Did Sin Cause My Depression?

Sometimes Christians with Depression wonder if they did something to deserve their suffering. They wonder if their sin caused their depression. Some things I read in a recent book, Depression, Anxiety and the Christian Life (my review) made me think and I wanted to share.

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Did Sin Cause My Depression?

It is true that some of the hardships we encounter are a result of sin and so sin can cause or worsen depression and sometimes it's not related at all. It's not usually one sin that causes an illness but many sins over a long period of time. However that's not what you should be worrying about. The cause of your depression for the most part is irrelevant. It's what you do with that depression.

If they were more aware of how sinful is their overvaluing the world, failing to trust God, having bitter thoughts of him and meager, unholy thoughts about his goodness, and devaluing the glory of heaven (which should give them some solace even in the most desperate state), as well as their being frequently impatient, worrying, and discontent, and their denying previously received mercy or grace, this would do them more good than words of comfort.  - from Depression, Anxiety and the Christian Life

What this quote is saying is that by doing those things, you are sinning. Someone telling you that they are sins and that you should work hard to overcome them would be better than just simple words of comfort such as "don't worry, it will be okay." Hope is important but just hoping it will get better is not taking matters into your own hands.

Words of Wisdom

Don't make the world more important than faith. Trust in God, resist bitter thoughts of God and unholy thoughts about his goodness. Watch your impatience, worry, discontent and don't deny already received mercy or grace or deny that you will receive more.

Sin Doesn't Mean...

However just because you might be struggling with sin (as we all are in some way), it doesn't mean that you are not worthy of grace or that God doesn't love you.

On the other hand, if they foolishly imagine that all these sins prove them to be devoid of grace and that God will count the Devil’s temptations as their personal sins, condemn them for the very things they abhor, and reckon their very illness of depression to them as a crime, these notions need to be refuted and discarded. Otherwise, they might mistakenly relish their disordered emotions and sufferings. - from Depression, Anxiety and the Christian Life

God doesn't count the Devil's temptations as yours, as long as you resist them. God doesn't consider your illness a crime either. God loves you and your imperfections but he hopes you will be able to resist sin and try to live as he would.

Repent of your sin, ask for forgiveness and then work on your illness. It's hard, trust me I know. But you have to take an active role in your depression to get rid of it. It won't go away by itself. God Bless!

Choosing Life (Suicide and Faith)

I suffer from Bipolar which means I have struggled with Depression and Mania and have dealt with suicidal thoughts most of my life. My manias are dysphoric which means that instead of feeling excessively happy or having grandiose thoughts (I'm better than others or I can conquer the world) most of the time I feel excessive anger, anxiety and obsessive thoughts when I'm manic. It also means I get suicidal thoughts during depressions and manias.

NOTE: This post may be triggering to some. It talks about suicide. Please read with care.

Choosing Life - Suicide and Faith

If you've struggled with suicidal thoughts and you believe in God you may have wondered what God thinks about suicide. I have been suicidal off and on for many years but I've only been
Christian for just under 5 years.

Before I believed in the Christian God, I thought it didn't matter if I committed suicide because when I died I thought I'd be reincarnated to another life no matter how I died. Once I started being a Christian I struggled with what God would think if I killed myself. Does it matter? Would I be welcomed into his arms no matter how I died? Surely God would understand that I was suffering. Surely God didn't want me to suffer right?

I had searched online for what the Bible says about suicide but wasn't happy with the answers one way or the other. Luckily I chose life. I'm not currently suicidal (thank goodness) and am doing okay. But I recently came across Deuteronomy 30 in my reading and I wanted to share what it says with anyone who might have considered suicide or might consider it in the future.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God says "Choose Life."

Okay so God wasn't talking about suicide but I still feel like this is his message to me.

The commentary on this page says this about this passage:

"Every man wishes to obtain life and good, and to escape death and evil; he desires happiness, and dreads misery. So great is the compassion of the Lord, that he has favoured men, by his word, with such a knowledge of good and evil as will make them for ever happy, if it be not their own fault. Let us hear the sum of the whole matter. If they and theirs would love God, and serve him, they should live and be happy. If they or theirs should turn from God, desert his service, and worship other gods, that would certainly be their ruin." 

So the phrase is about choosing God, loving God and serving God so that we may live through him. I feel this is still what God wants me to think of if I consider suicide thoughts. If we seek him and follow him we are doing it so we can live with God when the time comes and so we should be doing so only when HE decides the time comes.

I don't think it's a matter of whether you will go to Heaven if you kill yourself or not. We still go to heaven when we sin as long as we accept Jesus as our saviour and try to life like he would. I think if we DID go through with it, we would still be accepted into Heaven. HOWEVER, God wants us to choose life, now and then with him after we die, as HE wills it.

These are just my thoughts and I am still studying more but I hope it is helpful to someone.

eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker is the best tool to keep track of your Bipolar condition so that when you talk to your doctor he or she can tell if you are doing better or worse and if anything needs to be changed in your treatment plan
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I’ve tried multiple ways to track my symptoms but most of them didn’t work for one reason or another.
I’ve tried paper but that requires remembering to print or photocopy it each month and keeping it somewhere where someone doesn’t find it.
I’ve tried just writing it down on paper but it inevitably gets lost and its hard to be clear on what means bad and what means good.
I’ve tried lots of phone apps too but most of them were made for depression, not Bipolar and so I couldn’t track my mania or they weren’t easy to use or weren’t free.
Until now…

eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker Review

I recently found an app called eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker. It must be new because I’ve been looking for a Bipolar tracker for years.

I’ve been using it for over a month now. It tracks your depression, mania, irritability and anxiety. You rank each from None to Severe and you are ranking the worst it was that day. This works best for me since my moods change throughout the day so it’s hard for me to rank my depression at a certain number for the day if it’s been all over the place. But this way I’m ranking the worst it was.

eMoods Log Your Moods

You can also mark if you had psychotic symptoms or had talk therapy that day. Also you can track the hours of sleep you got so you can see any patterns. Those with Bipolar know (or should know) that lack of sleep can be a sign of an Mania. If you are sleeping less and less and your mania is going up, it’s time to talk to your doctor.

In setting you can add a spot to track weight or menstrual cycle. My doctor used to have me track this and I found my depressions were worse during that time of the month. You can also allow it to automatically check that you took your everyday medications.
You can view your results in calendar or graph mode to see how you are doing over time. You can also set a reminder to use the app.

eMoods Sleep Results

eMoods Tracking Points

As you can see below (graph mode) you can see how depressed, elevated (manic), irritable or anxious I was from May 10th when I started using the app until the end of May. The darker, longer lines are worse. The small light blue dot means none. So you can see the 14th and 15th were bad for me with depression and irritability.

eMoods Calendar Mode

I don’t personally like this mode as much but you can see how you did in calendar mode. So here again you can see more dark circles on the 14th and 15th. In this mode you would have to remember that the first circle is depression, second is manic etc.

eMoods 3 Month Overview

The app just recently added this feature. This is another way to see how you’ve been doing. You see one month at a time but you can scroll down to see the last 3 months.
This one is showing June. It drops off on the 20th because that is today, when I wrote the post. You can see two irritability peaks, one of which happened when I was manic (elevated) but not the other. I mostly had mania this month, you can barely see the depression because it mostly was less than the mania was.

The Premium Version

All the above is free but if you upgrade to the paid version (which I have not) you can add custom tracking points so you can say mark down when you exercised.
The premium version also allows you to add time stamped notes, generate printable reports older than 6 months and 10% of the profits goes to mental health charities.
All your app data is saved and you can email yourself as a backup as well.

Get the eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker App

You can find the app on Google Play for Android.
You can find the app on the App Store for Apple.

The Silver Linings Playbook

The Silver Linings Playbook is a 2012 romantic comedy-drama starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence with Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, Anupam Kher and Julia Stiles.

Summary: After a stint in a mental institution, former teacher Pat Solitano moves back in with his parents and tries to reconcile with his ex-wife. Things get more challenging when Pat meets Tiffany, a mysterious girl with problems of her own.

Rated R
2hr 2min

Silver Linings Playbook Review

When I found out this movie was about someone with Bipolar I knew I wanted to watch it. Since I have Bipolar, I like to see how the media portrays us.
I realized as I watched it that there is always a problem with portraying people with mental illness in movies or TV.

Those with mental illness are all different, even if they have the same diagnosis. So because of this, a movie can only portray one version of that illness. So anyone with that illness that experiences it differently will think they didn’t portray the illness correctly. Anyone without that mental illness will think the illness ONLY looks that one way.

That being said, overall I think the movie was pretty good. I identify with Pat’s anger although I deal with it in a different way. He lets it out, I hold it in or unleash it on myself. I may have enjoyed it more if I was a football person as a lot of the show revolved around watching football on TV and betting on games.

It’s one of those movies you can watch while you do something else, it doesn’t require intense concentration. Which honestly is a good thing for me right now as I can’t concentrate well.
The ending was the best part of the movie (as it should be as far as I’m concerned.) The movie is listed as a Romantic Comedy-Drama but honestly there wasn’t really any comedy in it. But that was okay. A Romantic Drama was refreshing.

Silver Linings Playbook Trailer

NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP is something I just recently stumbled upon. It can be a bit confusing at first but it sounds like something I’d like to try and I wanted to share a bit about it.

What is NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming?

According to Wikipedia:

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. […] NLP’s creators claim there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro-), language (linguistic) and behavioral patterns learned through experience (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life

If that seems very confusing, don’t worry. I find the more I read about NLP the more I understand it.
Basically there are a set of practices you can do to acheive results whether it be freedom from depression and anxiety or just the negative thoughts every person has from time to time.
You should know that not all of these ideas can be proven through science and probably because of that, certain people and groups discredit NLP. However there is nothing harmful about using NLP and besides, sometimes if you believe something helps, it helps.

Anchors

Anchors are used to change the feelings/thoughts surrounding a particular situation. You know how sometimes if a person is wearing something specific and they win a competition they start to think of that item as lucky? Whether or not it has any actual luck in it doesn’t matter. The person associates said item with luck and so when they wear it in the future, they feel more lucky.
Anchors are like that but you can make them intentionally too. So if you create a few anchors like a calming stone you can hold or a joyful necklace, you can train your brain to change how you’re feeling when you have those anchors with you.

Change The Memory

There is another one that involves remembering something negative that happened (and that you think about often) and looking at it again from a third person’s perspective, as if you are a movie director. You can zoom in and out, change the view, focus on certain things and unfocus on others.
Manipulate the memory, take the focus off the main part and focus on smaller, average things such as the flowers in the vase behind you or the dog barking at your feet. Doing this enough makes the memory seem distant and non important, stopping your brain from going back to it again and again.

And More

There is way more to it than that. I am still learning but I think it’s an interesting way to try to change your thinking. I wish I had heard of it sooner! There are some resources below if you wish to know more. The free ebook is pretty good and if after that you want to learn more, you might want the other books. Just remember that it can seem confusing at first but keep reading.

Resources:

NLP Canada FREE ebook on NLP
NLP Depression & Anxiety Kindle Books (affiliate link)
Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies (affiliate link)

The Difference Between Angry and Mad

How many times have you heard people use the word angry and mad interchangeably (me included) when there really is a difference between angry and mad.

Difference Between Angry and Mad

While there is technically a difference between being angry and mad, it’s not that big of a deal if you say you are mad when you mean angry, especially if you live in North America.
Although I will be explaining a bit behind the meaning of the words, this post is about dealing with your anger as much as it is about the correct grammar.

Angry and Mad Defined

Angry
1. Having a strong feeling of or showing annoyance, displeasure or hostility; full of anger.
Some synonyms: irate, cross, vexed, incense, infuriated, etc.
He makes me so angry.
I get angry when she does that.
Mad
1. mentally ill, insane
Some synonyms: crazed, psychotic,
She felt as if she was going mad.
He could feel the madness welling up inside of him.
If you live in England you will hear the word mad used to mean mentally ill more than you will in North America but the meaning is still the same.

How Angry and Mad Got Mixed Up

So how did people start using the word mad when they mean angry?
Unfortunately a lot of people have trouble with their anger and instead of expressing it well, as soon as it bothers them, they do a number of different things to not express it from bottling it all up quietly inside of them, to acting passive aggressive (e.g. the person who says nothing is wrong but gives you the cold shoulder) to the person who takes the anger out on the wrong person.
When they do this, anger tends to build inside of them and act like a poison to their body. They are not expressing their anger in a healthy way and so it can feel like they are going mad (insane) because their anger is building inside of them and affecting their mental health.
This seems to be the way that the word became known to be about anger.
“To feel and to express anger healthily is actually the antithesis of madness.” – The Angry Book by Theodore I Rubin, M.D.

Not Letting Anger Turn to Madness

I have no idea what the actual stats are but I do know that many people struggle with anger problems.
The Angry Book by Theodore I Rubin, M.D., although old, is a good resource for recognizing how you deal with anger. It shows the MANY and varied ways that people don’t deal with their anger in the best ways. Some are obvious but many you would not at first think have anything to do with anger.
You might be surprised to see how your behaviours might be betraying a long standing “slush fund” of past anger. Slush fund is the term used in the book to indicate the built up anger inside of you.
Definitely if your anger often seems stronger or more potent than would make sense for that situation, is very frequent, hurts your relationships or makes you act violently than you definitely are having troubles with your anger.
Seek help with your psychiatrist, doctor, counsellor or a trusted family member or friend if you are worried.
NOTE: I have reviewed the book I mentioned above at one of my other blogs if you are interested you can read my review of The Angry Book.