From Over the Edge

A Christian's guide to surviving Breakdown & Depression

Jon Grogan

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781910519226
• eBook ISBN: 9781910519240
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An intimate account of struggling with depression and breakdown as a Christian.

Many Christians who suffer from depression and mental breakdown struggle to rationalise it with their faith. In this honest and thoughtful book, Jon Grogan shares what helped him to understand and recover from depressive illness. This empathetic approach will help sufferers feel better understood, with an improved understanding of the issues they deal with on a daily basis, and a renewed sense of place within the church community.

From Over The Edge addresses the way in which different Christian spiritual traditions can be drawn upon to help sufferers and complement treatments that are likely to be on offer.

Christians can often be unsure about how their faith can relate to the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and Jon's careful navigation of these subjects, mixed with a sprinkle of humour, brings much-needed illumination.

Jon Grogan is a lawyer and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is married with two children.

1. Why Bother?

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

2 Corinthians 1:3–4 (ESV)

Do you remember when you were a kid (I still do this actually) and you sang along to pop tunes, oblivious to the intended meaning of the song? You simply used your own mangled lyrics, your own naive interpretation of what was being sung. Recently, my daughter came up with a fantastic example of the art form when she started singing John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” with new lyrics: “You build up my fences . . .”. I also particularly enjoyed once hearing someone blast out the chorus of one of Mr Mister’s hit songs from the 1980s. “Carry a laser!” was the command the singer kept repeating, somewhat implausibly it has to be said. The correct lyric and the title of the song is, of course, “Kyrie Eleison”. Christ have mercy.

I love Carole King’s “Too Much Rain”. In one of the verses, and I’m paraphrasing here, the singer wants to discern what makes her tick; she has clearly been hurt emotionally and wants to protect herself from any more pain. And how will she be able to apply this self-knowledge? Well, in my own previously mangled version, she was going to “write it down”. Yes, every jot of it. Nothing to be left out. I now know that those aren’t quite the right lyrics, but I still like this idea of our trying to capture on paper what we have come to fully understand, a documenting process that has both therapeutic and preventative qualities. And I will always associate this with Carole King.

So, I told myself that even if no-one was interested in publishing this book, writing it would still be a useful thing for me to do. At one level it could prove to be a resource for me in the future should, heaven forbid, something similar ever befall me again. It’s amazing how much of the horror story your memory wipes clear, with only the echoes of certain symptoms being felt months or years down the line, triggered by some temporary setback or other. But the exercise seemed more than this. The thing is, for the best part of three years, I kept a journal, starting with what I can now look back and recognise as being a second breakdown (the first one had happened only a year or so earlier, but the recovery from it had been far from secure). I have never kept a journal before, but a kind and wise friend bought a nice hard-backed note book plus pen and commended them to me as being useful tools to help me on the road to recovery. I took to the journal slowly and sporadically at first, but soon found that thoughts, insights, other people’s comments and quotations from books were making strong impressions on me, and that, somehow, I had to get things down on paper as part of what felt like a channelling of something that was working within me. With my mind broken and disturbed, the pages of the journal helped lend some kind of stability and objectivity to what has been the most truly terrifying experience of my life. On a fairly deep level, I also felt an assurance that there was a spiritual dimension to the process; that God was involved in this new-found written eloquence, this re-connectedness. Some stuff I wrote was admittedly a bit obscure and hasn’t stuck with me. But much of it has, and this material has been the main inspiration for writing this book.

The people of Israel gave God many names to represent different aspects of his character. A preacher in our church once challenged us to think about what names we would want to give to God; what names we could think of to reflect our own experience of God in our different circumstances and stages of life. Suggestions included “God of surprises”, “God of humour” and “God of peace”, all of which I could relate to. But for me, the name that came most strongly to mind was the “God of connections”; the God of one-thing-leading-to-another, of illuminating the right verse in a song, or something during a conversation with a friend, or a snippet on the radio. The God of the right book being somehow added to my reading list, of bringing insight just when I’ve needed it. The connections have felt like so much more than mere serendipity, but when I have been tempted to doubt God’s special providence during this period of my life, my journal has stood as a form of testimony to what I have learned so far.

Researching and writing this book has also brought a form of closure to this period in my life; a joining-up of the scribblings in my journal, a levelling-off (please God) of the steepest and longest learning curve that I ever thought was imaginable. St Ignatius of Loyola (more of him to come later on) experienced an extremely intense and formative time during a period of being laid low (the cause of his indisposition was a cannonball rather than mental illness). Looking back at that time, he later referred to God as having trained him as a school teacher teaches a schoolboy. I expect St Ignatius would have agreed that the learning process with God never ends, but I think we are right to discern different stages and periods of our life as having different purposes, different emphases. It feels to me that my “journal period” has been a special time when the Lord was training me, not only about how to get through the immediate suffering, but to learn things for whatever might lie ahead.

This has been a highly introspective time of my life. Depression in all its forms probably leads the sufferer to spend more time alone than they would if functioning normally. At times, you simply cannot bear to be in the company of others; the distortion of reality that you are experiencing is just too much to allow any form of social interaction. This enforced form of solitary confinement has been seen as a way of explaining the evolutionary purpose of the illness, with the retreat from daily activities providing the necessary environment for sufferers to re-evaluate their lives and analyse the issues that contributed towards the onset of the condition. It felt to me that some of the things I learned “in solitary” were probably for my consumption only—secret things revealed by God. But much seemed capable of being turned from inwards to outwards. I was challenged by 2 Corinthians 1:3 and was left feeling compelled to “do something” with the comfort that I began to recognise as coming from God. But even when writing almost felt like the fulfilling of a duty, it did not feel like a slavish one, but more the outworking of a desire to tell it as it is for a new generation of sufferers. As Margaret Silf puts it, “when someone dares to pierce the darkness a new source of light is opened up for those who still dwell in the night.” She explains that the darkness we pierce is “our own darkness”, our own suffering. And the transformation from darkness to a star lighting up the night sky only works if we are prepared to pierce through the night “with trust and courage, without evasion or circumvention”. [5] My hope is that the insights that I have gained, and the consolation that I have experienced, can now become “connections” (or constellations?) for others going through a similarly dark time in their lives.

I realise that by sharing my experience with you in this way I am standing on holy ground. For all sufferers that have, or are given, eyes to see and ears to hear, their recovery from depression will be a time when God not only feels incredibly distant but also incredibly close—closer probably than they have ever experienced him before. And so your lessons, your insights, will be different to mine. Your healing will take a different form to mine. Your way will be God’s way for you and you only. All I am asking, as one fellow pilgrim to another, is if I may walk (or climb) with you for a few miles. It’s just that I may have some understanding of what you might be going through and what might still lie ahead. You see, I already walked this route a few years ago. I’m now singing a different tune to the one I sang when I started out. The new tune has so much more depth and soul than the old one, and even when it shifts into a minor key—come to think of it, especially when it shifts into a minor key—it touches me and helps sustain me as I continue to journey on. Forgive me if I can’t help singing it as we walk. And I’ll try not to mangle the lyrics.

2. The Big One

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

OK, so you’re over the Edge.

And your body wants you to have no doubt about it. To borrow from C. S. Lewis’s metaphor, it is acting as a megaphone, screaming out that it just cannot carry on. It thinks it has no alternative but to stop you in your tracks, quite literally.

And precisely because of the seriousness of your condition, finding the way out of this is likely to take time. Don’t be too hopeful about finding short-cuts. We are not in easy-fix territory.

The good news, however, is that, despite breaking down on you in such a spectacular fashion, your body still wants to help you get out of this dilemma. There’s no need to fight against yourself, is what I think I’m trying to say. But for the plan to really work, the way out is also going to have to be a way which is going to sustain you, holistically, for the rest of your post-breakdown life, and ultimately help you become the person God wants you to be.

The image of the crucible has often been linked with suffering. I have certainly found it useful in understanding aspects of depressive illness. You find yourself in this unbearable place, where all of the negative emotions and anxieties that you have ever felt in the past suddenly get intensified in the heat of the furnace. You feel them like you’ve never felt them before. But, gradually, they become exposed as dross, and as they float to the surface you see clearly, maybe for the first time, that they were counterfeits all along. They were never part of the “real you”, but instead belonged to the realm of fear, and we know that God calls us, invites us, to a life of joy, the opposite of fear. Joy—a much more substantial and permanent state of being than mere “happiness”, note. And, finally, we start to recognise that the pure metal emerging in the refining process is that part of us which is true and lasting and helps connect us to God. It is a form of homecoming, really.

Music has played a large part in the healing process for me. Peter Meadows, in his book Pressure Points, recalls his wife Rosemary filling the house with the sound of Barbara Streisand’s “Never Give Up” when she was suffering from depression. [6] Maybe you would want to choose something different for your anthem—Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” has got to be up there for many people. But, for me, the healing has been felt most through listening to what I call my “moody music”. This can be music of all sorts of different genres. The main thing, though, is that it helps put me in touch with my emotions, especially my sad emotions, ironically. So, although the odd more invigorating one slips in there sometimes, it tends to be wistful cellos rather than frantic violins that I tune into; soulful harmonicas rather than strident trumpets. [7] You may not hear a great deal of cello or harmonica, but Peter Gabriel’s eponymous first solo album is certainly worth a listen. Much of the album (especially side two, for those still on vinyl) seems to be anticipating some kind of cataclysmic event, but in a fearless “bring it on” kind of way, which somehow resonates with me. Listening now to songs such as “Waiting for the Big One” and “Here Comes the Flood” helps remind me of a strange, intuitive perception that I had felt for some time: a sense that I might have to cope with my own “Big One” one day, a crisis to beat all crises. When the Biggy did come, a friend who I don’t think had ever suffered from clinical depression herself was still able to empathise with what was happening to me. She said “I feel as though I could have that in me too”, and I knew what she meant, as I think it had always been lying dormant in me, waiting to be triggered by some catalyst at some point.

As it turns out, this isn’t the end but the beginning. You see, when you fall over the Edge, you don’t fall into the abyss; you fall onto the bottom. Or you could say that you have arrived at the foundations of your life again. This is also a training ground—a place where you are going to have to leave behind the things that have been undone by your breakdown, and where you will start learning new things, the things that you will need for your onward journey. Although it seems such a wretched place to be just now, it will become more bearable—I promise. In fact, you will come to realise that it has much more going for it than the cliff edge from which you have been dangling for the past few months, or years even.

We tend to view a crisis in purely negative terms, but one dictionary definition is “a decisive moment”, and people’s experience suggests that such times can prove to be immensely transformative. As John F. Kennedy once pointed out, the Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word “crisis”. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other, for opportunity. In Hippocratic thought, a crisis was certainly seen as a decisive turning point in medical terms, when the patient could expect their disease to either intensify or diminish. Without the crisis, the level of medical intervention needed to bring about ultimate healing would never be triggered. And only through the crisis would the patient’s own natural healing processes be called upon to produce their maximum effect.

Conversion experiences can often come as part of a deep, personal crisis. The Greek word metanoia, which appears in the gospels and tends to be translated as “repentance”, itself denotes a powerful experience from which a profound sense of personal and positive change can emerge. Interestingly, the word metanoia was also used by psychologist Carl Jung as a term to describe the process where the psyche attempts to heal itself by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Henri Nouwen, when looking back at the pages of the spiritual journal he kept during a major depressive episode, wrote:

Reading them now, eight years later, makes me aware of the radical changes I have undergone. I have moved from anguish to freedom, through depression to peace, through despair to hope. It certainly was a time for purification for me. My heart, ever questioning my goodness, value, and worth, has become anchored in a deeper love and thus less dependent on the praise and blame of those around me. It also has grown into a great ability to give love without always expecting love in return . . . What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love. [8]

And so I suppose I can understand why a therapist once told me that I should view depression as a “gift”. The comment didn’t go down particularly well at the time, and I certainly don’t expect you to be able to see your illness in those terms if you are still in the depths of it. Indeed, the danger in talking in terms of opportunities and gifts is that we can start to romanticise depression. There have even been times in history where depression has almost obtained cult-like status, seen as something that must be endured in order to develop a certain level of creative insight (although I can’t help thinking that the form of the illness being glorified must have been a different, and more bearable, form than mine). We don’t want to fall into the trap of forgetting that, first and foremost, we are dealing here with an illness, and a particularly pernicious one at that. It is worth remembering that St Paul, whilst able to recognise God’s purpose in his suffering of the mysterious “thorn in his side”, still described whatever anguish or pain he was going through as a messenger sent from Satan (2 Corinthians 12:7).

What I think we can say with some confidence, however, is that this crisis will prove to be a make-or-break time. Mercifully, the testimony of countless sufferers of clinical depression is that it is possible to come through this thing, and for the better. It’s going to require courage, discernment and wisdom to determine what is needed to restore you to health. But for now, we simply need to hang on to God’s promise that he wants to work this out for your good.

And yet, we cannot help but ask: if this is indeed a “gift”, why has it been given to us? We certainly didn’t ask for it. And how come the vast majority of the people around us seem to get through life dealing with plenty of difficult stuff, without falling ill like this? The “why did this happen to me?” questions are always tough. They are unavoidable and perfectly natural, if not always healthy to dwell on. Ultimately, the answers are going to be complex and multi-layered, and sometimes we are just going to need patience to wait for insight to come. But one observation that I would throw out at this stage concerns the personality types of a significant number of sufferers of depressive illness. I should stress first that the people with the personality types I have in mind certainly do not have the monopoly on depressive illness. I certainly would not want anyone to feel alienated...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Why Bother?
• 2. The Big One
• 3. Help
• 4. My Brain Hurts
• 5. Thinking Differently
• 6. Ssshh!
• 7. Back to Life
• 8. Sustainable Me?
• Epilogue
• Notes