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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 16

Religious Conversion Can Cure Depression

So far we have talked about rational, planned-out tactics for battling against your depression. But some people's depressions--especially deep depressions--disappear suddenly and miraculously, without systematic battles and often with great drama. Such cures fit into the broad framework of Self- Comparisons Analysis.

The most dramatic cures are religious conversions, especially those of Christians and most especially of Protestants. The cases of John Bunyan, and of the Quaker founder, George Fox, are famous because they described their salvations in autobiographies.

William James analyzed and described this phenomenon brilliantly. The process of religious conversion for a depressive appears to happen as follows: The person suffers and suffers and suffers some more, from a sense of unworthiness or sin or alcoholism or worldly failure. All the while the person strives with all his might to overcome the failures and the feeling of unworthiness, but with no success. Then finally the person gives up, because he or she comes to believe that the struggle cannot be won; emotional exhaustion accompanies the giving up. (James emphasizes the exhaustion.) Then after the person surrenders up hope and struggle, there suddenly occurs a process of relaxation and inner peace.

I felt this happen once, six months after depression hit me, a time when I was in constant and total despair. My wife and I went to the country to visit friends for a weekend, the first time we had been away since the crisis had begun, and we slept outside on the ground. When I woke in the morning I saw a shiny leaf and I heard a bird trill, the first time in half a year I had taken pleasure in a simple work of nature or humankind. I felt a radiant, delicious inner peace. The closest to this feeling in a more common context is the peace and gratitude one feels upon receiving news that a much-feared tragedy has not come to pass. One also feels a similar, though less intense, relaxation when one meditates after having been tense. For intellectual and other reasons, however, I was not a candidate for a religious conversion. Perhaps for that reasons, after a matter of hours, I was back in despair. Yet I had at least experienced the feeling of redemption.

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As I understand it, a person who believes in the existence of an active personal God identifies the extraordinary experience of inner peace with the manifestation of God in the person's life and body. The feeling is "heavenly," and it seems reasonable to a believer that only God could create this amazing reversal of emotional fortune. Here are a few examples culled from the extraordinary collection by James, many of them taken in turn from Leuba. Here is the case of an alcoholic:

One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till morning. I had often said, "I will never be a tramp. I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will find a home in the bottom of the river," But the Lord so ordered it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner's friend. I walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen before morning. Some- thing said," If you want to keep this promise, go and have yourself locked up." I went to the nearest stationhouse and had myself locked up.

I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was not all the company I had either. No, praise the Lord; that dear Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray. I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally released, and found my way to my brother's house, where every care was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to go to Jerry M'Auley's Mission. I went. The house was packed, and with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the outcast--that man of God, Jerry M'Auley. He rose, and amid deep silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man that carried conviction with it, and I found myself saying, "I wonder if God can save me?" I listened to the testimony of twenty-five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M'Auley prayed fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor soul. A blessed whisper said, "Come"; the devil said, "Be careful." I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart, I said, "Dear Jesus, can you help me?" Never with mortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new.

From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and I have been trying to do mine".1

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