12-20-2015 Bioethics Part 37

The speaker begins by thanking God and praying for wisdom before discussing the topic of depression and mental illness. They mention that depression is worth studying because it affects many people, including Christians, and the Bible addresses the topic in various ways. The speaker also highlights that depression can impact our spiritual lives and that understanding it can help us be more useful to others. They mention that depression is often misunderstood and that it can be seen as an opportunity to glorify God. The complexity of the issue is emphasized, and the importance of addressing complex issues with wisdom and humility is discussed. The speaker acknowledges that the Bible doesn't provide all the answers on depression, but its truths can be applied to our lives. They caution against being overly dogmatic and encourage listening to those who speak from wisdom and learning. The speaker mentions that our world is becoming more complex and that we often seek simplicity in response All right, let's pray and get started. God, we thank you for this morning, and we thank you for each other and for the time that we have to think about life and the way that it ought to be lived, and we pray that you give us wisdom in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, last week we started talking about what? Depression, that's right. And also, we'll be looking after this section on depression, we'll also be looking at mental illness. Why is it something that's worth studying? We had like eight official reasons, I just need one of them. It doesn't even have to be like word for word what we said last week, but why in the heck would anybody in the church take the time to think about depression? All right, good, so a lot of people deal with it. Including Christians? Oh, yeah, okay. Good, I'm glad, maybe I'm a Christian. Anybody else? Yeah, sure. So the Bible addresses it, oftentimes not in like straight up ways, like it's not an anti-depression manual in any sense of the term, however, how does the Bible deal with the topic of depression and probably even mental illness? All right, so it exists, yeah, and how do we know that it exists? Yeah, there's a lot of people who are depressed up in the Bible, right? Like the crazy number, we just spent, at the beginning of Last Time Together, just starting to kind of name off things, people, times at which people seem to be rather depressed and the numbers rack up quickly. Good. Anything else? Okay. Because it impacts our spiritual lives, we should talk about it. Also, because while it can never be just completely eradicated once and forever, it's something that can be mitigated and sometimes prevented. Often because if we know about it, we will be more useful to other people and to ourselves. To know nothing about it or to just not think very much about it, if it's something a lot of people are dealing with or will deal with or are prone to deal with, then we just won't be very effective at loving our neighbor. Also because it's so misunderstood, we're going to take a look at that kind of today. And then the one that we talked about that is probably not very well thought of is it's a talent to be invested for the glory of God. We usually just see depression as a bad thing, right? There's no good that could come of me being depressed, which is absolutely and fundamentally untrue and we don't just know that because we're Christians. Some of the most profoundly artistic people on the face of the planet Earth are also serially depressed. That doesn't mean that you should just ride the wave of depression in order to write better music or something. However, it is kind of something that oftentimes accompanies your genius. Therefore, we should take from that and also know that anything that we have been assigned in this life by God, as we read in places like Acts, is to be used for the glory of God. And because we are this way, it doesn't mean that that's a bad thing necessarily. We should see it, even the kind of difficulties we have in this life, as opportunities to express the image of God and glorify God in unique ways. So, this week we're going to look at the complexity of the issue. Next week we'll start to look at, trying to see like, well what exactly is it? How do we help think through what distinguishes it from just kind of being down? But the complexity of it. When we talk about anything that's complex, we've talked about a lot of things that are complex here in Sunday School over the last year or so. How is it that you and I should address and think about complex issues in general? Carefully. Good. With wisdom and humility. Great. Why? Because they are complex. They are complex. That seems like a rather circular argument, but it is also kind of self-evidently true. If something is complex, then usually a simplistic answer is going to be wrong or unhelpful. So, the more complex the issue, the more careful we ought to be, the more we ought to think about it, and the more humble we ought to be, knowing that it is complex. As we saw last week, the Bible does, in some ways, talk about the issue, but it doesn't say everything we would like to say about it. That shouldn't make us sad or anything. The Bible doesn't speak about all kinds of things we would like it to speak about, because it doesn't cater to our wishes and demands. However, it does have some things to say, so we'll pay attention to those things, but especially because the Bible doesn't say a whole lot about it, it's going to take us probably more time to say, okay, well, this is kind of what the Bible is saying, this is how we should kind of think about this thing, but we can't just quote a few chapters and verses of the Bible and say, there we go, that's our thought on this, or really anything when it comes to bioethics. So, it will take time. When we speak about these kinds of things, we must only be as dogmatic as the Bible is. One of the dangers of doing a Sunday School like this is always coming across as if, thus saith the Lord on all this kind of stuff. We've had disagreements in here before, we will definitely have disagreements going forward, and that's perfectly fine. I say this often, but I'd like to remind us all, I stand down here for a reason during Sunday School. I don't stand up there. Now, it's not like there's some magic up there, but it is a theological statement. I stand down here because I am not authoritatively, ordinarily teaching from God's Word during Sunday School. We are taking the truths of this and then seeking the best to apply it to our lives. This is especially true of something that the Bible doesn't directly address maybe as much as we'd like it to, or as clear as we'd like it to be. So, our opinions are valid, our own personal history, either in this case with depression or with those who have experienced depression, is valid, but it's not everything. There's a lot of language in the church today about depression that sounds a lot like Old Testament prophets. This is what God says. This is what Christians should do when it comes to something like this, and it's rather unhelpful. Your opinion counts, right? Everybody's opinion matters. Everybody's opinion doesn't matter as much as everybody else's opinion. That's true in kindergarten, or it's true in some kind of maybe objective situation where it's like, what color is the wall? And we can all kind of say things about that. When we're talking about something as complex as depression, I understand that you might think something or I might think something, but just because you think something or I think something doesn't exactly mean that that's the way it is in the world. We tend to be in our society rather exalting of those who speak loudest, not necessarily those who know more than other people. So we should be humble and listen to those who speak from wisdom and learning. You and I live in a world that's more complex each and every day. Pretty much everything that we've studied in the last year in bioethics, and we'll continue to learn, would be unintelligible a few hundred years ago. People just weren't asking these questions. They were asking other kinds of questions, but you didn't have to deal with in vitro fertilization in the 1800s. You didn't have to think about nepotism. You didn't have to think about necessarily when does life begin, and there weren't a lot of complex issues about embryos and stuff like that because people didn't really know they existed. There were guesses about that kind of stuff. A lot of these questions are brought up because of the world we live in, and in a world as complex as ours, usually what we do as human beings is search for simplicity. We want to boil it all down. You can see this in any realm, not just science. You can also see this in politics or something like that. We just want the politicians to tell us what we want to hear in one phrase. It's like, could you boil down your policy statement on immigration or economics into three sentences? It's not possible, but we want to hear something like that. The same thing goes for stuff like this. Unfortunately, hard questions and difficult situations demand good answers, and good answers take time. Taking the time to think about these things and to speak with others about these things is really an act of love. The work that we do here, week in and week out, ought to be done not simply to know more but to love our neighbors in a better way. That's really the end of this. If this only serves to make us smarter or more self-righteous, then you and I have wasted our time royally together. This should only be done in order to truly understand what it means to love our neighbor and then carry that out in a better way. In the case of depression, like most anything else, this means avoid speaking in extreme ways. People who are depressed and mentally ill are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. If you don't believe that, either you have never experienced depression or mental illness or you have never known anybody who does. The crazy thing is it only takes one. It only takes one experience with somebody who is truly depressed or mentally ill to realize how broken human beings can be on the inside and yet physically appear like everything is totally okay. It is really, truly shocking and terrifying in the real sense of the term to be around somebody, if you don't have experience, who is experiencing these kinds of things because it's truly something that you can't even understand or comprehend. So what we are going to do is look at some of the extremes in trying to deal with the complexity, people who are trying to boil it down and go kind of too far and then try and find maybe the best way forward. So, extreme number one is that the cause of depression is all physical. It's all physical. This is kind of the dominant model today in society and has been for some time. Our brains are complex organs, more complex than we can possibly imagine or could have imagined and every day the brain gets more complex, not less. We do know more about it but that leads to more questions about how things exactly work. If you just think for a second about all the things that a brain has to do and then some of the crazy things that brains do like remember, how does memory work. There are like certain attempts to understand that on a neurologic level like the stuff that's going on but still kind of it trips people out. If you've ever seen the movie Inside Out, there's certain ways that they've tried to even approximate how this works but it's interesting to listen to interviews with the directors and stuff of a movie like that because what they were very clear in saying is we sat down for months and months. Pixar does this with every movie they do. They just try and figure out everything. Like we talked to the most brilliant people in the world when it comes to the brain and figuring out emotions and all this kind of stuff and like we don't really know very much so we had to find these ways and this isn't exactly how it works. Nobody knows how it works. The brain, this is so simplistic it's a joke, but essentially the brain needs certain chemicals in order to function properly. It doesn't really matter for our time this morning what those chemicals are and all that kind of stuff but there are multiple chemicals that the brain needs in order to function properly and a brain that doesn't have those chemicals or lacks the appropriate levels of those chemicals either because they're too high or too low is a non-well-functioning brain and leads to problems. That's why medicines like antidepressants or antipsychotic medications focus on leveling out these levels of chemicals in our brains. As we'll see in a moment there's a long and fierce backlash against this view from many Christians and while I don't think that Christians should necessarily think that all depression resides in the physical aspect of our brain, I do understand some of the Christians today that just go, yeah, it's all just up here because for way too long Christians have thought like I kind of touched on last week that what you and I have up here is just kind of some mystical, it's like the force or something, right? There's nothing really physical up here. We have a skull, we all know that and we know that there's something and we've seen brains but I think it's just kind of squishy and it's just like that doesn't really matter, it's like our thoughts matter. If you talk to Christians a lot, it's the craziest thing in the world. It's like our brains aren't actually part of our bodies and our brains, especially when we become a Christian, that's just like magically made good. The rest of our body is falling apart but our brains are always just fine. That's like the craziest thing on the face of the planet. I understand where that kind of notion comes from but if you can break your finger and if you can have a problem in your, I don't know, pancreas, then you can also have problems in your brain, right? This should not shock us. So, we are going to speak about the usefulness of drugs and other kinds of treatment in the weeks to come but for now what we have to say is that there's definitely more that's going on inside a human being than chemical levels inside the brain but there is definitely not less than that. Okay? So again, there is more going on than chemicals. We are not just the sum of our chemical makeup and biomechanical nature. However, we are definitely not less than that. It matters. So, that's the extreme number one. All the cause of depression is physical. Well, what would be the opposite of that? Anybody? Attitude? Okay, yeah. So, something like that. All the cause of depression is spiritual. That's it. It's just, that's why. The old model, thankfully there's not a whole lot of people that hold this model anymore, is that depression is caused by demonic possession. This is a view still held in places like Latin America. I run into it quite often. Sometimes, those of a very charismatic or Pentecostal persuasion that anything that happens to us is the cause, anything bad, right? Everything good is like God, everything bad is just like demons coming against us, which is rather convenient. I can only pray, sincerely, that this kind of view dies a quick and painful death in the church. This view just sees people as needing deliverance, and that if they do then become delivered, then they're fine. The problems reside completely outside them. This is not God's desire for anybody. It can't be a good thing. It's just a problem that needs to get rid of through prayer, laying on of hands, faith, maybe some holy water or oil or something like that, and goes away. There is lots and lots and lots of problems that we know for a fact are not the result of demonic possession. Demonic possession was often seen as the explanation for everything weird that happened with human beings that we couldn't explain, including things like epilepsy, right? Why? What happens when somebody goes into epileptic shock? Yeah, right. So somebody would actually, if we didn't know what was going on, it would look like that person was, I mean, we could just call it possessions, right? They're just like involuntarily, like on the ground, like freaking out. Yes? So there was a person who was a teen or a child who was throwing himself into a fire who did appear to have epileptic-like symptoms. So this is true. There are people. Demon possession can take all kinds of different forms. So this is my point. We can't criticize people who saw this too harshly because without an understanding of how the body works all the time, there are things that happen to human beings that will trip you up. If you've never talked to anybody who's schizophrenic, I guarantee you that for a moment you will be convinced that they're possessed by the devil because they'll be going along and just like, Yeah. Nice day today, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I just, I love the blue sky. You know what I hate? The color red. You want to know why I hate the color red? Because that's the color of the army men that come into my room at night and try to get into my brain to get the secrets that the government put in there. I love the color of the blue sky. You want to go get a hamburger? I'm not kidding you. That's the way it happens. And it's all said in the same tone. And they are totally convinced of one thing as they are of the other thing. And you go, How could anybody? And you're just kind of freaking out because you don't know what to do. It gets very, very scary sometimes. Same thing goes with people who are incredibly depressed. So to believe that it was just demonic possession, it might be understandable. But, again, to say that that's just all it is. If you have depression or whatever, you're demon possessed, we should lay hands on you, pray for you, and boom, get that demon out. Not exactly. The more prominent view today, especially amongst conservative or reformed circles, is that depression is caused by sin. Therefore, rebuke, repentance, and confession are required. Essentially, this view sees repentance as the medicine that cures everything. The common line in this view could be, if you do right, you will feel right. The cringing faces in the room thankfully know that maybe you're not on this team. This is because people supposedly feel wrong because they do wrong. And while I have serious problems, which I will explain in a second with this view, I want to say that it's not all completely wrong. People are responsible for their actions. That much is true. And they need to feel the weight of what they've done. It's far too easy to excuse actions on the basis of how you feel. That's not just what, by the way, depressed and mentally ill people do. You do that all the time. So do I. Well, I feel this way, therefore my action must be justified. Whether or not it's supposedly wrong, I can do this. I feel like it. Depression can be the result of spiritual unhealthiness. It's far too easy to focus only on the physical. So if the adage, if you do right, you will feel right, if taken as a very general truism in the kind of proverbial notion of, let's change the way that we say it, to obey God is going to result in things ordinarily going well for you. Right? We can say, ah, I mean, yeah, that's kind of what the proverbs are laying out. Like, the wise person is the one that fears the Lord and does what is right, and ordinarily it goes better for them. And the fool should expect nothing but pain and suffering, even though at times they seem to be getting ahead. Right? You go, okay, if that's what you mean, but that's not ordinarily what a lot of people in this camp mean. What would be maybe some of the failings of, if you do right, you'll feel right? What would be some of the problems with that? Yeah, so there can be a physical cause of our depression, but it's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. It's not necessarily a physical cause of our depression. Yeah, so there can be a physical cause of our depression that cannot be fixed by us just doing something right. It can't take care of that issue that's making us depressed. Good. Yeah. Can you think of an example of that? Okay. Anybody else? Doing something right that leads to other people being upset with you that then causes you to be discouraged and depressed. There you go. If you've never confronted a believer about their sin and them respond negatively and that sends you into a tailspin of sadness, then you maybe need to work on knowing other people better and then loving other people well. It is. It's very true. It's a great example and it's an interesting one because it sounds so good, right? Like, I mean, I'm just like telling you like in love and let's say that you pull it off right. Like, you can pull it off wrong and then, you know, that goes badly. But if you pull it off right, it's not that everything goes well because oftentimes they don't respond quote-unquote right. And I'm like, what the heck? Like, this is bad for the person? It's bad for like, is this stuff even true? Like, what the heck? It's bad. It can go way bad and send you off. You've done the right thing, but you don't feel very good as a result. Any other ideas? If you become depressed, whose fault is it in this view? Totally yours. That's right. That's right. You just didn't handle life right, Andy. That's why you're depressed. Just so we're all clear, there's nothing more discouraging probably that you could tell a Christian that's depressed than like, or even a non-Christian, like, oh, you, oh, why are you depressed? It's your fault. You just didn't do well enough. If you did do well enough or if you start doing well enough, then it'll magically go away. This is all your fault. So basically, you just, in like the old Job's friend thing, you can't discount anything outside of the physical. Exactly. Yeah. So just like Job's friends. Were Job's friends always wrong in everything they said? No. What was Job's friend's problem? Okay, yeah. So they spoke about things in Job's case that they didn't know anything about. They said things that were even generally true. They applied them to Job as if they had some objective knowledge that this was absolutely and always true in Job's case, and it wasn't. We, the readers, know that it's not. So you read along and you go, oh, man. But the painful, most painful thing about Job is, you and I are almost always Job's friends. We're not Job. We're the kinds of people who come along and go, well, clearly this is what's going on. This is all you need to do. This is why God's doing whatever the heck it is he's doing. And, you know, we're the ones that deserve getting owned in the end by God himself. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So you got yourself into this. It's also your job to get yourself out of this. Perfect. And also, if you do right, you'll feel right, it only deals with what we do with our hands, right, instead of what's going on in our hearts. I could do the right thing, you know, fake it till you make it, right? I'm just going to, okay, what should I do? I should get up every morning, and I should, and to not be depressed, I should go on a walk for 30 minutes. I'm going to go on a walk. I'm going to walk. I'm like, screw God. This is the worst thing ever. I hate life. I can't believe that God's making me do this. My friend who's counseling me said I have to do this. I'm doing this, and I'm not feeling any better. And you just get more depressed, right? Why? Because you've, sadly, bought into the lie that it's all you, and you can just make yourself better, and if you do what's right, you'll feel right. Yep. Right. And you. Yeah. Yeah, and this fits our kind of cultural narrative, right? You are the master of your own destiny. You can fix yourself. You can put yourself in a hole. It's all about you. Just you do something. Okay, and we kind of believe that, and then we realize that it doesn't work. It doesn't work, not because we're trying hard, not trying hard enough. It doesn't work because that's not the way we were created. At the end of the day, this view of telling people who are depressed to just do what is right is akin to telling somebody who has just accidentally shot themselves that what they really need is to be more careful around guns. Is that a true statement? Right? Absolutely. Probably not the best thing to say. What does the person who just accidentally shot himself need? A doctor. That's right. A truism. We have some medical professionals up in here today, so I hope I'm not making this up. What the person who has just been injured needs before they can recover is to be stabilized. Right? That's what they need. Same thing goes with people who are depressed. You can't just be like, hey, guess what? You are bleeding out all over the place. You should get better. Somebody's like, yeah, no joke. Like, I'm bleeding. I know that. Same thing goes with people who are depressed. There have been some people who have kind of tried to modify this position significantly. And it's moving in the right kind of direction. They realize that depression can be caused by physical problems or by spiritual problems. And they recognize that at times, medication might be necessary. But even here, medication is always spoken of as kind of like this dirty, like back alley weak sauce option for people that's just like, well, I mean, if you're a real Christian, like you can just kind of buck up in the Holy Spirit and get yourself saved all over again. And if not, like, well, there are these things, you know, for the weak people. But the thing that's going on here is that, first of all, the person who's shot has to get stabilized. And we're going to talk about medication later on. They're a double-edged sword for sure. But the other thing is that this view often talks as if all depression just really resides in the heart. Like it's this heart sin issue. Which, let's be clear, could it be that? Absolutely. It absolutely could be the thing where you're just like wrapped up in yourself and telling yourself lies and can only see darkness and you're just, you're just, there's part of it that, yeah, you just, there's stuff going on in your life and there's stuff going on on the inside. But we can't just assume that, like, that's all there is. Go back to Tim's example. Like if you lost a leg and you were like, you loved running or something and then you can't run anymore, you're going to most likely be depressed. It's not like, well, you're idolizing your leg or something. It's like, what are you talking, I don't have a stinking, you have two legs, I have one leg. Right? I'm not idolizing the thing. Maybe I am. But again, don't play Job's friend and assume that that's the case. We should always be slow to judge other people. Our default position can't be that people who are experiencing depression have an idolatry problem because we don't think that that's true with people who have cancer or Alzheimer's or a broken leg. You want to know why God broke your leg? Because you idolize your leg. That's why. So God broke your leg. Like, people do that, right? And we all look at them and go, you're crazy. Like, don't do that or you want to know why God gave you cancer? Because you love your children too much. Like, that's, I've heard that kind of stuff. Hopefully you've never said that stuff out loud or heard anything like that. I've heard it and it's crazy talk. Could that be the case? Like, could that, like hypothetically, like God, does God ever use judgments to bring people back to Himself in the Bible? Let's just go with that one. Yes or no? Yes. Absolutely. The only reason you know that is because of some kind of objective claim from God towards humanity. So if real, that's the only reason you know that. There's 10 billion things that other things that happen in the Bible, right, or during the times that the Bible was written that we have no clue of. So we might have known why one dust storm came and wiped everything out or why one locust invasion came. That doesn't mean that every time locusts come we're like, oh, judgment of God happened like 6,000 years ago. Every time locusts come, that's what's happening. So basically, it's how we basically think the best thing to do is take a long, well, I mean, listen well, like I said before, and be quick to like, to the point where you're like, I don't really know. Right. Right. At the end of the day, you can say, I don't know and I'm not going to know. You might get to that point because then you hurt the person that you're dealing with. Exactly. Here's our default position. Our default position is a person is depressed. This is what we know for sure. Because they are, just like I am, a broken, fallen person living in a broken and fallen world. I know that. Yeah, but what's the cause or anything? How is it that you and I can help? And we're going to talk about this more next week. But how is it that you and I can begin if that's our default position and we start to, you know, we got this person who's depressed and from it, what should I do in order to not be Job's friend? Yeah, try to get into that person's situation. What does that mean? Listen. And in order to listen, what if nobody's talking? What do we do? Ask questions. That's right. Ask questions. Like real questions too. Not like, isn't this why you're feeling this way? That's not really a question. That's rude. You don't want people to do that to you. Ask real questions. Details only come out in time. As we begin to ask questions, we'll begin to see the complexity of human beings. And we'll be also driven to humility and patience. Why? Because simply, no two people are the same. Right? We believe that. You believe that. Everybody's different. Everybody's like a snowflake. Right? Even identical twins aren't really identical. Right? You probably learned that when you were a little kid. Right? So, no two brains are the same either. There's a sense in which your previous work, your previous experience with people who have depression or mental illness matters and there's a real other sense in which it doesn't, it shouldn't control anything. It doesn't matter. Because the person you're speaking to is a brand new individual. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. Their situation is totally new. 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It's way easy to freak out and just make everybody feel as if if things don't get quote-unquote better right this minute then everything is going to just go badly. And if people don't get better quickly then often times what we do in the Christian community is go like what sin do you have? Like come on, get better! Like just so we're clear I want to ask for a show of hands like personal testimonies about what you wrestled with for like the last forever but I'm sure that there's like something that you'd be mortified if everybody in here knew about that you have been struggling with for the last I don't know, what, ten years? Depression is not any different. Especially when we're talking about something that's actually chemical possibly in the brain. Now we're talking about something that's much more complicated. David Murray writes this, we'll end with this. All of this reminds us that the prescription of solutions is often a matter that takes much time and even trial and error. There are usually no quick fixes. For Christians there will often need to be a balance between medicine for the brain rest for the body counsel for the mind and spiritual encouragement for the soul. Recovery will usually take a patient or take patient perseverance over a period of many months and in some cases even years. We're trying, like Gaddafi said we're trying to help people. We're not just trying to fix people. And if we go into it thinking we're going to fix people then we'll feel like champions when we win and absolutely worthless when we don't help. And you and I also will begin to play God. I fix people. It's my job around here. I fix them. It will go disastrously wrong. So as we think about things like depression and mental illness and really all things that humans deal with again, the reason why we're talking about these things is because they help us think about life in general We could all stand to be more humble and listening when it comes to dealing with other people. Let's pray. God, we thank you for humility. We don't like it very much. Most of us lack it in rather large quantities. So we do pray that you would give it to us. That we would understand the complex nature of human beings. How we think and how we act. That we would be encouraged to learn much in order to love well. And that you would cause us to be very slow to speak and quick to listen quick to ask questions and truly try to hear the other person instead of just diagnosing some kind of problem. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.