Medications are crucial in the management of mental illnesses, as they are for other illnesses. Now, I’m no general practitioner, so this is just my opinion based on my own experience. I’ve been prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) more than once and found they were essential for getting my body’s biochemical levels back in balance.
As a counsellor and pastor, when people come and see me about any mental illness, I’m quick to enquire with them how their journey with their GP is going.
Many times, I find people are quite resistant to taking their struggles seriously enough to drive recovery in the right direction. I think there is a direct correlation between taking the bit between the teeth and one’s recovery. Sure, there are some who are debilitated no matter what they do, but most people can and do improve if they insist they can do something to improve. Diligence is more often than not rewarded.
There is the psychological principle of the internal locus of control in what I’m saying here.
The more we say we’re in control over our own destiny, the more we find that to be a reality. But it requires significant investment over time. Why would we not invest? Well, it’s hard, that’s why! But the rest of our lives is ‘coming at us’ at a rate of one day and one second at a time no matter what we do, so we might as well own the opportunities that present themselves at our door. There’s no time to waste unless we resolve to waste our lives.
One of the biggest issues we all have to face in this entitled age is the predominance of any pockets of entitlement that win their way into our being and modus operandi.
Entitlement, to me, speaks of the opposite of an internal locus of control. It speaks of a person in a state of externalising everything that ‘happens to them’. Sure, many things do ‘happen to us’ but in all of life the factor or our response is understated.
Those who take it upon themselves to do something proactive in response to a disaster do tend to prosper. Amid depression, we have an opportunity. Is it a learning opportunity? A self-care opportunity? A healing opportunity?
The occasion of depression is an opportunity to learn empathy, the depths of suffering possible in life, and to acknowledge aspects of loss and grief.
It can often be the gateway to deepening our path toward maturity.
I often think it’s God’s opportunity to go back and heal those past experiences that may continue to come up and haunt us.
If we’re compromised in some significant way, like we have chronic pain or chronic fatigue, what we can do is engage our faith to maximise our value for life. It will never be perfect, but it will be marginally (maybe a whole lot) better than if we did nothing and focused on remaining miserable. (It should go without saying there will still be miserable days, which is a sad and inevitable reality to accept.)
There is a role for responsible care in our recovery from depression. Even when we have a diagnosed depressive disorder. If we don’t take responsibility for what we can do, who will? That’s right, nobody other than us can.
The sole purpose of this article is to say that if we have depression, counselling is very helpful, but it’s not actually the starting point. A properly managed plan of action begins at the doctor.
Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash
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