In 1994, Penguin Books published a young women’s autobiography that chronicled her desperate battle with depression through most of her youth.  “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir hit the New York Times Best Seller list and was heralded by the Times as, “Sparkling, luminescent prose… a powerful portrait of one girl’s journey through the purgatory of depression and back.”

Though this very raw and unfiltered account of her long term struggle with depression is full of heartbreak and despair, it also offers a great deal of insight into the moods, heart and attitudes of a depressed human being.

Where most people in this condition would be terrified to let you into their very dark private thoughts and emotions, Elizabeth plows right in and lays it out there for all the world to see.  And, I have to admit, it was helpful.  As painful as it was to read and observe, it shed a lot of light on this very dark and disturbing condition.

And of course, the very first thought that popped into my head was why.  Why do some sink into this very deep abyss and get stuck like some poor pathetic bird who inadvertently wanders into a tar pit, and despite all their efforts, get sucked further into the black oozing substance, while others may only occasionally get splattered with the stuff, but are able to brush it off and keep functioning in relative normality.

I know the answer for much of our modern sophisticated world is that it is merely a disease of the mind like any other medical condition that affects humans to varied degrees ranging from the short term “common cold” type illnesses all the way up to the sometimes terminal condition like cancer that sometimes ends in death.

The difference is that no matter how depressed you become, no matter how dark and foreboding those feels might weigh on your heart and mind, depression will never, in and of itself, cause you to stop breathing.

The Physician’s Desk Reference, in its section, Deaths Resulting from Depression,   immediately lists the statistic that there are approximately forty thousand suicides per year, but nowhere is it specifically stated that someone dies directly from depression.

On the other hand, cancer doesn’t care how good or bad you feel, despite all of yours and your doctor’s efforts, when it has eaten up all of your cells and is done with you, your life will end.

For depression to end in death, one must pull the trigger themselves, or engage in other unhealthy behavior which in turn can lead to death, but most of these other stressors can be externally avoided.  In the history of all mankind, as far as we know it, the “medical condition” of depression has not ended in one single fatality.

For many of us, it is easy to empathize with Elizabeth’s story as she speaks of a childhood that was blanketed with strife and disorder.   According to her, her parents were divorced sometime around age two and her father was in and out of her life throughout most of her childhood, but mostly out.

For Elizabeth, as with most normal children, the disruption to her family life caused by a very messy divorce was devastating and the pain of separation she relates is enormous.

In her chapter (page 75), “Love Kills,”  she asks the question, “Can divorce possibly work with a child involved?” and then proceeds to discuss how a “small industry of marriage counselors and divorce therapists devote themselves to easing the process of parental separation for the sake of the children,” has sprang up.   However, it’s easy to see how over the past 20 years this industry is no longer small, but dominates the landscape.  Coincidentally, so does suicide.

She further relates (pg 77) how her parents would tell her, “Every so often…, that their feelings for each other shouldn’t affect me, but it always rang false, like putting an elephant in the middle of our cramped, poorly lit living room and trying to suggest that I ignore the beast.”

She continued (pg 80), “It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective…  No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy.”

After being sent off to summer camp for several years in a row and feeling toward her parents like, “they threw me away,” she further relates how she felt like she wanted to kill her parents for doing this to her and hack them to death because she felt like she never really found her way back home (pg 80)!

At the age of twelve after an attempted suicide, she tells her mother that she doesn’t want to make her mother sad, that she just wants a relationship with her father (pg 81).   Pg 82, Elizabeth just wants two parents who love her.

On page 316 of her book she states, “I hate to admit it, but even after years of religious training, I really don’t believe in the afterlife. I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that.”  She continued saying how she was “looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore.   I am looking forward to it for real.”

If this is the case, then suicide, or euthanasia is a very real and appealing option for those tired and weary souls that feel as though they’re messed up beyond repair.  Why go through the formality of suffering through the remainder of time here on earth when comfortable nothingness awaits?

But what if that line of thinking is not true?  What if depression is really an alarm bell and not a disease, a symptom of something wrong, but not a sign that you are irrevocably damaged goods, whose only cure is in a medicine bottle, intensive psychological counseling or at the end of the barrel of a gun.

My father once told me that suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

What if the answer was simpler than that?  Wouldn’t that be worth investigating?  Wouldn’t that be worth sticking around for a little while longer to truly count the cost and to consider perhaps one more possibility?

And, ultimately, what if depression is not a disease of the mind and body, but a sickness of the heart and soul?  What if it is a condition in need of a Savior not a suicide?  Wouldn’t that be worth exploring?   In John Chapter 8, vs. 12 Jesus makes the following unusual claim, “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”