Dying of Despair and the Good News

Christians believe that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ brings Good News to a troubled, anxious and despairing world whether it is 40 AD or 2017 AD. The message that there is a good and loving, a just and merciful God who cares for everything and everyone that he has made and who has acted to rescue everything and everyone from inevitable death and despair is literally a matter of life and death, here and in the hereafter. This conviction speaks to the picture of reality presented in a distressing article titled Dying of Despair by Aaron Kheriaty that appears in the August edition of First Things magazine. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine.

Professor Kheriaty is concerned about the increase of depression as the most common serious medical and mental health disorder in the United States. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults, and the tenth leading cause of death overall in the United States. He does not include in these statistics the epidemic of opioid addiction that is ravaging our people and is itself a cause of death by either accidental or intentional overdose.

This is all easily tied to the increasing social fragmentation that has plagued our society for at least fifty years. The article names as culprit the disappearing or weaker ties that provide people with identity, social capital, mutual aid, reciprocity, collective action, solidarity and connection, the real, not the virtual kind. In a meritocratic age, we are increasingly valued for our usefulness. When usefulness replaces the good or efficiency becomes the highest value, human beings are diminished, objectified and instrumentalized. Radical personal autonomy trumps all other considerations. Kheriaty sums it all up with the ancient words: It is not good for man to be alone.

Not surprisingly, medical research suggests that participation in religion and faith communities, faith practices like prayer, the cultivation of faith values like gratitude, forgiveness and other virtues all reduce the risk of depression, lower the risk of suicide, decrease drug abuse and help those striving to overcome addiction. Most importantly Christianity provides hope.

Professor Kheriaty writes that the the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps knew when fellow prisoners had lost hope by the way they walked, looked and carried themselves. Before long, they would be dead. The most dangerous factor for a person struggling with depression is the sense of hopelessness. Hope cannot come from a prescription, yet it is essential to mental and emotional well-being. Professor Kheriaty concludes, we cannot live without hope.

In 1993 Pope John II used the term “culture of death” to describe the wide range of contemporary patterns, genocide, sexual trafficking, slavery, euthanasia, to name only a few and the demise of conscience itself as expressions of a culture opposed to life. Over and against the culture’s insidious, creeping nihilism stands the Good News of God’s righteous love revealed uniquely, definitively and redemptively in Jesus Christ.

Whether we or someone close to us struggles with depression or not, the culture all of us and our children inhabit is itself dis-eased. The fruits of this dis-ease are despair, cynicism, hopelessness and death. The fruits of the spirit, by contrast, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

The world is despairing for lack of the hope in God in Christ that keeps us going. Don’t keep yours to yourself.

- Robert +