What Is Mental Health?

Contemplating the precursors of depression

Friends and readers, the following breaks from the shorter meditative insights I normally try to share with you. This a much longer, personal account with reflections on broader implications. If you’ve been waiting to hear from me, this is a big hello from across the cyberspace between us.

“The truth will set you free, but not until it's finished with you.” David Foster Wallace

When you hear the term “depression,” what comes to mind? As a broad diagnostic category, it encompasses a range of subjective symptoms with their attendant states of mind. Before I had firsthand experience with this insidious interior darkness, I vaguely regarded it as something like protracted sadness, or a “chemical imbalance,” often of inscrutable origin, and for that reason, probably requiring pharmaceutical intervention. I no longer see it that way. 

While I don’t regard my experience as normative, I’ve tried to trace what I believe to be the pathogenic patterns of thought and behavior in my particular case. As far as I’m aware, the traditional etiology of depression places little causal emphasis on the self-subverting tendencies and habits I cite below. I suspect there are many reason for this omission, including cultural drift, a lack of introspective proficiency, scientism, and the general fracturing of our self-understanding along with our story of our situation in the cosmos.

Whether or not my experience was representative of depression generally, I can tell you that it was one not of sadness but rather of irremediable hopelessness. When you are depressed, life and everything in it becomes mysteriously and unbearably insipid, like ash continuously poured into one’s mouth. Not only is life stripped of its color and savor, but you, the person trapped in that incomprehensible wasteland, are disintegrating as a coherent individual. Your identity—your sense of place, of purpose, of basic relevance—is being baptized in acid. 

If you haven’t experienced it, the description above probably sounds absurd. It probably sounds like a combination of weakness and self-pity. There is some truth to that. However, once weakness and self-pity have cleared a path for their more potent, more poisonous progeny, mere willpower has missed its moment. In a very real sense, a person in this state is like a rodent succumbing to paralysis in the coils of a venomous serpent: even the most strenuous efforts avail nothing. As the suicide rates attest, the whisper of the forked tongue is often a Mephistophelian lullaby.  

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Approaching Graduation

March, 2007. At twenty-four years old, I was on the verge of completing a four-year degree in just three years. I had been a C-average student in high school. Since graduation, however, exploring over a dozen foreign countries had revived my natural sense of curiosity that public school had driven into dormancy. Exposure to the messiness of real-world problems, and the beauty of the planet and its peoples, had transformed me into a genuine student of life. Because of that, I engaged with my university studies as I had never done in high school. 

My academic interest was genuine, then, but it was not, shall we say, pure. That is, I took an undisclosed degree of pride in earning this institutional credential. I believed that a college degree would “say something” about me; that it would be a universally recognized badge of honor. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t fully considered the more crucial aspect of education—namely, vocational aptitude—until I was about to have to earn a living. I was too preoccupied with earning social approval, and doing so with minimal risk, minimal effort, and minimal investment. 

After returning from the aforementioned globetrotting, my parents had offered me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live at home (to save on housing costs) if I chose to pursue a degree. With a good chunk of my tuition covered by a cross-country scholarship, I was in a pretty comfy situation. Getting room and board for free and getting paid to exercise, my life was not exactly the kind of thing that carves people out of wood. I had also designed my course load around ease, irrelevance, and areas in which I already possessed a high degree of understanding. My state university was only too happy to sell me a certificate for skills I already possessed. And I was naive enough to pay them for it. 

Then, in the midst of my cushy life, with graduation only two months away, something began to slip. I would read through some assignment only to find that I hadn’t understood it. I would read it again with the same result. To reiterate, up to my final semester in my undergraduate program, I had maintained something like a 3.98 GPA. Suddenly, managing abstract thought was like trying to sculpt dry sand. The ensuing difficulties began to cast my educational pursuits in a painful new light. It all began to feel like the pointless posturing it really was. 

Scrambling to keep it together, if only to cross the finish line, I began looking for ways to cut corners in my coursework. Even then, I could no longer handle the workload. And I had no idea why. Something in my mind or my brain was simply broken or breaking. We say that someone has lost his mind when he begins to exhibit inexplicable behavior. My routines and my behavior had not changed. But trying to engage my thinking faculties was like reaching out for an object only to find that my hands were no longer there. 

Broken and Afraid

I suddenly found myself completely adrift. Almost overnight, I had gone from high competence to profound ineptitude. Intellectually and psychologically, the transformation was as stark as an alpine climber forgetting not just how to climb but also how to walk. Needless to say, there was no way I could think my way out of my predicament. So I coasted. I showed up when and where I was expected. I went through the motions and waited for my brain to come back from vacation. On the outside, I still looked like the person my acquaintances thought they knew. But inside, I was curled into a question mark: a small, frightened, vegetative nobody. 

As the weeks passed, I exerted myself less and less. People were giving me strange looks and I knew why. I was losing ground, and the more ground I lost, the weaker I felt. Weakness, in turn, gave way to fear as I became more and more aware that weakness meant vulnerability. And my fear, as fear tends to do, took on irrational dimensions. I became terrified of things that had never frightened me before, such as being alone. 

Afraid to be alone, I would linger in places where there were other people. Some days I would sheepishly crawl into bed with my family members. I became a shadow around the campus, lurking about the commons and the library, talking with anyone who would put up with me, trying not to seem overtly parasitic. I often resorted to talking about my melancholia, asking for advice that I knew I couldn’t follow, vaguely hoping someone would say the magic words that would break the spell. 

But the spell held. And worsened. My fear became tinged with a sense of guilt. The guilt of the sluggard. The guilt of the derelict; of the useless, the spineless, the false. The guilt of those who skulk and creep through life, of those who avoid the light because their deeds—their pathetically small and meaningless deeds—are evil. In this emasculated state, I became especially fearful of aggressive, violent men. Their overt, unapologetic masculinity intimidated me to no end. I felt certain that given half a chance, such men would throttle me for my cowardice, if not for my uselessness. 

Onerous Legacy

During this time, my paternal grandfather was dying. Since my dad had build him a house across the street from ours, I could see well-wishers filling his home on a daily basis. His slow passing gave me a convenient excuse to skip entire days of the classes I could no longer understand. While skipping class, I would hang around the people who came to visit my grandpa, and as I did, I overheard what they said about him. They repeatedly referred to what a great man he was, and how the Lord would surely welcome him into His kingdom with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

As I listened to these comments, it hit me like never before that I was one of the heirs of the man they were talking about. I was in line to carry the legacy of this beloved medical doctor, this neighborly prayer warrior, this international philanthropist. But how could a broken, deceptive, pretentious coward ever shoulder such a burden? Deep down, I knew I never could. I knew I was unworthy of my origins. I knew that I had squandered the advantages of my birth. These realizations placed yet another millstone on my collapsing self-worth. 

I cast about in my mind, searching for some bit of evidence that my life had not been a complete waste. My past, I was forced to admit, had been a sham: little more than a series of esteem schemes. Rather than doing the hard work of becoming a person of character, I had settled for the appearance of being such a person. I had been playing to the crowd, working just hard enough to elicit the applause of the onlookers. While paying lip service to authenticity, I had been putting on a show. 

As I dared to consider whether my future might somehow redeem my past, my prospects grew darker still. It dawned on me that because I had wasted my past, I had no future to look forward to. Having planted nothing in the spring, there would be nothing to harvest in the fall. Grasping at straws, my mind pointed to my college education, the pursuit that had received the best of me over the past three years. But even as I reached for it, I knew that it, too, was worthless: an expensive status symbol that, vocationally speaking, had prepared me for nothing at all.

The realization of my undeniable wastefulness, falsehood, and hypocrisy took me out at the knees. I saw myself as a lost cause. My fate was sealed. My every effort had been funneled into a lie, and there was no longer even any sense in keeping up the act. No, repentance wasn’t an option. Partly because I regarded repentance was too good for me, and partly because there was nothing to go back to—nothing true to build upon. My enfeebling sense of pride couldn’t stomach the thought of starting back at square one just when my peers were embarking on shiny new careers. 

Sympathetic Escort

It was about this time that I became conscious of a small, internal voice that had been whispering in the background of my thoughts. The voice, seeming to know that I was sufficiently disarmed that it could now make itself known, moved from subtle insinuation to direct guidance. It gently encouraged me to give up, to let go, to quit trying. It said, “Look around, everyone manages to survive no matter what they do. Some work themselves to death, some major in mediocrity, and others don’t even have jobs. In the end, they all die the same death. Take what you can get while you can get it because your life will soon be over.”

I assumed the voice was nothing more than my own thoughts. I didn’t particularly like what it was saying, but it all seemed basically true. In my protracted stupor, I thought, Yes, why should I try? Why should I bother? Life is so hard, and what do you get for your efforts? So I stopped trying. And not surprisingly, I became exceedingly ineffectual. The will, it seems, like so many other aspects of human ability, is like a muscle. The less one uses it, the more unusable it becomes. 

“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of the judgment, character, and will.”  William James

The last few times I showed up for class, I could barely comprehend the material. I was becoming dumber by the day, and the trend showed no sign of abating. My stupefaction advanced to the point where I had to quit my part-time job and withdraw entirely from university. Just when I should have been taking a definitive step into adulthood, I was reverting to the crude conduct of a child. My parents were concerned and supportive but they didn’t know what to do. No one knew what was happening to me, much less why it was happening. I was becoming an intellectual invalid before their eyes, and they were powerless to arrest or reverse the process. 

Nor could God help me, apparently. I felt sure that my falsehood and my failures had made me unacceptable to him. I felt forsaken, bereft of my former anchor, with only myself to blame. Nonetheless, I felt that part of my downward spiral had been imposed on me, like a punishment or a curse. What I couldn’t figure out was, was it from God or Satan? At the time, I took this point of confusion to be a measure of my intellectual and spiritual decay. I now know that such ambiguities are an inevitable part of the walk of faith, and how we respond to them makes all the difference. 

Unfortunately, the way I responded made things worse. Part of that was due to a defeatist attitude that was too brittle to be molded and too formless to be broken. But perhaps an even greater part was due to volitional inertia: as it is for so many of us, expediency and superficiality had become habitual for me. So although my life was falling apart, I couldn't wrench myself from the ruts of habit. The same craven spirit that had led me to this place was still directing my steps. The thinking that had created my problems was all I had to solve them. So I poured fuel on the flames that were consuming me.  

Jobless and without responsibilities, my mind, body, and spirit were free to rot. Having lost hope in the future, all that remained to live for were moment-to-moment pleasures. Food became my dopamine trigger; movies, my distractions and sedatives. Driven by the knowledge that my days of free food were numbered, I ate as much as I could whenever food was available. I watched three or four movies alone on many nights—always while gorging on whatever was most convenient—and went to bed just before sunrise. 

My self-image slumped from the gutter into the sewer, and anhedonia set in. My mail piled up, unread. A heap of clothes covered my hamper. I belittled myself in conversations with friends and acquaintances. Former pastimes lost all appeal. I couldn’t see how I had ever enjoyed any of them. Humor and creativity became distant memories. I barely read and I didn't write at all. With no long-term outlook, every thought of exerting effort recreationally struck me as patently inane, indefensibly pointless. After all, as the voice kept reminding me, my life would soon be over.

I remember several friends who took time to listen to my self-abasing gibberish. In their own unique and loving ways, they tried to steer me straight. One of them told me that if I was still talking this way the next time he saw me, he would kick my ass. If only it were that simple. Still, the would-be ass-kicker and the others were truly beacons of light on a dark path. But what is light to the blind? Only an empty idea: a projection without an image. Even so, their words were like hope carried on a warm breeze. While they spoke, I could feel the heat and visualize better days. But like a ship without a sail, I just couldn't beat the waves. 

The Turning Point

Seeing how I was languishing, my mom insisted that I see a psychiatrist. My dad insisted that I get a job. I applied at Costco. I remember stammering incoherently during my interview, feeling like a picture of abject idiocy. Amazingly, they hired me to push carts and stock shelves anyway. It was mind-numbing work, even for someone with little left to numb. I would drag myself out of bed, jump on my dad's motorcycle, and skid into work at 4:32 a.m., just in time to keep from getting fired. Menial though it was, the job called me higher than I was calling myself. It demanded my participation in a structured system that would eject me if I didn't meet a few very basic requirements.

My mom, who has been medicated for psychiatric issues for most of her adult life, called in a favor so that I wouldn’t have to wait for a month to see the doctor. The seasoned, avuncular psychiatrist assessed the severity of my mental state using a comparative chart of some kind. This involved asking about how much I previously enjoyed certain activities as compared with how much I currently enjoyed them. Ascertaining that my ability to experience enjoyment had flatlined, and that I felt life was barely worth living, he wrote me a prescription and scheduled a follow-up appointment.

I took the prescribed medication (Wellbutrin) for a month. But once the little orange bottle was empty, I didn’t have the motivation to get it refilled. Although I worked in a building with a pharmacy and considered getting it refilled for weeks, I never actually did it. At the time, that level of responsibility was still out of reach. To this day, I don’t know whether the pills were instrumental in my recovery because, as the psychiatrist told me, the first month was only the “loading period.” For all I know, not refilling that prescription may have spared me from long-term pharmaceutical dependence. 

Over a period of several months, as I managed to hold down my job, I slowly came to regard myself less darkly. Somehow, I knew I had to start doing more than the bare minimum. I began by setting small, achievable goals for myself, and I would grind them out no matter how pointless it felt in the moment. Getting to the finish line became an end in itself, irrespective of the activity or its merits. Not because finishing filled me with satisfaction, but simply because finishing was the opposite of giving up. Capitulation, I came to see, was a velvet casket, and I was beginning to think maybe I shouldn’t climb in just yet.

The familiar voice continued to hound me, however. It would make itself felt, for example, at the second-mile marker of a three-mile jog. It would whisper the same defeatist drivel, reminding me of the futility of it all. But the memory of the stench of the swamp of surrender was too fresh to ignore. So I would run that last stupid mile scorning my own weakness along with the internal saboteur every step of the way. Such crucial moments of micro-change often feel anything but victorious, yet I see now that they are the resilient cells that coalesce to build a healthy body. 

Another part of doing more than the bare minimum was learning to give more than I took. I realized that I had spent most of my life trying to ensure that the scales of any transaction tilted in my favor. Letting go of this concern and really allowing myself to give became a new source of joy. I also made an effort to be in bed before midnight, and to face my fears, which turned out to be a source of life in itself. Pro-tip: many of your demons are gutless blowhards whose power is directly proportional to your fear. 

Continuing the pattern of doing more, I realized that I could do something with what was left of my mind while my body went through the motions of my job. While pushing seven-hundred-pound trains of shopping carts up the inclined parking lot in the summer sun, I worked on memorizing the Declaration of Independence. I'm not sure why I chose that particular text, apart from already having it at home in a booklet I could carry in my pocket. Perhaps I felt the need to make up for the civics omissions in my state-run education.

Strange as it may sound, I now believe that much of my recovery was due to the gradual restoration of my responsibility and integrity. More specifically, I had to reestablish a relationship with my conscience. I had to stop looking for shortcuts. I had to stop prioritizing appearances. I had to stop making excuses. I had to stop thinking I was special. In short, I had to accept the normal burden of real life. I don’t know whether, or to what degree, this pattern may apply to others, but I believe it applied to me.

It would take roughly a year for me to emerge, often stumbling and tumbling, from the existential fog. Having dropped out of college in the middle of spring semester, and having spent the summer in the mandatory rehab of forced labor, I took a chance and re-enrolled for fall semester. My academic performance was noticeably diminished but I was no longer dead in the water as I had been before dropping out. I challenged myself with electives like Arabic instead of Yoga that semester, and finished with Bs and Cs rather than my previous mostly A’s.

One significant tumble that semester involved a steamy evening spent with a beautiful Brazilian co-ed. It was one of the most amazing and memorable sexual experiences of my life. But in the days that followed, I felt a certain degree of shame and remorse. Nevertheless, I knew that I would eventually thirst for another encounter with her. I still remember where I was, filling up at a gas station, when I deleted her number. And I remember as well, several weeks later, when, if I had still had it, I would have used it.

You may regard my sexual skittishness as puritanical, and perhaps it was. But that’s beside the point. The point is that personal compunctions are something more than inconvenient feelings, and I had been ignoring mine for too long. Conscience is a gift of interior guidance that draws on a wisdom beyond the one it guides. We will always be able to turn a deaf ear toward its gentle directives, but we ignore them at our own peril. As an old Chinese proverb puts it, “Sometimes not getting what we want is our greatest stroke of luck.”

A New Lens

Looking back now at how my mind began to unravel, it’s clear that I was on the wrong path. Even while jumping through the conventional academic hoops, I was trying to fake my way into success. I thought I was smart enough to game the system, to get the rewards without doing the work. Instead of using my intellectual potential to do something real, I had set my mind to doing made-up work in pursuit of a made-up credential. All the while, the hulking monolith of the real world had been quietly, inexorably reeling me in. In the real world, the only way to have your cake and eat it, too, is to steal it from someone else.

Although I was on a false path—the path of least resistance—I probably wouldn’t have changed course if I hadn’t been stopped dead in my tracks. We don’t tend to abandon the strategies that work for us. Yet the path of least resistance is deceptively perilous. Its comforts are, at first, deliciously inviting. But those who keep to it reliably become cowards and cripples. Who, then, kept me from straying farther down this path? Was it God or some devil?

As David Foster Wallace riffed on throughout his satirical tome Infinite Jest, we live in an age that is owned by commercial interests (The Year of the Trial-size Dove Bar; The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment). It has been useful for these interests to characterize man as a meat-machine. His mental health is, by extension, the purview of pills-makers and mental mechanics. But what if this paradigm is woefully insufficient?

If each person is a node in the multivariate mosaic of consciousness, isn't it obvious that the well-being of each node involves vastly more than the fluctuations of neurotransmitters? Or perhaps that is the goal: to so isolate the subjective condition of the individual that he can disregard the decline of the world around him.

Could it be that “mental health” is a materialist misnomer for a phenomenon whose natural dimensions defy a secular framework? What if mental health is unavoidably linked to our beliefs, our conduct, and our story of the world? What if mental health is better understood as the health of our truthfulness, courage, and sense of purpose?

I believe that my mental illness was a manifestation of a moral illness, and that something inside me—my moral immune system, the Jungian Unconscious, the Holy Spirit within—mounted a defense against my pathological immorality. Few others, if any, would have regarded my behavioral precursors as pathological, which is a crucial point. My experience suggests that the moral dimension of mental illness involves the particular ways in which a person is living in violation of his or her conscience.

The literal meaning of conscience is “with-knowledge” or “joint knowledge”. Some dictionaries offer definitions such as, “knowledge within oneself,” or “an internal sense of right and wrong.” While conscience is both of these, I think they both also miss the most central meaning, which is that of an internal witness: the other knower of the joint knowledge. For how can the knowing be shared unless there is someone with whom to share it, and how can it be internal unless that someone is within?

But, of course, such a witness would be iconoclastic to the materialist frame. So we are meant not to see this aspect of our internal experience. We are conditioned and coddled into a state of self-ignorance by those who profit from our malaise. They flatter our appetites into believing that conscience has no bearing on well-being. In silencing our scruples and numbing our pain, they excuse the very behaviors that necessitate the numbing. They teach us that we can rub shoulders with demons and still feel like angels—that we can sow the seeds of death and still somehow reap life.

In one sense, this is simply the creation of desirable market conditions. Fearful, empty, confused, lonely, miserable people make the best customers. But it is also a collision of immiscible categories: the incursion of vendors into the domain of the sacred, the spiritual. Finding God all but dead in the public consciousness, the vendors have fed like leeches on an unmitigated windfall of commercial demand.

For how much security does it take to create a sense of safety? How many contracts does it take to replace trust? How much titillation does it take to create contentment? How many prescriptions does it take to generate health? How many lies does it take to replace truth? How much glamour does it take to bestow confidence? How much status does it take to feel loved? Synthetic counterfeits of all these things offered to us relationally by God are now offered to us transactionally by the inventors of planned obsolescence.

Not all of this, however, can be lain at the feet of industrialists and commercial pharmacologists. It’s only to be expected that those who profit from such conditions will encourage them. To do otherwise would require devotion to a God other than Money—which is precisely the anchor from which we have cut ourselves free. No, there is a deeper antagonism here than capitalism without conscience.

Wallace, although largely of the atheistic persuasion, recognized that we humans are haunted—and even hunted—by some species of immaterial adversary. He was keenly aware of Thanatos in its many forms—be it a spirit, an instinct, a principle, or a principality. Of course, Wallace was in good company. Until recently, (right around the Year of the Whopper, I believe), most serious worldviews readily recognized Death as an active, willful force; not simply the passive, indifferent absence of life.

The difference matters. If there is any sense in which we are being hunted, our survival depends on being aware of it. And indeed, if our depressive suicides were understood as anything other than self-inflicted tragedies, we would identify and eliminate the serial killer in our midst. But because the materialist paradigm is decidedly blind to such assailants, we’ve been tinkering with molecules while being ravaged by Moloch.

How long will it take us to connect the dots? We can know a cause by its effects. In the case of depression, the effects are demoralization and identity decomposition that lead down to death. Something is killing us. Something that infiltrates our consciousness. Something that talks to us, guiding us, nudging us, binding us. Pushing us toward the edge, the noose, the overdose, the barrel of a gun. But we don’t know what it is.

Consider: the science of energy understands entropy; the science of nutrition understands metabolic disease; the science of microorganisms understands saprophytes; but the science of the soul (psyche) doesn’t understand immorality. If Man is not a moral entity, then his immoral behavior should have no effect on him—and require no remediation. But if he is a moral entity, then our understanding of his well-bring must account for that.

We humans are complex creatures. Not only do we each hold a psychical world within, we also exist within a network of relationships that can range from nurturing to murdering. Beyond these two dimensions (but also suffusing them both) is the mythic aspect of our existence—our story of the world, which is our only means of answering the questions, “Why are we here?” “What are we for?” “Why does any of this matter?” Add to this the possibility that we are the prey of ancient, entropic spirits, and it’s clear that micromanaging serotonin is a form of veiled surrender.

If, as I believe, what we are dealing with is a scourge of identity crises due to an unserviceable worldview, then there is no easy fix. Patching the roof is no cure for a collapsing foundation. If we are to have any hope of health in this arena, we need a better model of Man. We need to acknowledge that, so far from being merely molecules in motion, we are:

• Relational. There is no substitute for being known and loved. Parenting is an indispensable art. The worse we are at parenting, the worse we will be as a society. These first relationships are meant to be a bridge to our relationship with the Internal Witness, the giver of life, the centerpiece of morality and meaning. If these connections are compromised or neglected, life will be a series of restless, uncomprehending, destructive compensation campaigns—and society at large will pay in pounds of flesh for want of the parental ounce of prevention.

• Moral. Every choice we make is a value judgement. This is an inescapable design constraint. But values, while optional, are not arbitrary. Values influence outcomes, which can range from very good to very bad. Through our choices, our values create feedback loops that simultaneously shape not only our souls but also the world as a whole. If we would only listen, this is often what our Internal Witness is trying to tell us. Our values, which are so consequential, spring directly from and only from our mythology, our story of the world.

• Mythological. Because our desire to know has always outstripped our ability to investigate, we have mapped and re-mapped the cosmos with stories that reach where we cannot go. Such stories knit the objective world into a psychologically manageable framework, providing a context for everything we do, including where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Today, however, a codependent reliance on counterfeit science has reduced us to existential bastards, cosmic detritus. What we need, in the words of GK Chesterton, is the story of “fatherhood that makes the whole world one.”

I’ve been suggesting the possibility that we are mentally ill because we are morally ill. What, then, would it mean to be morally healthy? Is it enough to follow a certain set of rules? If so, which rules are the right rules, and can we truly follow them?

Some system of rules, values, and principles is essential for human life. But any such system will be insufficient for two reasons. Not only can rules never attain a granularity suited to the variety of human experience (they become suffocating when they try), they also stimulate the ego in a way that reliably produces self-righteousness, superficial showmanship, and hypocrisy. Needless to say, these traits are open invitations to every kind of immorality. Something more, then, is needed.

That something, I believe, is on the spiritual level. Our roots must go deeper than rules. Unlike the rigid, impersonal hand of morality, spirituality is concerned with the conscious connection of relationships. Specifically, our relationship with the Internal Witness, who is wise and non-coercive, through whom we are connected to everything else. But if this primary relationship is missing, other voices and influences will rush in to take its place. The house, once swept clean, must remain occupied.

Today, many, if not most of us, are spiritually comatose: under the anesthetic siege of parasitic interests, human and otherwise. And just as a blind man, who cannot see his own arm, can still have it cut off, we remain vulnerable to attacks we do not perceive. In the words of Philip K. Dick, “Thanatos can assume any form it wishes. It can kill Eros and then simulate it. If this happens to you, you are in big trouble. You suppose you are driven by Eros, but it is Thanatos wearing a mask.”

How, then, can we trust such interior guidance? How do we know if we are being directed by Death or by Life? Learning to distinguish between these two chaperons is part of the lost art of living. We learn, as Socrates said, by examining ourselves and knowing ourselves, and as the Apostle John said, by “testing the spirits.” Beware the very battle, however: both Socrates and Jesus were executed for their allegiance to such unsanctioned guidance.

If we are spiritually blind, it is because, as Nietzsche said, we have killed God, the Spirit of life. We have cut off the only branch we had to stand on—fooled, once again, into believing that knowledge (rebranded as science) can somehow replace the divine. We have imagined that we will out-know the original Knower. We see here yet another instance of our primordial pattern: the belief that insular, outward understanding can take the place of interior, relational knowing.

In keeping with our deicide, we have tried to cast off the moral dimension of our being, only to find that it’s an integral part of who we are. Is it any surprise that, having rejected morality, we’re becoming demoralized? This condition is then explained as a “chemical imbalance” as we might say of a man shot to the ground, “This fellow lost his footing.” Chemical imbalances, to whatever extent they’re involved, don’t occur in a vacuum, and should be investigated as symptoms before they’re treated as the disease.

But you know what people will say. Just make it stop, doc. Make the darkness go away. Let me feel hope again. And the doctor will say, (forgive the hyperbole) “I’ve got just the thing. Your condition has nothing to do with your lifestyle, nor with the themes on which you constantly meditate. That feeling of empty aimlessness isn’t related to your functional solipsism. That gnawing sense of guilt has nothing to do with your hidden hypocrisy or your chronic cowardice. You stay just the way you are, and I’ll see you again next month. And the month after that. And the month after that… Don’t you go dyin’ on me, now.”

Our condition as captives to these foreign substances is a quiet calamity of pyrrhic victories. While these drugs may be helpful as emergency palliatives, their easy availability is part of the problem. We should see long-term dependence on psychotropic medication as akin to having to wear a cast for years on end. Just as we would seek a second opinion if our surgeon said our femur would never heal, we should be equally suspicious of those who claim to treat, but cannot heal, the mind.

The problem with partial solutions is that they often foil what else might have been. It’s amazing how people will innovate when doing so is their only option. And this hints at one of the most delicate aspects of healing, of parenting, of healthy relationships in general: that we should strive to allow others to do as much as they can do on their own power. The true limits of that power can only be discovered by attentively (perhaps painfully) allowing the other to struggle while helping them to believe in their capability.

If you do this, however, you will open yourself to accusations of lacking empathy, having no heart. But is it really heartless to take the longview of another’s wellbeing? No, such aspersions are the sound of a person’s entitlement to being rescued, even from the problems that he brings upon himself again and again. Our desire to be seen as compassionate caretakers is so strong that we often break down under this emotionally charged assault. When empathy is weaponized in this way, as a lever of coercion, we must disconnect from that lever so that compassion cannot be used as a fulcrum for crushing our wisdom.

This brings us back to my question about God and the devil. Which of these unsympathetic sprirts was behind my hardship? Both, I believe, were playing their part—shaking everything that could be shaken. God, firmly guiding me through the painful process of losing my airs to take root in truth; Satan, stress-testing my understanding, my resolve, and my identity by goading me to give up. For God, pain is an incidental (and instructive) aspect of restoration. For the devil, pain is an opportunity to offer the comforts of hell.

There are a few instances in the Bible that tell of God sending an evil spirit to bring about His purposes. Relatedly, Hebrews 12:6 says that God “chastises everyone He accepts as a son.” I don’t know if this was the case with me, but if it was—if God determined that I needed to be tormented for a season to produce his ends in me for eternity—then I wear his marks on my life with trepidation and humble gratitude.

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