- You know that's a very common question
and I hear two very common types of answers
both of which are very unhelpful honestly.
And one of type of answer is an unthinking yes
and another answer is an unthinking no.
And both an unthinking yes and an unthinking no
suffer from the same mistake,
and that is they tend to make a division between
the response of depression as merely physical
or as merely spiritual.
Where Scripture makes it very clear to us
that God intentionally and beautifully made us
to be embodied souls,
meaning we have a spiritual or immaterial component
and a physical or material component
and those two aspects of our personhood
are both operating in any response that we have to the world
and depression is a response to the world.
So let me first mention the dangers
of an unthinking yes.
An unthinking yes, it says yeah, of course,
antidepressants are good thing for a Christian to take.
Well a lot of times that's driven by
the assumptions of the culture around us
that does not see a spiritual aspect of their experience.
And so, the thinking is basically,
we are biological beings,
so if there's something wrong in our perceptions,
it is merely a biological reality, a physical reality.
So we try to fix that physically.
And so, we do so through
various types of psychiatric medications
and different families of meds do different things
and the thought is, if we can sort of
bring order to what is physically disordered,
then we have solved although
a lot of people will try to avoid that over save
and they don't say solved,
but they'll say to remedy the problem.
So far more than just merely a physical response.
Depression is a spiritual response meaning
it's our attempt to attribute some kind of meaning to
the experience or the situations around us.
There is something we perceive spiritually.
We perceive as lacking or a hope that we had
placed in something that failed us
and so it's a testimony to how we perceive the world
that goes beyond just brain chemistry.
So on top of all of this,
you have to consider how
the psychiatric, medical industry works
specifically the medication industry.
I have friends who are psychiatrists
and they tell me that with the increasing pressures
of just how the healthcare system works,
they have to see more and more people an hour
in order to keep the lights on
which forces diagnosis and prescription to be
shorter and shorter.
There's less actual exploration like they want to do.
And these are good people trying to do a really good job
and there's just a lot of difficulty logistically.
Through the process of interpreting someone's words
about the symptoms they're describing and then
coming up with the proper medical solution.
Another reality in the industry
is direct to consumer marketing.
So we are being told stories
on television between football games or baseball games
about different meds that can help you with
particular problems in your life.
And you know, you watch those commercials
and they tell a really compelling story.
I want to feel better
and then they're offering you a solution.
Just go talk to your doctor about that solution
is what they're telling you by the end.
And so it just creates expectations
that I think narrow our understanding of depression
to the physical side of things in a way
that we don't realize is sort of shaping
our instinctive responses
if someone comes and tells us about depression.
You know, the average North American I think
is going to be quick to think
well, he needs to be on medication.
That's what I mean by an unthinking yes.
It's not the whole picture to think that way.
So now let me talk about the danger of an unthinking no
to that question of
Is it okay for Christians to use psychiatric meds?
The danger of that one
in just saying flat out no in a simplistic way,
is that the implication is then,
we can control our spiritual agency, our functions,
totally independent of it detached from
the bodily realities that God designed us to have.
And that's just not a Christian view of the person.
We're not a ghost in a machine
that kind of hovers around the machine for this world
until death when we get to go soaring into heaven.
We're embodied beings and we're going to be embodied beings
in our final state.
It's a good thing that God designed us for.
So God's care for us, even as you read in Scripture
in various places,
God's care is spiritual in its focus
but it's also physical as a holistic care.
I think of the despondent Elijah in 1 Kings 19
and when he's just wanting to die,
he's so in the pits.
God speaks to him, words that he needs to attribute
new meaning to his situation,
words that are true of God and what He's up to.
But He also feeds him,
an angel actually feeds him.
So, psychiatric medications aren't equivalent to
feeding someone.
I've heard people make that analogy.
I don't think that's a helpful analogy.
I'm just simply trying to establish the point
that God's care for us
is not just an other worldly, spiritual type of care.
It's a care that can contain our physical needs as well.
So how do we understand that principle
specifically for psychiatric meds?
Well, we have to bring in another
sort of theological element to understand it
and that's what's introduced in Genesis 3,
the fall of mankind.
So, Adam and Eve disobeyed God
and in disobeying God and failing to believe His promises
and His words,
instead believing the serpent's.
They brought into the world
and into their own experience,
a corruption, many effects of sin.
And if you actually read the narrative for how it's told,
it's described as a spiritual corruption,
there's spiritual effects of the fall
but there's also physical effects.
So the spiritual effects were immediately they felt shame,
they felt fear.
They dove into the bushes to hide from God.
They started blaming each other.
In other words, they're estranged from each other,
they're estranged from God
but then they're also estranged from creation.
And so part of God's curse was
now the ground is going to be against you.
Now, your childbirth is going to be hard.
It's not just that the curse applies to farming
and to child labor,
it's that now there's a principle
that the physical world is touched with dysfunction.
It doesn't work how it's supposed to work.
And so that applies to the larger creation
like, this is why tornadoes happen.
It also applies to our own physical bodies
as part of creation.
So what that can mean is,
Christian theology has plenty of room to acknowledge
that there can be very fundamentally dysfunctional things
that can go on inside of us,
including our brains.
So how do we understand depression as an aspect of
the effects of the fall?
So it's a spiritual and a physical response.
It's a spiritual response in that
we are hoping in the wrong things
and those hopes have failed us.
We're not seeing the world from God's perspective.
We're insisting that our narrow view of things
is the truest view of things.
Those are spiritual issues.
And I actually think
that the people who give a simplistic no
to the med question,
are trying to preserve that and honor that the Bible
places the onus of responsibility on that.
So I appreciate that but I think it fails to
have a fully Christian picture of
depression is also in part a physical response
because we're physical beings
and that is a corrupted reality.
So, brains don't work how they're supposed to work
and it's not that everyone's brain
is affected in exactly the same way.
And it's not always that even in cases where
because of the extremity of the symptoms,
we are confident that there's a physiological influence.
It's not always that we can trace that.
We can't trace the causation of it all the time.
But we don't need to necessarily
in order to simply acknowledge for now
that physical corruption can be part of
the response of depression.
So, antidepressants can in some situations
be a helpful stabilizer of the physical aspects of things
in order to do the spiritual work of pursuing the Lord.
It's no more and no less than that.
So when I say no more than that,
I simply mean a really good psychiatrist
and I know many,
they know the limits of their practice.
They know what they're doing.
They're working on the chemical reactions of the brain
that have established themselves as patterns
in this person's life.
And that's the extent of what they're doing.
They aren't crossing into the deeper heart issues
of perceiving the world in ways
that God perceives it.
And in entrusting our hearts to God,
who is doing something deeper and broader
than simply what our brain are,
or what our bodies are doing in any given moment.
And so, it's no more than that
but it's also no less than that.
There are times where in ministry,
it becomes clear that someone is just caught in a rut,
whether through just a habituated response
or whether through some other untraceable causation.
The physical body, the physiology is so clearly
a strong influence on it
that a really good, wise doctor
can do a lot of good in setting them up
to be able to function well and rightly.
Well I imagine that some people who clicked on this video,
having seen the title,
Is it okay for Christians to take antidepressants,
were a bit puzzled, maybe even offended
by the fact that the question was even being asked.
Yes of course it's okay.
Well my hope is that this answer
helps you have a more robust biblical understanding of
how antidepressants can be used
as part of addressing the overall response of depression
that involves both the spiritual
and the physical aspect.
And not to just say yes because we've adopted
the culture's understanding,
narrow understanding of how psychiatric meds
ought to be used.
But then, there's others who might be watching this
who have always felt a bit tenuous about the fact
that maybe they're on antidepressants,
maybe they feel guilty for that.
I would just encourage you to realize
that God is doing a deeper work than that issue
in your life.
And sometimes depression is one of the best ways
we see our own weakness
and I've just, in a number of folks I've counseled,
them having to take meds,
was sort of this step of realization
of just how weak they are.
And that actually led to a lot of spiritual good for them.
So I would just encourage you,
don't waste your efforts spinning around in guilt.
Instead, pursue the Lord, Jesus Christ.
And so, for anybody watching this,
that's the main advice I would land on.
You need to take care of your soul
and you need to take care of your body.
Take care of your soul by availing yourselves of the means
that God gave you to take care of your soul,
His word, prayer, the Church,
fellowship with other Christians.
Those have everything to do
with how you respond to the world.
They form you and shape you.
They help you see yourself rightly.
They help you see God rightly, most importantly
so that the things that occur to you,
that might have otherwise been very depressing
and debilitating to you, they're less so.
So take care of your soul
but also take care of your body.
You should regularly be talking to your doctor.
And even a part from this specifically,
the psychiatric med question,
there are broader and more basic things
that we ought to be doing for your health.
We ought to be regularly sleeping and eating well.
We ought to be exercising.
We ought to be having mental breaks that allow us to
recreate in the mind and not just be focused on
problems and troubles all the time.
There's a number of the basics that we often overlook
in order to get to what's seemingly the more complex
but quicker way of solving things.
So take care of your soul and take care of your body
and that's part of how you steward who you are
before the Lord in your following of Christ.
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