Category Archives: book reviews

Devotions and Book(s)

I am really doing a lot of writing right now. Tragically it’s not here. But this is another way you can help the cause.

One of the things I have completely missed is any kind of theological treatise on suffering that would help the Christian understand how suffering fits into the Christian life. I know there’s a bazillion things out there. What’s the best?

In connection with this, what are the best books/articles any of you have read on depression? What are the worst?

Have any of you run across any devotional booklets that were actually helpful? (I’m thinking about another project here.)

Thanks for any input you can give

The Second Book I've Read: Prozac Nation

Ten years ago or so, this book, Prozac Nation, was the hot ticket. Written by a young up-and-coming female writer, it was hailed as fresh and innovative, courageous, raw, and a bunch of other nice things. It was a part of a genre of self-disclosure that was (and is) extremely popular. But written just a few years after William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, this book was written for the young and the restless. Lots of colorful language, a few titillating references to sex, and sort of a super-extension of teenage angst, the book had everything that other books of the genre lacked. It had a movie made about it. It was a bestseller, and so forth.

When I first read this book, early on into my illness, I found it liberating and deeply moving. It described what I couldn’t. Despite the sometimes whiny voice, it served an important purpose for me in understanding what I was going through. I wasn’t crazy; I had a mental illness.

I’ve read it again, and my views on the book are very different. It does describe the state of depression well. It does describe the roller coaster of medications pretty well also. It was, however, written at a time when Prozac was the first of a panoply of anti-depressants to come on the market. In many respects this is better, as more people have more options for healing. But this phenomenon has also added the maddening factor of doctors bouncing you from drug to drug, seeking to find the magic cocktail that will be the right fit. It can be a profounding frustrating and, well, depressing experience.

Back to Prozac Nation. After reading Styron’s book above, and others (which I’ll get to in due time), I find that Wurtzel is not as helpful as other memoir-type books of the genre. One of the dangers of reading memoirs like this while you’re in the midst of the illness is that it can give you ideas, prey upon your already overactive anxieties, and create a mental state which may not have been there at the start. It’s usefulness for those suffering from depression and anxiety comes more as an afterward than as a self-diagnostic tool.

Now what I do find extremely useful in this book is how it chronicles all of the different types of self-medicating that we go through. Alcohol (the pastor’s choice most of the time), uppers and downers of various sorts, over-the-counter drugs, sex, relationships. We can use almost anything as a narcotic against the creeping darkness and the coming fog. They are all attempts to escape from our lives, or to feel SOMETHING so that we can know we are still human. In that respect it is helpful

Completely lacking in the book, though, is any real interaction with the spiritual element of depression and anxiety. Wurtzel is basically a non-practicing Jew, where religion and spirituality of any sort plays no part in her worldview. That is helpful to recognize at the outset, but that also means that the Christian suffering from depression and anxiety is going to find this book completely lacking in one of the key elements of their suffering. It is a picture of the disease, but it is not a complete picture.

If someone were to ask me today what book could I read to describe what I’ve gone through, I’d probably give them Darkness Visible, because it fits my own experience closer than Wurtzel. However, I would also tell them that there isn’t anything out there that I’ve read which really nails it completely, so they’ll have to wait for the book…

-DMR

One of Two Books I've Read on Depression: Speaking of Sadness


Over the last year or more I’ve read a number of books on or about depression in different ways. When I could concentrate enough to read. Two books I read early on I’ve mean to write about for some time. Here is the first one. The second will follow:

Speaking of Sadness
By David A. Karp

Karp is a sociology professor at Boston College. He is not a Christian (neither is the other writer). However, Dr. Karp’s book is profound. He has suffered from depression himself, and so the book is part auto-biographical, part sociology, and part explanation of what is happening to you and how others around you are reacting to it.

Some of the topics he discusses are disconnection, illness as identity, medication, coping, family, and depression’s impact on our society. It was probably the sections on disconnection and illness as identity that were the most useful to me. Depression forces one to withdraw into yourself. You shrink, so that you feel like you are in a deep dark hole and can only barely see out at all. Friends fall by the wayside, family even. Many a divorce has had depression as one of the chief causes. So to understand how and why this disconnection is happening is quite important.

Perhaps equally important is the concept of illness as identity. I remember having a conversation with my wife’s brother once. He said that he hated being called a diabetic. He had diabetes. In his mind, the illness did not define him, and so he wanted to create separation between himself and the illness. That can be done with physical diseases and illnesses to some degree. No one says “I am a flu-er”, you say you have the flu. Even this has it’s limits. Paraplegic. Diabetic. These are but a couple examples of where the illness is incorporated socially into the identity of a person.

But with mental illness it is different. Because depression and mental illness are so invasive, because we can’t seem to separate our minds from ourselves, depression quickly gloms itself on to the identity. You are marked as unclean or not quite right in the head. There is a social stigma that goes along with depression. Are you trustworthy, or will you just crash? Jobs, family, church, all of these areas an more can make depression become a part of you. I am surprised that no one has coined a term like “I am a depressionic” or something to that effect. Karp addresses this phenomenon with a great deal of insight.

Now where is the Gospel in a secular book like this? There isn’t any, directly. He goes through the journey down into the valley and back up again. It is descriptive, with many helpful insights along the way. I would highly recommend this book, for example, to anyone suffering from depression and especially to their family. It is very good for understanding this. What he doesn’t do (and I have yet to find) is a real treatment of the relationship between mental illness and faith. How is it that I can cry, “I trust when dark my road” and yet mentally not believe there is a future for me? Is the mind the sole place for faith, so that if my mind isn’t right, it must mean my faith isn’t right?

God forbid. Faith is a gift, not an achievement. It is a gift that God continues to give, no matter how difficult the circumstances. In fact, the harder it is, the sweeter God’s gift will become. Even if you don’t feel it. Even if you can’t see past the next fifteen minutes. That doesn’t mean God abandons you. It means that he is hidden for a time so that He may reveal Himself more fully to us at the proper time. There is hope. There is a future. There is a Messiah who comes.

-DMR

One of Two Books I've Read on Depression: Speaking of Sadness


Over the last year or more I’ve read a number of books on or about depression in different ways. When I could concentrate enough to read. Two books I read early on I’ve mean to write about for some time. Here is the first one. The second will follow:

Speaking of Sadness
By David A. Karp

Karp is a sociology professor at Boston College. He is not a Christian (neither is the other writer). However, Dr. Karp’s book is profound. He has suffered from depression himself, and so the book is part auto-biographical, part sociology, and part explanation of what is happening to you and how others around you are reacting to it.

Some of the topics he discusses are disconnection, illness as identity, medication, coping, family, and depression’s impact on our society. It was probably the sections on disconnection and illness as identity that were the most useful to me. Depression forces one to withdraw into yourself. You shrink, so that you feel like you are in a deep dark hole and can only barely see out at all. Friends fall by the wayside, family even. Many a divorce has had depression as one of the chief causes. So to understand how and why this disconnection is happening is quite important.

Perhaps equally important is the concept of illness as identity. I remember having a conversation with my wife’s brother once. He said that he hated being called a diabetic. He had diabetes. In his mind, the illness did not define him, and so he wanted to create separation between himself and the illness. That can be done with physical diseases and illnesses to some degree. No one says “I am a flu-er”, you say you have the flu. Even this has it’s limits. Paraplegic. Diabetic. These are but a couple examples of where the illness is incorporated socially into the identity of a person.

But with mental illness it is different. Because depression and mental illness are so invasive, because we can’t seem to separate our minds from ourselves, depression quickly gloms itself on to the identity. You are marked as unclean or not quite right in the head. There is a social stigma that goes along with depression. Are you trustworthy, or will you just crash? Jobs, family, church, all of these areas an more can make depression become a part of you. I am surprised that no one has coined a term like “I am a depressionic” or something to that effect. Karp addresses this phenomenon with a great deal of insight.

Now where is the Gospel in a secular book like this? There isn’t any, directly. He goes through the journey down into the valley and back up again. It is descriptive, with many helpful insights along the way. I would highly recommend this book, for example, to anyone suffering from depression and especially to their family. It is very good for understanding this. What he doesn’t do (and I have yet to find) is a real treatment of the relationship between mental illness and faith. How is it that I can cry, “I trust when dark my road” and yet mentally not believe there is a future for me? Is the mind the sole place for faith, so that if my mind isn’t right, it must mean my faith isn’t right?

God forbid. Faith is a gift, not an achievement. It is a gift that God continues to give, no matter how difficult the circumstances. In fact, the harder it is, the sweeter God’s gift will become. Even if you don’t feel it. Even if you can’t see past the next fifteen minutes. That doesn’t mean God abandons you. It means that he is hidden for a time so that He may reveal Himself more fully to us at the proper time. There is hope. There is a future. There is a Messiah who comes.

-DMR