Depression and Sorrow

Depression can be caused by suffering, pain and sorrow. Let’s recall the difference between evil and suffering. Evil is the absence of a good which should be present, in other words something is missing that should be there. Blindness is a physical evil since the person is missing sight. Vice is a moral evil since the person is missing virtue – the good actions and habits that result in happiness. Suffering is not evil. Suffering is a felt response to something perceived as evil. The purpose of suffering is to alert us that something needs to change. People always mix up suffering and evil, probably because suffering always indicates the presence of some evil. If we suffer, it’s either because we accurately perceive some present evil, or because we mistakenly think something’s evil when it isn’t – and that very mistake on our part is itself a failure in our judgment. Suffering doesn’t happen without evil. But the correspondence between evil and suffering shouldn’t lead to confusion. Only evil is evil. Suffering can be good. It can be the right response to a perceived evil (causing you to take your hand out of the fire); and it can motive change in our behavior from vice to virtue. Like changing from a life of greed to generosity.  We must distinguish between pain which begins in the body and sorrow which finds its origin in the soul. Sorrow can cause us to ask the big questions in life and then seek for answers. Sorrow can also motivate us to make a change in the way we live. If we suffer the sorrow of loneliness, we may make the changes to have deep friendships. Sorrow may also help us appreciate happiness even more.  Suffering in the form of pain or sorrow is meant to alert us to a problem and motivate us toward change and ultimately to achieve the purpose of our life - union with God. Suffering can awaken the soul from indifference and sloth, causing it to take our relationship with God more seriously. Suffering can also prevent us from becoming distracted on our journey toward union with God because when we become distracted, as we often do in the summer, then we lose the depth of relationship we had with God when we are in our normal routines, and this lose of relationship results in sorrow. Finally, suffering can empty us of all the addictions and disordered attachments we will not let go of on our own that block us from being filled by God.  Suffering is not evil. Evil is evil. Evil is the problem – whether physical, psychological, or spiritual. Evil is the thing to eliminate at all costs – not suffering. We eliminate evil by rectifying the absence of the good that ought to be there; not the numbing of the response that motivates positive change.  God allows evil out of respect for our freedom and interdependence, and because He can use evil as an opportunity for good. God gives us the gift of human suffering as a perfection of our nature, and as a motive for heroically moving beyond the weaknesses and defects of our condition: “the more one sorrows on account of a certain thing, the more one strives to shake off sorrow, provided there is a hope of shaking it off.” We are not motivated to change until the pain or sorrow outweighs the pleasure or the comfort.  However, suffering in the form of sorrow, just like any other good or any other passion, can also become disordered. It can be counter-productive. It can inhibit, instead of inciting, the process of making things better. Such is the case with “excessive sorrow, which consumes the soul: for such sorrow paralyzes the soul, and hinders it from shunning evil...”  There is the danger of a suffering that cripples the will rather than empowering it – and this is depression.  It’s not necessarily immoral or imprudent to use drugs to help with depression, but before we get to that we need to appreciate the character of depression as a natural response to significant pain