What others have to say - Depression, healing, and pull your self together

There is a bubble of this kind of conversation across the web the past couple of days -

On Ship of Fools there is a discussion on Blog and the kind of attitudes the writer has had to face. I deeply admired her grace in writing to the church leadership and, allowing for the possibility that they may not have intended the harm, to explain it.  The response was horrifying - we meant that, and you should be alright with it, I had problems to and pulling myself through with prayer worked so it must do for everyone.  Forget being vulnerable during any healing time, and certainly not long term, full exposure to jolly happy faith is what you need.

On the other side, theologically and practically, is not the magic healing but the insistence that you don't have a problem in the first place. As espoused by Giles Fraser - yes we need to tackle the underlying sources of stress, and injustice and zero hours contracts and bedroom tax and.... BUT that doesn't mean that depression doesn't exist.  Yes and some of us take pills, I don't take pills to make me happy or hide from the stresses - I take them to enable me to cope, and when there are stresses I can manage, but actually even without the stress I need them to manage in my plodding way.

It is important not to label the wide range of normal life as abnormal or ill, and so Giles I do get some of what you are trying to say - but there are a lot of us who are far from your category of those  'for whom happiness can be reclaimed by doing a bit more exercise or being more sociable'.  In the depths of depression both of these are about as accessible as Mount Everest with out oxygen, tents or those ice grabbling things.

There is a response to Giles Fraser here - highlighting the distinctions.

But despite the pull yourself together, nothing is wrong on one side, and the pray and it will all go away on the other, in the middle are churches and Christians who care and love. Sometimes struggling and say or do the wrong thing but open to being helped to be better helpers. And in the middle there are people who live it, who know it, and between us and with God's help try to hold each other up.