “no other kind of pain has such a visceral spiritual component.”
Webb’s article is not the only recent piece to highlight the religious implications of depression. Rebecca J. Clayson also addressed spiritual side effects of depression in the February 2016 Ensign. Both articles make the same point: the spiritual effects of depression mimic the spiritual effects of sin. Clayson described her experience:
I prayed constantly for heaven’s help to relieve the heaviness in my heart. When the sorrow remained, it seemed as if the Lord had abandoned me and for some reason I didn’t qualify for His love. This further fed my belief that I was unworthy of my blessings. Reading the scriptures also fueled my anxieties because each time I came across a verse that described what I felt, the passage had something to do with sin. I could not figure out what great transgression I had committed to deserve such torment, but the scriptural association of despair with iniquity seemed proof of my fallen state.
As Clayson received medical help for her depression, she was surprised to learn from others who suffered from mental illness “that they had also felt little distinction between the spiritual side effects of depression and actual unworthiness.”
The effects of sin can be treated and resolved through repentance and the Atonement. Repentance, however, does not relieve symptoms of clinical depression. Webb wrote, “The absence of anything like grace in the experience of depression means it holds a dark mirror to the healing promised in purgatory… As a kind of contrition out of control, depression can be a lesson in how close purgatory is to hell.”
The question is, then, how? How does a chemical imbalance in a mortal body have the capacity to inflict such devastating spiritual consequences?
Mormon doctrine holds some promising clues. We believe that the soul of a person is made up of both the physical body and the spirit (D&C 88:15). Since we believe all spirit is matter (D&C 131:7), it’s logical to expect the finer matter in our spiritual bodies to interact in some way with the coarser physical matter of our mortal bodies. We often attribute physical effects to spiritual manifestations (burning in the bosom and all that). We also read in scripture and church history that transfiguration, seeing visions with the spiritual eyes, can cause total exhaustion in the physical body. Clearly, the spiritual and physical aspects of our identity influence and impact the other.
President Boyd K. Packer once said, “Your body is the instrument of your mind. In your emotions, the spirit and the body come closest to being one. What you learn spiritually depends, to a degree, on how you treat your body.” He was speaking in relation to the Word of Wisdom, but there are two relevant points. First, emotion seems to be an intersection point between the spirit and the physical body. Second, the health of the physical body affects spiritual reception.
If the chemicals responsible for manifesting emotion in the physical body are misfiring, there is a problematic connection between the body and the spirit. Depression misfires are more than just restricting access to positive emotion, though. They also grossly distort negative emotion. Webb insightfully states, “The case can be made that depression is not really accurately named, since it is a state of heightened sensitivity as well as lessened energy and lowered expectations. The depressed react to fears, worries, and deprivations without any of the ordinary resources that filter and contextualize those emotions. The depressed know on some level that they are confronted with exaggerated fears, but that only makes their hypersensitivity worse.”
When two factors are necessary in interpreting data correctly (physical and spiritual), it makes sense the interpretation will be off when one factor is malfunctioning. Think of eating food when you are severely congested with a bad head cold. Since both food odor and taste together form our perception of flavor, the lack of smell will cause the flavor to seem deficient. The food is the same, the taste buds work fine, but without the normal olfactory contribution we perceive the flavor differently.
The Holy Ghost communicates with us through our spirit. If the physical body is interfering with the emotional connection between it and our spirit, we will obviously have difficulty properly receiving messages from the Holy Ghost. The perception of “radio silence” creates that disconcerting feeling of God being far away, even when He is, in reality, quite close. These ideas echo Webb’s distressing statements: “Perhaps that can serve as a theological definition of depression: When your need for God is as great as your feeling of God’s absence.” And, “The more you cry out for help, the more distant God can appear to be. This is negative theology gone deeply awry.”
As a depression survivor, this is the biggest frustration: I know God is close to the depressed individual. I know there are people around that person who love and want to help them. I know there are individuals on the other side of the veil trying as hard as they can to lift that individual and inspire them to get the help they need. And yet, I know from experience that the depressed individual is often incapable of feeling any of that.
Webb’s description of depression as purgatory is haunting and disheartening. He ends with a message painfully familiar, “The depressed wait for the long nights to end and the anguish to subside. The depressed, like Jesus during his so-called lost years, are hidden from sight, waiting for their lives to begin.”
The church created a 7-minute suicide awareness video in 2014 with some very good visual imagery of how depression feels. I recommend watching if you haven’t already.
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
That is a different perspective on a devastating problem. But the observation that the effects of depression a very much akin to the effects that sin has on a person is spot on.
I am finally beginning to understand now a part of my patriarchal blessing where it said that there would be times that it would seem that the Lord was far away and did not hear my prayers. The only solution offered was to hang on and keep praying.
Sometimes hanging on, grimly, desperately, is the only option.
Glenn
Sometimes your feelings are right. Sometimes your feelings are wrong. When your feelings are right, embrace them. When your feelings are wrong, ignore them.
“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When life hands you hemlock, don’t make hemlockade. Learn to tell the difference between a lemon and a hemlock.” — Rick Cook
Worth your time – other posts honoring the loss of Stephen H. Webb:
https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/03/08/honoring-stephen-webb/
http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/stephen-h-webb-1961-2016/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2016/03/on-depression.html
Glenn, thanks for the comment. Holding on is key, and stubborn persistence can get you very far. As you know, though, holding on in spite of the deep despair is a gargantuan effort.
Mary, I applaud your recommendation, but I don’t know that you are really addressing the primary issue. You’re more addressing “feeling down,” and as the Ensign article points out, “feeling down” is different from clinical depression. “While everyone experiences trials that can lead to feelings of sadness, loneliness, and anxiety, major depressive disorder (MDD) is different. Major depression is a mental illness that requires professional treatment and medication. Feeling down in the face of challenging life events (as opposed to having MDD) may be treated best through family and social supports, finding ways to serve others, and observing proper sleep, diet, and exercise habits. In both circumstances, though, we can seek aid through the healing, enabling, and redemptive powers of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”
I’ve used this analogy elsewhere. If depression is like morning sickness, then effectively you are claiming, since you didn’t experience it (or you had a mild form), that someone else should similarly be able to power their way through their experience. You’re standing above a woman puking her brains out and saying, “Well if you’d just have the decency to resist the urge to throw up, you’d be fine!” It’s really not all that helpful advice in that particular situation.
This is a really great post! I don’t really have much to offer constructively except to comment that it made me realize that I am not very well read on the religious work that’s been done to try to reconcile psychology and theology.
My understanding has been that these two things — psychology and theology — have been at odds (as is described in this post), but that one’s prior commitments will pick one over the others. In other words, someone who is theologically committed to free will and agency will have to discount the role of psychology, and someone who is theologically committed to a more secular, more determinist view will discount theological frameworks like sin and its proposed effects.
But I think this post is really good for showing that not only are people thinking about reconciling the two, but that there are some interesting ways to consider both from a religious perspective without dismissing or minimizing one or the other.
Very well said.
I like what Andrew says: “someone who is theologically committed to free will and agency will have to discount the role of psychology, and someone who is theologically committed to a more secular, more determinist view will discount theological frameworks like sin and its proposed effects.”
I think this is where the disconnect lies. Depression, like states of anguish, sickness, and abuse, is very common, and always has been. Primitive religions that are more determinist and fatalistic wouldn’t get perplexed about depression, but would interpret it as a normal state, along with the sorrows accompanying high mortality rates, frequent starvation, war and continual deprivation.
But Mormonism cannot find a place for depression, because it’s theology was created in a relatively prosperous post-Enlightenment world of American individualism and “the pursuit of happiness.” Spirituality has been conflated with happiness, and we are no longer seeking a “kingdom not of this world” but happiness in THIS world.
The Book of Mormon is supposed to be an ancient record, but there are many 19th century-isms in it, including: “men are that they might have joy” and “wickedness never was happiness.” While a lot of the basic teachings of the Book of Mormon can be found in the Bible, these two core teaching cannot be. They are distinctly modern views of religion.
Nate,
The interesting thing though is that some people write about depression (at least some manifestations thereof) as being a modern phenomenon. I don’t know how much I buy into that (I think I would prefer an explanation that it has always existed, but has only recently been addressed seriously), but if that is true (that depression is a relatively modern phenomenon), then we’d expect modern religions to be more able to deal with it rather than less able to deal with it.
Andrew, I’ve heard that too, and I think there might be some kinds of depression which are triggered by some of the unique characteristics of modern life, like the phenomenon of too many choices and too much freedom. But certainly, it has always existed, and can be clearly seen through the lives of writers and artists throughout the ages. And philosophy has always been preoccupied with the apparent meaninglessness of life.
I think Mormonism, as a modern religion, DOES offer an antidote to a lot of potential despondency in the modern world, by giving its members a strong sense of community, purpose, and duty. When those are lacking, I imagine depression could be even higher. Perhaps there are drawbacks however, when the sense of duty and purpose are driven by excess guilt and perfectionism.
Fascinating and essential ideas!
If we take the President Packer’s postulate “Your body is the instrument of your mind. . . What you learn spiritually depends, to a degree, on how you treat your body” and draw it out to the end conclusion, (not to “a degree”) then anytime the physical body misfires (cancer, dying, deformities, starvation, pain, injury etc.) the spiritual is also harmed or stunted. So how then do we account for the spiritual enlightenment that many cancer and near-death persons report? How do we account for the acts of charity by fellow holocaust victims or the philosophical insight of persons like Victor Frankl or Anne Frank? Of of the Apostle Paul who suffered from a ‘thorn in the flesh’? Of President Kimball with his many illnesses? Of Eliza R. Snow (whom we learned this week was a survivor of gang rape)?
How can the spirit sometimes even blossom during or after these circumstances?
I bring it up because I once heard a Sunday School lesson a few years ago where the teacher drew on Elder Packer’s conclusion that the temporal and the spiritual are inseparably linked. As a result, physical illness inevitably leads to spiritual illness. Therefore a cancer patient was inherently spiritually defunct. Conversely, the athletically talented were spiritually gifted. (The marathon runners, the champion jocks, the superstars). Additionally, those who were temporally blessed were spiritually blessed and vice versa(pure Calvinism- or ‘the righteous shall prosper in the land’ BoM theology). Ergo, all LDS leaders are righteous and rich.
Several class members objected to these conclusions.
Something in our spirit is able to rise above mortal trappings. Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’ speaks to our unconquerable souls in the fell clutch of circumstance, rising above the the black night covering us from pole to pole. We are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls.
Why can so many rise above massive physical pain, while so many struggle futilely with depression?
*I in no way blame depression victims (like myself) for not taking control of their souls, or ‘making their minds up to be happy’ (as ironically the chronic and clinically depressed Abe Lincoln believed was possible.)
I just don’t know why depression catches the spirit in ways that other physical ailments don’t.
MaryAnn,
I was going to post, but you expressed it so much better than I could have. Who knows how many have suffered and died because of the myths that “it’s your fault” and “you can power through it”. It’s not, and you can’t. If you’ve been depressed for a while (not just sad, but lethargic and uninterested in life), see your doctor right away or call up any licensed therapist and make an appointment. Don’t wait. It won’t go away, you can’t fix it yourself, and it’s not your fault in any way. There’s no shame in seeing a therapist or taking meds. In a week or two you’ll be your old self again. Bless you!
Mortimer, I think it’s the emotional health element that’s key. You can still have good emotional health even with a physically defective body (think of happy kids in children’s hospitals). With those close to death, spirits are beginning to separate from bodies, so there’s another element at play. That brings up another point – spirits theoretically feel emotion, and bodies can feel emotion from purely physical stimuli – there’s more to understand how those emotional sources contribute to each other.
Hope and surety that things will get better is typically what people attribute to retaining a positive outlook. One of the hallmark traits of depression is utter hopelessness. Being unable to feel that things will ever get better. For heaven’s sakes, that’s the goal of people committing torture, because that’s when resolve disappears – what’s the point of fighting if nothing will ever change? There *has* to be something to hang on to.
In the past, religiously, people would blame despair and hopelessness to evil spirits or sin – pretty similar to what I hear from a lot of members today. With the doctrine of agency, we theoretically *should* have capability to have full control of thoughts and bridling emotions. But just as people sometimes have limitations on function of limbs and organs, mental illness clearly influences agency of the mind.
When I first went on antidepressants, I was very disturbed that those little pills could affect my emotions as much as they did. Knowing how much spiritual manifestations utilize emotion, I began to wonder whether my spiritual experiences were really “legitimate,” or just my brain playing tricks. In recent years as I’ve switched to a different type of medication with a more accurate medical diagnosis, I’ve noticed an even more stark difference. There is a massive level of interplay between the physical chemicals involved in emotion and how we receive and interpret spiritual manifestations.
Mary Ann,
Emotional health may be the key. Is emotional health a result of spiritual health?
There is much in Buddhist philosophy about learning to separate temporal pain from the observer (spirit) inside, that suffering is ubiquitous in this life but that the spirit can observe, not experience it. Perhaps there is something for Mormonism to learn from Buddhism and Eastern meditative practices?
Andrew,
Clearly, clinical depression isn’t a modern phenomenon. It’s as old as humanity, and, for that matter, pre-dates human beings. Non-humans suffer from depression and are treated with some of the same drugs. It is true that effective treatments for depression didn’t exist until the mid-1900’s.
Here’s the first link that popped up when I googled history of clinical depression. I scanned it, and it’s pretty good:
http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?&id=12995&cn=5
MaryAnn,
At one time there was discussion of a “God spot” in the brain as the origin of spiritual experiences. Later research indicates a neurological origin, but less centralized.
http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2012/0418-distinct-“god-spot”-in-the-brain-does-not-exist-mu-researcher-says/
I seem to remember some research aimed at triggering spiritual experiences through direct electrical stimulation and also external application of weak magnetic fields. The latter was called the “God helmet”.
And, of course, spiritual experiences can be artificially induced by eating psilocybin mushrooms.
In short, spiritual and mystic feelings plainly do have a neurophysical origin, as does clinical depression.
Bad spiritual health is caused by sin. Bad emotional health has clearly physical components, yet depression (just *one* type of bad emotional health) mimics bad spiritual health. Like sicknesses caused by viruses or bacteria – can share same symptoms but different root cause requires different treatment.
Bipolar mania can make people feel like God and have hallucinations – definitely not masking as effects of sin, but it’s opposite. (To clarify, the communication between the spirit and body would still be off – the hypersensitivity to positive emotions would similarly warp or prohibit clear messages from getting into the body. The lack of communication with the spirit combined with insensitivity towards negative emotions would essentially eliminate comprehension of sin or inappropriate behavior. Where with depression you cannot feel any spiritually positive effect from uplifting spiritual activities, with mania you would not feel spiritually negative effects from inappropriate activites.)
This past Sunday during EQ someone commented that his mission president taught them that if they were discouraged or depressed the first thing they needed to do was repent, because the Gospel (and teaching it) as a blessing of joy. While I quickly reminded everyone that depression is real and not a sin, based on some of the other comments I am not sure that I persuaded very many people. Alas this is the attitude of far too many members.
>When I first went on antidepressants, I was very disturbed that those little pills could affect my emotions as much as they did. Knowing how much spiritual manifestations utilize emotion, I began to wonder whether my spiritual experiences were really “legitimate,” or just my brain playing tricks. In recent years as I’ve switched to a different type of medication with a more accurate medical diagnosis, I’ve noticed an even more stark difference. There is a massive level of interplay between the physical chemicals involved in emotion and how we receive and interpret spiritual manifestations.
If I may ask, when you began to wonder if your spiritual experiences were legitimate, do you mean that there was a concern the experiences could have been a side effect of the prescription, a healing emotional system, a healing brain, or something else? I am curious because I know it can also go the other way.
It was my experience that most of the prescription medicines for my conditions, in this case seizures and memory loss (and any of the other various mental health symptoms related to the seizures and memory loss), actually made it very hard to feel and recognize the Spirit. Not just the emotional interactions and responses to the Spirit, but those moments of light, truth, intelligence, inspiration, and intuition. This was very true when there was an attempt to treat the seizures as a result of anxiety. Although to some degree or another the various prescriptions I was on for seventeen-eighteen some odd years dulled my ability to sense the Spirit, in my case anti-anxiety meds were the most extreme example of this. I also know that sometimes these same meds are used for depression, and in one case schizophrenia. I know mine isn’t everyone’s experience, and I hope that more people have more positive outcomes like yours (I am assuming, you just pointed out the difference, not if it was positive or not). I do have to wonder though, if there aren’t others who are struggling with feelings of unworthiness and lack of spiritual contact, even though they are doing “all they should” —taking meds, seeing doctors, counseling, church, staying as physically and spiritually active as they can endure, and so on, and so on, and so on—could benefit from a reassessment of the side effects upon them, readjustment of the dosing, a change of prescription, or a different path altogether? And none of that can happen over night. Interaction with the Spirit can facilitate and assist with healing, and this can complicated when the healing that must be done is in the realm of mental health. I wish we knew more about the positive, adverse, and/or neutral effects of prescriptions upon spiritual receptivity and emotional interplay and response. Now that is the kind of science that it would be awesome to see BYU leading the way in.
Looking back, I feel, with hindsight of course, that there was one situation that could have been handled better by both the doctor and patient. One of the last doctors I ended up working with happened to be LDS, and had been my EQ president, and was then a Bishop in a different ward. This should have allowed for a more frank discussion about the effects the meds were having on my spirituality, and yet it wasn’t that way at all, in fact he pretty much dismissed those concerns with a “being physically healthier will improve your spirituality, these pills will improve your health, therefore you will be spiritually healthier.” By then I had pretty much given up, so I didn’t see how stupid the dismissal of my concerns was.
Borrowing some else’s thoughts:
Being LDS doesn’t improve mental health anymore. And it did 40 years ago. That is a huge and significant trend.
Within the last 40 years, the church took the socialization culture away from the wards, dumbed down the Sunday doctrinal lessons, made the church all about RULES, BLIND OBEDIENCE, and FOLLOW THE PROPHET.
They increased the pressures to narrowly conform while the larger U.S. Culture was becoming more open.
It isn’t a surprise to me that people feel mentally pressured.
Good article, but I am also suspicious of any implication that depression (or mental illness in general) is linked with sin, or sinful behavior. The idea that my depression is the result of sinning, whether by commission or omission, serves only to drive the cycle of depression further. Also, suggesting repentance or the atonement as the ultimate source of healing implies that the depressed person must have sinned in the first place, or that he/she is not “praying hard enough”, etc.; also not always helpful. I get that the OP was suggesting that depression is a kind of “phantom sin” condition, but anytime sin and depression are mentioned together, well, that’s part of the problem. We humans are naturally bad at separating people from behaviors when forming character judgments.
I’ve suffered from depression for years, but I was only able to begin to manage it by breaking away from traditional Mormon narratives about mental health, and NOT by doubling down on them (that only whipped up anxiety and more depression). I still occasionally hear lessons at Church suggesting that depression comes from Satan, or is only the direct result of sin, you can choose to be happy, or other such ideas that are patently false, or perhaps just ignorant.
I’m intrigued by these ideas about where spirituality intersects with the mind, and the spiritual implications of depression, but I still find little comfort in the information that comes from official Church communication channels, even nowadays. There is still so much we don’t know. But I do know that spiritual feelings, just like emotions or physical sensations, can be manipulated.
Forgetting, awesome points. Believe it or not, I’ve tried to make this response as short as possible.
-Like you pointed out, our spirit has interaction with both mind (intelligence, inspiration) and heart (I see intuition under heart, since it’s knowledge without obvious logic).
-Everyone knows that fluctuating hormones (chemicals) affect emotions.
-Stereotypically, men rely more on logic, women rely more on emotion. I buck that stereotype, so observing the hormonal effect on my emotions was embarrassing.
-My first major depressive episode was after childbirth. The depression lasted months before my husband convinced me I met all criteria for medical depression. The SSRI antidepressants cleared out negative thoughts, allowed more energy, and lessened the severity of negative emotions. As I’d think about the Rx, I’d wonder if my emotions were “legitimate” (logically proportional to outside stimuli), or just biological processes gone awry. As I looked back on past spiritual experiences that had been tied to intense emotions, I began to wonder if I had accurately identified the Spirit, or if the chemicals in my body had just gone haywire. LUCKILY, since I’m naturally more logical, the vast majority of my spiritual manifestations are in the mind. Since the antidepressants allowed me clarity of thought, I felt I still had trustworthy access to the Spirit, and could sense God’s presence in my life. (If the Rx had impacted clarity of thought, it would’ve been a different situation.)
-The antidepressants dampened my emotion, but I was distrustful of emotion anyway. Other women I knew hated being on SSRI antidepressants. I think emotion was a much bigger part of how they interpreted the world and how they felt the Spirit. By numbing the emotions, the Rx interfered with their spiritual access, so they felt more comfortable treating depression through talk therapy or other methods.
-I felt as long as I wasn’t semi-comatose and having suicidal thoughts, life was pretty awesome. Other people noticed that I didn’t cry when feeling the Spirit – I’d feel happy and energetic, though. Church friends would joke that they wanted to see me cry, but that wasn’t really funny. Crying meant that I was in a really bad place.
-Over the years (about a decade), the antidepressants became less and less effective. Sinking into the darker moods began to overpower my mind as well, so I had a lot more trouble spiritually connecting. Several other church factors ended up playing a big role in both my emotional and mental breaking point, pushing me to therapy (I knew my problem was chemically based, so I never felt talk therapy to be useful). I was worried when I was assigned to a therapist who refused to prescribe meds, but within a couple months she agreed my problem was inherently chemical, and I was on the wrong meds. I went on mood stabilizers and it floored my husband and I how much things changed.
-I had *positive* emotions. Joy and excitement for life – emotions that I didn’t realize had been absent for years. They were overwhelming for several months until my body became more used to them. I started crying for happy reasons like normal people. And I began to feel something that I eventually realized was the Spirit connecting with my heart.
-That’s why I’m convinced that mental/emotional health is critical to accurately feeling promptings of the Spirit. If the spirit is having to access certain biological channels in order to get messages across, it makes a LOT of sense why those spiritual sensations can be duplicated or messed around with by scientists, biological malfunction, or drugs.
-I agree with your point about side effects – they can definitely cloud thought and emotion, making spiritual interaction more difficult.
Jack, I also am hesitant to tie sin to depression, but I hoped to make it clear that spiritual effects of depression mimic the spiritual effects of sin – meaning, you are feeling effects of sin *without* actually sinning. That’s why using repentance doesn’t work. It’s not fixing the real problem.
The church is getting better about separating mental illness from sin, but the “feeling down” vs. major depression section in the Ensign article still sends across mixed messages. Since you access the Atonement to help you find comfort in sickness and grief, they encourage you to seek the help of the Atonement in addition to medical help for mental illness. But since we use the same shortcut word “Atonement” to refer to repentance, it’s still way too easy for people to assume mentally ill people are having trouble with the Spirit due to sin.
When talking about mental illness, almost everyone quotes Holland’s “Like a Broken Vessel” talk. It’s the *only* address that targets mental illness as a real illness – not something you just power through, but something you seek medical help for. We really don’t talk about mental illness in church, and I still have to remind teachers way too often that happiness is not always something that you have an ability to choose. Sometimes you need medical help to get to that point where you have that agency again. (And one time was 5 weeks after a suicide had occurred in the ward – it was bizarre that no-one seemed to be picking up on the problematic message.)
In Alma we read that Wickedness never was happiness but that doesn’t mean all unhappiness comes from sin. To me it just means that doing wicked things won’t make you happy or A=B but B doesn’t equal A, we can be unhappy for a host of reasons none of which have anything to do with unrighteousness. I remember in the mission field it was hammered that if you were righteous you’d be baptizing but you aren’t so go home and find out what is wrong with you and welcome to being extremely self concious. Now I think differently about that. I’m sure God wasn’t unrighteous when 1/3 of his children followed the Devil.
Not sure whose thoughts Stephen Marsh is borrowing, but I disagree that being LDS improved mental health 40 years ago (OK, 37 years ago, but whose counting?). The link is a transcript of Louise Degn’s award-winning 1979 documentary titled “Mormon Women and Depression.”
Click to access 049-19-27.pdf
I’ve got to agree with Last Lemming – I highly doubt the social programs would be the major cause, but it could be a contributing factor.
Two depression factors listed on the Mayo clinic website heightened in a general Mormon population:
-“Certain personality traits, such as low self-esteem and being too dependent, self-critical or pessimistic” – the perfectionist culture could aggravate a condition if someone already had an overly self-critical personality trait. Encouraging us to better closely examine our deficiencies (Lord, is it I?) and taking responsibility for choosing to have happy feelings wouldn’t help.
-“Blood relatives with a history of depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism or suicide” – Mormons in the Intermountain West share a significant gene pool. My genetic lines that have bipolar disorder, depression, and alcoholism are *all* Mormon pioneer lines – and they happen to be those massive polygamous families with thousands of descendants.
Crazy enough, scientists are doing research with the idea that less oxygen at higher altitudes is related to higher prevalence of depression (and suicide) in the Intermountain West. The lower oxygen also makes SSRI anti-depressants less effective. This article even states that females in particular would be hit harder by these factors: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865625140/Are-anti-depression-drugs-as-effective-in-Utahs-high-altitude.html?pg=all
Many factors could be contributing to the problem.
Church always makes me feel worse because all talks and lessons focus on how much we suck. Lectures about tithing and fast offerings, rescuing and missionary work, serving in the temple, home and visiting teaching. Relief Society was the worse. How can I feel the Savior’s love if I am told I am unworthy and useless because I can’t live up to thses standards?
Once the Stake President spoke to us so harshly about not doing enough to reactivate members. This was a particular sore spot for me because of a lot of effort my spouse and I had ut into befriending a family. It was followed up by a nasty lecture that the priesthood weren’t doing enough for the single women in the ward.
Mary Ann, I’ve seen the studies with altitude. In addition, there is some indication that less light (from the mountains cutting off sunrise and sunset) also leads to more depression. As we have gone to sunblock and no tanning, we are much more likely to have low vitamin D.
In 1961 Church headquarters announced a new program that it called “Correlation.” This new way of doing things was introduced in conference by apostle Harold B. Lee. It was described as a benefit, sold as a way to coordinate and unify all the various programs of the church. …
Correlation represented a gradual and subtle shift in the way the church came to be governed at all levels. What it resulted in was top-down control of the church and its members. Like the frog in the pot, few members really noticed what was happening to their church until it was fully cooked.
Gone by this time were the Roadshows, because the central authority couldn’t trust us hippie teenagers not to write some funny bit into the script that someone might find inappropriate. Gone also were the fun church bazaars, rummage sales, and pancake breakfasts. With them went many of the extracurricular activities, other than scouting and some tightly controlled dances.
-Rock Waterman “How Corporatism Has Undermined and Subverted The Church of Jesus Christ”
Stephen,
I studied German in school, and I remember my prof explaining the word “föhn” we encountered in a Thomas Mann novella: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
My wife and I had the experience of living and working in the valley for 4 years or so. While the inversions are noticeable, there seemed to us to be a sort of “fug” that hung over the place, inversions aside. We were never sure if it came from the air, the weather, or possibly even the culture(!). Either way, moving away was like a breath of fresh air–literally and figuratively. Both of us cheered up considerably after leaving the place.
I wonder how much modern societies contribute to depression. I remember a freakonomics episode that noted primitive societies who deal with death constantly, instead of the modern stresses of a40 hour work week, have virtually no depression or suicide. There was the story of a guy whose brother commit suicide. He told a primitive tribes man and the tribesman laughed. Why would someone kill themselves? It was such a foreign concept. A man who struggles to survive every day just to get enough food to eat and avoid cholera and other illnesses, just couldn’t fathom why someone would take their own life.
As I recall, freak onomics came to the conclusion that depression and suicide is the cost of having an advanced Society.