Hope for the hopeless?

[RestAssured]

I'm new here, recently diagnosed with chronic depression which has crippled me my whole life. I'm 44 now. Better late than never! Found some help with counselling and medication but at the moment I'm transitioning from Sertraline to Mirtazipine due to side effects. Sertraline was working (for the first time in my life I actually felt like I wanted to live!) and I'm hopeful that the Mirtazipine will be effective too but its only been two weeks.

Brain chemistry, it seems to me, is a significant piece of the puzzle but it's not the whole picture. My suspicion is that stopping the brain from abusing its chemical privileges creates a space where we can choose to act with a freedom that we may have never known. A door of opportunity can open up; but what we do then is crucial. It's like the door is in the wall which has been overshadowing us and blocking the way. For the first time we can see the other side but we then need to choose to step through. That's where we need the support of counsellors, family, friends...

I'm a Christian who believes in a God who grieves over our griefs more than we do. He knows our sorrows and he also knows their solution. He provides good things to help us, but these are nudges towards him. Ultimately we all face the final futility of death but he has overcome and instead offers us the final hope of life that transcends bodily death. He can do this because he came to die in our place and destroy death's stranglehold on humanity. I'm a follower of Jesus because he's the King who serves.

Now we can join in his victory by acknowledging our wrongdoing, asking to be forgiven by a God who knows our sin far better than we do, confident that he knows us and loves us perfectly with all our failure and weakness. We don't have to pretend with him as we are transparent to him. We don't need to be afraid if we will accept his perfect diagnosis of our terminal condition (our rejection of him - the one who gave life) and accept forgiveness - the cure he has provided by sending Jesus to take God's judgement of sin upon himself in our place. He now offers unending life, truth, beauty and peace because he offers us himself - the great good that lies behind all good things.

I think that depression may be the most accurate perspective on existence - but only on existence apart from God. If there is no God, life is here today, gone tomorrow and has no meaning. We can pretend that our lives are significant and have purpose, but if everything just ends as the laws of physics do their thing with our cosmos, what was the point of it all? Of love and Mozart; peace and good food; laughter and compassion; hope and purpose; Picasso and the perfect pistachio; dancing and sunsets. What did it mean in the end? Nothing at all. Just an accidental glitch in an accidental universe.

But something in us recoils from that and finds it impossible to believe that what we do or say or think or achieve or love has no real meaning. It does have meaning, even if it only means something to ourselves! Our consciousness is key and our consciousness cannot deny itself. Our consciouness finds meaning everywhere. That's why we get up, brush our teeth, kiss the children, pursue justice, watch films, eat, sleep, read and think about it all. We were made to seek meaning and so we do just that. But meaning is not material. It cannot be measured in a test tube or observed in the Hubble images. It can be attributed to those observed things but we don't find it when we dissect them. Meaning resides in and between persons. It is the sole preserve of consciousness. We came from consciousness. From personality. From the One who made all things that have been made and who fashioned us in his image to be seekers of truth desirous of purpose and hungry for beauty. He made us to feel at home where we are loved.

For he loved us, and he is home. He is beginning and end, before all things, the destination for which we strain blindly. He is the one who shows the way to himself and gives us a reason to live that is bigger than the brief flicker in the vastness of time and space that is our physical, earthly life. He offers the solidity of eternity, a flame that will not be quenched by death but that will burn forever in the unquenchable joy of Him whose joy is boundless. He is inviting us to join in, to become one with the fire that burns with no need for fuel. He invites us to come freely, with no perfect track record or glittering CV or long list of good deeds. We can come with the whole sorry sack of hurt received and inflicted; of good we withheld and which was withheld from us; of evils committed by and to us. He knows it all, extends his hands to embrace us, has them nailed to a plank of wood and dies to give us life. He dies so that we might be forgiven our sin; and that we might forgive others too. There is no greater expression of love than dying to save another. He died for many. A countless number.

The true answer to the bleak despair that so often marks our way is found in that life-giving death - in that love which reveals a heart immeasurably full with compassion for the dying race he made. Come to me, all who struggle and are heavily burdened and I will give you rest.

[Hidden]

It is good you believe and are trying to face some harsh realities at the same time. Good coping technique. Thank you.

[laverdasf1000]

Hi, I am trying to get off Sertraline as I felt it was not helping me anymore. I have been off it about a week and feel no worse or better (Yet!!) than before.

I take Vitamin B complex and the only prescribed medication I am now on is Allopurinol for Gout. I find people when I mention I suffer from Gout think it is quite funny and think quite wrongly you must have a drink problem. Gout is an incredibly painful affliction but I think the medication helps.

I am sorry but I don't have your Christian beliefs but I am not a total Atheist either.

My wife died three years ago and I think anyone regardless of their religion would ask why did she have to suffer so young (54) the misery of sight loss and associated complications from Diabetes.

I hope the medication helps and you can find relief from the misery of Anxiety and Depression.

[RestAssured in reply to laverdasf1000]

Thank you for replying. I had to come off Sertraline because of side effects. Was on 200mg a day and started growing a man-boob! Gynaecomastia is a rare side effect of Sertraline. I came off too quickly and started on Mirtazipine which it seems a lot of clinicians rate as the most effective antidepressant. First week was pretty hairy - low, irritable, aggressive and some spectacularly horrifying nightmares! I think it's settling down now.

I'm sorry to hear about your wife's passing. Life takes bitter twists and we struggle to make sense of them. My sister is also a Christian, a type 1 diabetic, bed-bound with an undiagnosed neurological condition, in a huge amount of pain, chronic and dangerous constipation, often appalling 'care' which easily descends to bullying.

She was taken ill 15 years ago at the age of 30. A brilliant woman with an IQ somewhere north of 150, an extraordinary professional chef with a gift for creating the most incredible food through sheer imagination and culinary skill. Painter and musician (she was simultaneously studying for a performing diploma in violin and a teaching diploma in piano when she developed RSI and was told she would have to give up her aspirations of being a professional musician and would never be able to play either instrument regularly!), incredible athlete blessed with phenomenal strength. Truly beautiful (I had to keep an eye on my friends when she was around!). She had it all.

And it has all gradually been taken away from her. Is she angry? Bitter? No. Does she know why such suffering has come her way? Why she has been unable to express her many talents? No! How could God do such a thing to her?

My own thinking is that the vast oceans of pain that we have both suffered - hers largely physical, mine largely mental - have both broken and made us. They have brought something more precious than all the talents we possess and that is recognition of the sheer wonder of existence and, ironically, God's great love for us. We are a more loving family now than we ever were before the wheels came off.

Both my sister and I seemed to have the world at our feet but instead of striding forward we ended up face down in pain and failure to realise our potential. Of course, 'realise your potential' is an aspiration none ever meet. Human potential is incalculable but our days are short, as you painfully know. We cannot fulfil it in 54, 70, 80 or 120 years (scientists have relatively recently discovered that we can't live beyond 120 because of telomeres. In Genesis 6, God says man shall not live beyond 120 years. Coincidence?)! That's what eternity is for. That's partly why we yearn for life without death and instinctively understand the wrongness of loving relationships being severed by death. It shouldn't be this way!

All the pain, the dying young, the failures and faults and fears and frustrations; all of these things tell us that all is not as it should be. Depression tells us that all the time!

[Hidden in reply to RestAssured]

We are all put on this earth to learn different things and extend our knowledge and consider our failings.

Like you in my twenties I had many interests. I contracted Meningitis on Holiday and I feel that started problems with my memory

After that I was involved in a severe accident and then I developed a severe rare form of Chronic Arthritis and skin damage, I was also a Depressive from my teens and then I was forced into retirement, in 1988, I have never worked since. I have a congenital Short term memory disorder, Reactive Depression and PsA. i try and keep as positive as I can even though my disabilities are broad spectrum.

For your Sister ask your GP to refer Here to Pain Clinic it will help her learn how to live with her problems and increase her expectations and hopefully be given tools and techniques to move on considering more on what she can do instead what she cannot do.

What treatment plans have been introduced in your case by your Doctor. Just because we feel restricted does not mean everything is not restricted by you, there are many ways to move on and experience life in its full.

BOB