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Question: Is Depression Compatible with a Belief in God?

The God question always hovers in the background whenever a person is struck down by any kind of illness. Got cancer? Why did God force this on me? So what if I smoked three packs of cigarettes for 10 years--I still should have fallen under the God Protection Clause if the Big Guy was really up there looking after my welfare. Even lesser diseases like acne and chronic diarrhea get blamed on a missing or decidedly malevolent God. The truth is we seek responsibility for our problems, and God can easily be singled out as the culprit.

I don't know how many times when I was really depressed that I just knew God was MIA. How could he/she ignore my suffering, especially when I threw up my hands in despair and crawled into bed like a child hugging a stuffed animal. Grown adult women should not have to grab a teddy bear to get comfort from pain. If God engineered that scenario he has a childish sense of humor that risks embarrassing the people who need him most. Now I ask you, Is that fair? What's the sense of baiting a vulnerable population who might possibly doubt your very existence? That doesn't rack up heavenly points for the God team, and we depressives and other neurotics generally lack the gumption to fight back with a host of prayers and pleas. Our memories of biblical verse are wiped clean by depression, and boomers like me lack for Bibles on our shelves. We have every how-to book authored by pop psychologists like Wayne Dyer and Albert Ellis, but when it comes to the Old or New Testament, there's a gaping hole. No holy book to flip open to prayers for a happy, optimistic mindset.

Of course there's always the alternate God theory that depressives sometimes claim for their working philosophy of life. God exists but doesn't like his followers to be imperfect in the emotional sector. Like the general population, God may stigmatize those with broken brains. It might be like, "Come on down if you have missing limbs or eyes and ears that don't work so well--we have gift packages and panaceas for you people. But you folks with busted neuron circuitries stay away. We don't want your kind here." Could be God's a bit prejudiced. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not calling him racist or antisemitic or anything like that, but like so many observers out there, he may think we can just "snap out" of depressions and run to our respective church or temple to give thanks.

Well, the mind doesn't work that way, and after all these centuries, you'd think God would know that. But, no, he keeps on ignoring obvious mental monsters like Donald Trump, whose emotional history is about as complicated and convoluted as a computer on steroids. His parents sent him to military school to try and wipe clean his predilection for uttering stupid sound bites, but that didn't work and he grew up to be a neurotic bigot with tendencies toward misogyny and impulse control issues. To be perfectly frank, it's hard to see how a merciful God could have created such a 21st century misfit. Donald Trump's run as a presidential candidate and now the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces pretty much puts the lie to a belief in God.

 But I got off on a related but useless track. The real question is whether God Almighty chooses to help the emotionally challenged. Does he not intervene because he wants psychiatrists to make a quick buck? Does he not give a hoot because depressives are inclined to think bad thoughts like suicide, self-mutilation, zero self-esteem? Because if this is so, why doesn't he just do a little shock therapy of his own (a few harmless lightning strikes should suffice) and zap depressives into cheerful optimists? Could be he's not that all-powerful as we would have him be or like so many humans, he doesn't want to get involved. That worries me. A lot. Because if God doesn't want to get involved due to stigma or scheduling problems or some such inconvenience, then what's really left besides hot fudge sundaes and all-day Netflik programming?

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