The main thing we get wrong about anxiety and depression

Society at large, and even individuals who should know better, get mental illness wrong to this main degree: the individual who suffers the malady is pathologized.  It’s all too easy for an all-knowing world to look on and think it knows what’s going on within the one who battles anxiety and depression, but this world forgets the SYSTEM that is suffering.

Suffering is always circumstantial.  A person is tipped into crisis, and they respond in generally one of two ways, resilience or capitulation.  Often resilience occurs after a period of capitulation, but not always, and sometimes capitulation occurs after resilience, or staying strong for too long.

Anyone who has responded via resilience will have felt the echo of grace impelling them forward — if they’re honest.  Few people can take credit for strength to respond well.  It is so often a grace that is given — an inside job we cannot explain.  This is known when the person, having been ‘strong’ all their lives, is suddenly brought to their knees, and the event is catastrophic.

Now, Christians especially have been known to peddle the unhelpful myth, “Your true character comes out under pressure.”  It sounds good, but it’s unhelpful at best and harmful at its worst.

The truth is, when your world has crumbled you cannot be expected to respond well, nor consistently. With support and many resources, you can.  Help is needed.

Someone has their home burned to the ground, and in their weakest moment, when grief sets in — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, the most shocking case of dread — as it will very often, and an onlooker has the audacity to say, “This will make you stronger... you’re only as strong as your weakest response.”

There are so many levels of loss in that one event that it would level every one of us.

Much of what we see as anxiety and depression is loss and grief and change disguised.

What is seen is the symptom — the shocking dread or the listlessness that can’t be shaken.  We completely negate the cause — those life circumstances that would challenge any one of us.

Those who are not beset by such challenges may go on and deny the reality as much as they please, but the fact is some do SEEM more ‘blessed’ than others.  Some will say, “You make your own fortune, and wisdom will be the best part of it.”  It’s true to a certain degree.  Well, until it isn’t.

If the main thing that everyone gets wrong about anxiety and depression is, they don’t cater for how circumstantial grief and loss are, anyone who gets entrapped in the circumstances of loss and grief will soon find they’re convinced.

I can tell you now, there is a precipice, a divide, between one half of humanity and the other.  Once loss grips you, it changes you in an instant, but until it does you have no idea.  And many who have no idea truly don’t understand how fickle life can be.

Those who don’t understand may one day be blindsided by a grief that switches on within them the struggle of anxiety and depression.

When it occurs, it’s a gift of insight bestowed through pain.  Nobody wants it.  But it does awaken a soul to the depths of grief available for anyone trapped within its truth.

The best thing about having been blindsided at least once; the eyes of the heart are opened, empathy becomes tangible, the life course is deepened, and you begin to feel the fullness of the true abundant life that is eternal.

Photo by Pablo Basagoiti on Unsplash