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John Dixon: 本期节目探讨了宗教信仰对心理健康的影响,挑战了宗教有害于心理健康的普遍观点。大量研究表明,宗教信仰对身心健康有益,定期参加宗教活动可以有效预防自杀和抑郁症,并有助于提升幸福感、生活满意度和人生目标感。 Karen Pang: 分享了她患有躁郁症的经历,以及信仰如何帮助她度过难关。她提到,如果没有信仰,她可能已经自杀。起初,她因为是基督徒而不敢向其他基督徒倾诉病情,这反映出教会对心理健康问题的讨论仍存在不足。 Lynne Worsley: 作为临床心理学家,她解释了躁郁症的症状和治疗方法,强调了心理治疗在管理躁郁症中的重要性。 Tyler VanderWeele: 哈佛大学公共卫生学院教授,他领导的研究团队发现,定期参加宗教活动可以有效预防自杀和“绝望之死”,并降低抑郁症的风险。他还探讨了宗教信仰对心理健康益处的潜在机制,例如降低抑郁率、减少酗酒和增强社会支持。 Buff Dickson: 分享了她与焦虑和抑郁症抗争的经历,以及信仰如何支持她。她强调,信仰并非万能药,但它能提供稳定的精神支柱,帮助人们在困境中找到意义和希望。 John Dixon: 本节目采访了多位专家和当事人,探讨了宗教信仰对心理健康的影响,并对一些常见的误解进行了澄清。节目中还介绍了相关的研究数据和统计结果,以及一些寻求帮助的途径。

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Karen Pang discusses her bipolar disorder and how her faith in God has been crucial in her life, countering the common belief that religion is bad for mental health.

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If you grew up in Australia, play school on the ABC, the national broadcaster, would almost certainly have been part of your childhood.

It's been going strong now for over 50 years. The second longest running TV show in the world after the British kids show Blue Peter. A grumpy face and a sad face. But I have a happy face. Hello, I'm Karen.

Lots of different faces with different feelings. That's Karen Pang, one of PlaySchool's longest-serving presenters. She's been on the show for more than 18 years. In the clip we just played, she's doing a series with her fellow presenters on feelings. And it's appropriate, really, because we spoke to Karen for this episode about her own feelings, or more accurately, her mental health.

I stay because it's one of the best jobs ever. It's a job that permits you and gives you licence to be a child. And I guess it's like, especially when you start to have children around you, there is no way that you can walk with them without having some kind of child-ness and joy. It also makes my life, you know, lighter and it also kind of, you know, just makes me remember that it's OK and it can be a lot of fun, this life.

Karen's life isn't always light. It can get pretty dark. Karen has bipolar, and she says if it wasn't for her faith in God, she probably wouldn't be here anymore. Perhaps you've heard it before. Religion is bad for your mental health. It triggers feelings of guilt, right? Self-loathing, bigotry. But actually, there are many ways in which the opposite is true. Karen's life is testament to that.

There's also a growing body of research, authoritative, real-life, peer-reviewed research that reports a significant benefit to wellbeing if you're religious. That's right, you are more healthy if you are religious. I'm John Dixon, and this is Underceptions. Underceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Three Views on Christianity and Science, a new book from Zondervan Academic. Every week at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Undeceptions

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Before we go any further, just a warning that today we're talking about mental health and suicide.

If you're struggling at the moment, you can get help by calling Lifeline in Australia on 13 11 14. In the UK, the Samaritans on 116 123. And in the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1800 273 8255. Be safe. God bless. Hello? Hi, it's Kayleigh. Thank you.

That's producer Kayleigh, who sat down with Karen for a heart-to-heart. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I went to Charles Sturt University in 1994. And it was really great because I was just doing stuff that I really liked in terms of communications and...

But by the second year, I felt something just, it was like it got heavier and heavier. And I just found myself crying at a drop of, you know, the hat. And I didn't know what was going on. It was like as if all joy, all like, you know, kind of fun, all sort of, you know, experiences of these things were just taken away. And I felt like it was just an empty, dry landscape.

Karen says she was diagnosed with depression and given some antidepressant medication. It's probably worth just stopping here to define what we're talking about in this episode when we say mental health. The Mayo Clinic in the US, a leader in the field, puts it this way. Mental illness or mental health disorders refers to a wide range of mental health conditions, disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behaviour. That's producer Kayleigh.

Examples of mental illness include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviours. Many people have mental health concerns from time to time, but a mental health concern becomes a mental illness when ongoing signs and symptoms cause frequent stress and affect your ability to function.

Okay, so back to Karen, who says she began to walk out of the shadows of her university days depression and walked straight into NIDA, the National Institute for Dramatic Arts, a prestigious centre that trains some of Australia's best performers.

There, Karen had to confront some really difficult things. Opening herself up to criticism, digging deep into her emotions to play tricky characters, and well, just being in a high pressure environment where people are adversarial with lots of people competing to be the centre of attention. She emerged after three stormy years there and began her first job on PlaySchool.

I could feel the shadow just, you know, behind me. So yeah, I went into work, but then I hit like about 25, 20, yeah, 25, and things got really weird. I started to just, you know, things just really deteriorated. And I started to lose track of, you know, time. And I started to just, it was like I couldn't sleep. And I could hear like

stuff in my ears, like some noises and stuff like that. And it was just, and I just felt like I was, the adrenaline was constantly just overflowing and I just couldn't get rid of it. You know, I was moving all the time because I couldn't keep still. I'd stay up drawing like these pictures continuously and it really started to get out of control. And there was points, got to a point where, you know, I was just

just felt like if I tried to, I don't know, step up, you know, on the third floor and jump, would I die? Like, or can I just try it and see what happens? Like things were really starting to blur reality and what was going on in my head. In the end, I went into hospital and they found out that I had bipolar. So that was my first hit of what a serious high looked like. And it took quite a while for me to come back down.

Bipolar is a type of depression and it is really a chemical imbalance.

That's Lynne Worsley, a clinical psychologist based in Sydney. When it comes to bipolar disorder, you have an extreme, an extreme between someone who's hyper manic, so they're hyper in their behaviours and their thoughts and they're fast acting and fast thinking, and then there are extreme depths of depression. And those swings can be so extreme that people don't, they almost seem like they're two different people.

When Karen was admitted to hospital and told she had bipolar, she ended up staying for almost three months. For me, when I'm on a high, what happens is I bounce straight into a low, like a bipolar depression. And it's slower, it's harder, it's darker and longer. It takes, like, generally, you know, for me, it took about, you know, six to eight weeks before I could even start to...

you know think about or be in a place to um accept sort of you know okay how are we going to do this the clarity to have that even small clarity of going okay you know um so what are we going to do um and actually accept help and also to be able to even want help so and that's about six to eight weeks that you're like in this kind of severe depression what are you doing in that time

It's really hard because a lot of people don't talk about this. And at first I didn't really talk about it. Strangely enough, as a Christian, I thought I couldn't talk about it and other Christians didn't want to hear about it.

So I was like, you know, in literally a constant state of suicidal, you know, not just tendencies or thoughts. I was in the thick of it. So that's why I was in hospital most of the time. In more kind of lockdown, you know, places where, you know, more than... It's not hospital, it's basically lockdown. And also I was actually hurting myself very badly. That's what's happening in that phase. And it's like a cloud, you know,

a really, you know, sort of deep fog. Yeah. Those suffering with bipolar are 17 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. See the show notes for the details. One in four people with bipolar will attempt suicide. And Karen's right. This hasn't been a topic the church is super comfortable talking about.

In the Bible, there are six or seven suicides reported through the Old and New Testaments. The two best known are Saul in the Old Testament and Judas in the New.

King Saul, who reigned in the 11th or 10th century BC, ended his own life to avoid dishonour and suffering at the hands of his enemies, the Philistines. In the New Testament, Judas, who betrayed Jesus, commits suicide after handing Jesus over to the authorities. There are two quite different accounts of his death, you may know. One in the Gospel of Matthew and the other in the Book of Acts.

Check out the bonus content from last season's Bible Mistakes episode, where I speak with Craig Blomberg about whether these accounts are contradictory. Still, however Judas died, it's clear he took his own life.

Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint August, writing in the 5th century, addressed the ethics of suicide in some detail. A theologian and philosopher, Augustine wrote in his book The City of God that suicide violated God's commandment against killing and also the command to love one's neighbour as oneself. You can't love yourself if you want to kill yourself, the argument goes.

Augustine actually goes a bit further than that and says that suicide is an attempt to completely escape suffering when the fact is Jesus himself has given us a model of what it means to patiently endure suffering. It is clearly monstrous to kill oneself, Augustine wrote.

The later church continued to condemn the taking of your own life. Some even argued that it is an inherently unforgivable sin because in the nature of the case, there's no opportunity to repent of that sin. The result, sadly, is that various church councils through history declared that anyone who ends their own life can't have a Christian burial.

The modern church has modified its view a bit, thank God. The Catholic Church, for example, still holds that suicide is a grave sin, but also says that psychological impairment, like depression, can so cloud a person's moral judgment that it actually makes them less morally responsible. The Catholic Catechism, which is the official Catholic curriculum, reads...

Protestants like myself don't believe in praying for the dead, but most of us share the same sentiment about the possibility of God's grace toward those who have taken their own life.

The church's teaching on suicide has been mixed through history. But there's more to say. Christian teaching on the immense value of life seems to have had a measurable impact in saving lives.

Our speculation is that, you know, that belief that suicide's wrong, reinforced by, you know, often powerful and regular teachings on the value of life, may in fact be the principal mechanisms by which weekly religious service attendance protects against suicide. That's Tyler Vanderwill, the professor of epidemiology at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

Tyler is the director of Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, which has done some fascinating research over the last few years. We spoke to him for a much longer discussion about human flourishing in general, so stay tuned for an upcoming episode on that. For now, though, it's worth pondering how on earth regular church involvement is protective against suicide. A study I think you were involved with found that...

amongst American women, women who attend church, are five times less likely to suicide. How can that be?

Yeah, so again, that's what our estimate from our study suggested, about five-fold less likely to commit suicide over the roughly 15 years of follow-up in that study. And others have found similar estimates, I would say, with regard to weekly religious service attendants, most of the estimates are under the range of three-fold to six-fold protective measures.

Okay, just a few more details about these remarkable statistics.

Tyler and his colleagues at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published this study in 2016, the one that found that regular participation in a religious service like church offers five-fold protection against suicide.

But then in the middle of last year, they published another study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry, that went a little further. Tyler and his colleagues found that people who attend religious services at least once a week were significantly less likely to die from deaths of despair. So deaths of despair is a term coined by...

Angus Deaton and Anne Case to refer to the phenomena where we've been observing, at least in the United States, increasing deaths due to suicide, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdoses. And what we found was that those who attended religious services regularly were at considerably reduced risk for these deaths of despair.

Amongst women in the study, those attending regularly had about a 66% reduction in these deaths of despair. And with the men in the study, the effect was somewhat smaller, but still very meaningful. It was about a 33% reduction.

in the likelihood of deaths of despair over about 20 year period. So considerable reduction, considerable protection for those attending religious services frequently. So we were curious to try to understand why this was so. And that is from an empirical and scientific perspective, a more difficult question. And suicide thankfully is still a relatively rare event.

But it makes it more difficult to study. But in the analyses we did that tried to understand what the mechanisms might be, we had speculated that sort of lower depression rates and less alcohol abuse and greater social support might all be important mechanisms for leading to the much lower suicide rates. And we knew from prior work that religious service attendants had

beneficial effects on social support, on reducing depression, on reducing alcohol abuse, and these things are associated with suicide. And we found that some of the effect was explained by these pathways, but much, much less than we had anticipated. With that dramatic five-fold effect, quantitatively, it was really a tiny portion that seemed to be explained by these other mechanisms. And so

It led us to speculate that maybe one of the central mechanisms, and this is more of a speculation than something we have definitive data on at present, but that maybe one of the central mechanisms was simply the belief that suicide was wrong. And many of these religious communities do have fairly strong beliefs

prohibitions against suicide, and also profound teachings on the value of life, of life being a gift from God and sort of the negative consequences of suicide on the community as well. It's not just deaths of despair that are reduced by religious service attendance. Tyler found that religious service attendance is associated with better overall mental health.

I would say there's very strong evidence for a protective effect of religious service attendance on depression. Those who attend regularly seem to be at about a 30% reduced risk of depression over time, and likewise those who are attending regularly who are depressed are more likely to recover from depression.

And there's also evidence that

religious service attendance contributes to various aspects of psychological well-being, tends to increase levels of happiness and life satisfaction, gives rise to a greater sense of purpose in life. So that would be another contribution of religious service attendance to mental health. I would say the evidence to date is that religious service attendance has

both a preventive effect, but also an effect on healing and recovery. And there's some evidence, I wouldn't say it's yet definitive, but some evidence that perhaps the effect on recovery is even more substantial than it is on prevention. That while

Religion may not prevent things from going wrong, may not prevent suffering. It allows one to find meaning in the midst of suffering and difficulties and the resources which religious communities provide might help as a pathway

towards healing. Some evidence of this for depression. I would say even stronger evidence for this from recovery from drug abuse or alcohol abuse, where again, one sees protective effects, but the magnitude of the effects on recovery seem to be even larger. Religious communities

really have an important and powerful role to play in healing and in recovery. The prevailing idea for many is that religion is bad for you, but the evidence just doesn't support that. It strongly points in the other direction.

Tyler VanderWeele is a leader in his field. He's not just heading up the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard. He is a methodologist and statistician. He has an added interest in making sure his research holds up. So we asked him, what about reverse causation? Isn't it possible that only healthy people end up going to church in the first place?

The only way to properly address this is to collect data repeatedly over time, both on an individual's health status and on an individual's religious service attendance. And then you can begin to look at, do the changes in religious service attendance precede those in the changes in health?

Or is the reverse the case? So we essentially control for early levels of health when looking at the potential effects of religious service attendance on subsequent health and well-being. And this helps rule out that possibility of reverse causation.

Tyler's team isn't the only group of experts that have found these positive connections between religion and mental health. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Health provides a comprehensive meta-analysis of all published studies on the association between religious involvement and medical and mental health. The findings are extraordinary.

78% of more than 300 studies report a positive association between religiosity and wellbeing. 73% of 40 studies report a positive association between religiosity and hope. 81% of 32 studies report a positive association between religiosity and optimism.

93% of 45 studies report a positive association between religiosity and one's sense of purpose and meaning. 82% of 74 studies report a positive association between religiosity and one's sense of social support.

61% of 413 studies report lower rates of depression or faster recovery from depression in religious individuals. 75% of 141 studies report that religiosity is associated with less suicidal ideation, fewer suicide attempts or fewer completed suicides.

Because all of us do have ups and downs, so you can imagine all of us just having a normal wavy line that's between two points on a spectrum. That's Lynne Worsley again, back to talking about bipolar.

Someone who has different types of bipolar, but some people would have an extreme that would go to a point of them making rash decisions, spending money too quickly, spending money inadvertently without even thinking it through, going and taking out a new business.

without even thinking about it or understanding the consequences. Making massive decisions, proposing to someone, going somewhere on a long road trip without thinking of putting petrol in the car, you know, just none of those, it's almost like an impulsive behaviour. And then to be caught out by the extreme of having depression in absolutely low mood a couple of days later.

So that's cyclical change. Some people can have the hyper manic behaviour for weeks on end and then they crash. Some people might have it for 10 hours and then they crash. And then they cycle back again. So this particular medication that is used for bipolar and a particular type of treatment

psychological treatment to help people to manage their highs and their lows and training their brains to try and regulate their emotions because it's such an extreme of that. It's turbulent, you know, because people kind of think that it's only just the yay, but it's also the other side where you swing right to the other side and it's this extreme sort of like, you know, kind of, yeah, emotional, you know, rollercoaster, yeah.

And then you fall into this, the trap of being literally identified and you yourself, you know, that is your identity. You know, I am bipolar. I have mental illness. And it's a very, it's a very tight place and very, you know, in terms of you're very lonely in that space because you start to get defensive. You start to get like, you know, that no one understands you or no one sort of like knows what it's like.

Tyler Vanderwiller's research is all about public health. He deals in the statistics that help us improve the health of entire communities. And yes, at that macro level, religion is good for us. And it's not just on the grand scale that we see this. It's personal. We're so grateful to Karen Pang for sharing her story with us.

But after the break, it gets a little more personal for me. My darling wife, Puff, has battled anxiety and depression for years. And when we come back, she shares something of her journey and how faith...

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into a financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash AnglicanAid.

When I was 20, I had a brain hemorrhage.

and needed surgery, and that was fairly dramatic. And then when I was 30, I had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy when I was three months pregnant. That's my wife, Buff. She and I sat down with ABC's Rachel Conn during Mental Health Week a few years ago. Buff opens up about grief, loss and clinical depression. The full interview, by the way, is linked in our show notes.

So that was also fairly sort of call the family to say goodbye kind of moment. Oh, goodness. Ectopic pregnancies don't usually result in that. But did you say you almost bled to death? Yeah, but it was all internal. It was in my stomach. So I had no, they didn't know what it was. After the brain surgery, which was in my frontal lobe, which in hindsight would say maybe was the start of some mental health problems.

but I was never diagnosed. And then I had a... When we had the children, I had what was... They didn't diagnose it as quickly as they might this time, but I was described as having a definite detachment from the children and...

which now people would jump on and say, oh, postnatal depression or something. But back then it wasn't quite so clear and then we moved house and so it all just gets lost. But after the ectopic, I definitely went downhill. Into a kind of depression? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And just crying all the time and...

almost wishing I hadn't survived and just feeling I was just all over the place. And that was when I first started on the track of being diagnosed and medicated and dealing with all that sort of beginning of that journey. So you're still on medication? Oh, yeah. So that faith experience, if you can put it that way, that you had when you were there in the surgery almost near death,

has not sustained you? Or, I mean, that is to say, faith hasn't fixed you? Oh, no. I was saying this to John the other day. I said, it's so funny how it really fixes me every day, but it doesn't fix me. It's a curious, it's a tension there. I don't always understand myself. I don't know if you have any insights there. No, faith doesn't fix. Definitely not.

Christianity doesn't offer a fix to every ailment. In fact, the New Testament speaks of our groaning in this world. It goes on to say that the world itself is groaning. The better way of thinking about all of this is that biblical faith sustains us in a real and profound way. It tells us there's more, there's another perspective that can anchor our lives when we feel at sea.

And if you talked to any of Buff's friends, they'd say her faith sustains her in remarkable ways. In the midst of the worst bouts of depression, when she doesn't want to get out of bed, she has this amazing ability almost to laugh at herself, to detach from her feelings, not in a negative way, but by reminding herself that she's not the sum of her emotions.

She is objectively loved by me and the kids, but also by the Creator. And so we end up praying through it all. We almost never pray nowadays for healing. We've just decided we're going to walk with a bit of a limp. Calmly, peacefully, often joyfully with a limp. Faith isn't a fix.

It's a steady ground to walk on, even when you're walking through the darkness. I think it was hard because as a Christian, a lot of people were, you know, very much like those guys who were just unhelpful friends, you know. And I think it is because I don't blame them for, you know, they want to try and their heart is in the right place. You cannot assume, you cannot fix, and you cannot advise what you don't know.

I didn't know how to travel, you know, through the bipolar and the diagnosis. So I was listening to all the people around me and I was like, oh, OK, I'll do this. Oh, I'm not praying enough. Oh, I'll read my Bible more. And it didn't help because it was just this flurry of like, you know, people and everything trying to help me, trying to heal me, prayer over me. And like, you know, I've got a demon inside me. Like it's just was like I look back on it was just really actually quite amusing now.

Because it was like a, I have to say it was like a circus, you know. And I was, you know, the show, like, you know. But I feel glad that I got out of that and not let that harm me. And I don't know if it's necessarily a prejudice. I think people don't know what to do. So, you know, as much as we can say it's a stigma, it also comes from a place of lack of knowledge.

So the more knowledge we have, the more likely we're going to be able to lean in. What would you say to a Christian listener who thinks that they can just pray and read the Bible and they'll be fine if they're struggling with anxiety or depression? Unfortunately, when you say to someone, we're just going to pray these spirits away or we're going to read the Bible over you, that you're telling that person that they're evil.

You're telling that person that there is something in them that they might be possessed.

And that, for somebody who is having problems with their thinking, just adds to the problems and actually perpetuates the situation. But sometimes it's the person experiencing, say, anxiety, dramatic anxiety, who thinks themselves that, you know, it's a spiritual problem. If I go to a psychologist, you know, I'm letting the Lord down. Because after all, didn't he say in Philippians, be anxious about nothing? And here I am anxious. Yeah.

Yeah, I hear that all the time. Do you find yourself still praying to be healed of your bipolar? No. Why? Because I've done so many times. And those many times I've like, you know, I've demanded that he do that. And there's a few times where he says, no, I'm not going to do it. And as my life has continued on, I realise my life is blessed now.

my life is good because I know I have a good story. And I'm glad he isn't, you know, taking it away. So maybe another misconception then about bipolar in particular is this middle ground. Like, you know, we're sitting here drinking tea. Where are you now? For me now, I'm in a time where I'm very stable and I've been stable for now.

Two years. I mean, I still have my days. I feel quite stable and quite steadfast, you know, as the Bible would put, and quieter. I think quietness and stillness is the essential part of this experience because not only is it the opposite, you know, of bipolar, but it is the way that the Bible teaches us as Christians that is the best place.

And also on your knees, because as he says, you know, bring me the brokenhearted and, you know, and those, yeah, those who are weak. And I think that for me, being on my knees has been the best place to be. Prayer, you know, also has brought me to my knees to be able to live in this space again.

There is strong evidence now of an association between attending religious services and happiness and life satisfaction. Those who attend religious services find a greater sense of meaning and purpose, they're more likely to have social supports, and they have stronger coping mechanisms. And I think spiritually, like in a devotional sense, there's days where I have felt, if I'm particularly low, where I would just feel...

I have nothing to offer today. I just can't pray. I can't, I've got nothing. But somehow that time of prayer or of looking at the Bible or of saying the prayers, they're a great help. That's Buff talking about how we use the wonderful set prayers of the prayer book when we can't quite find our own words.

the feeling the trouble with anxiety and depression is that so um you get emotional you get paranoid you get so low on yourself and so on and these words they lift your gaze higher and they're they're constants and they're so reassuring and I find it a what some would say is a ritual it

Or maybe the idea of discipline and self-discipline is outdated these days, but I find just as someone with cognitive behavioural therapy would put things in place just to help, I find for me that has really helped me to not be a slave to my feelings, but to be able to step outside and realign myself with things I know to be true regardless of how I feel.

Sometimes, you know, of course I raged and I questioned and I hated. I was bitter, you know, and I was upset. But the thing is, I know God says it's okay. I can take this. This is okay. Just keep going. Can you imagine what your journey might be if you didn't have your faith? I don't think I'd be here. I wouldn't be here. Even my, you know, husband says that.

my sister, like, you would not be here.

If you're struggling right now, you don't have to do it alone. If you or someone you know needs help, here are some excellent services ready to talk right now. In Australia, go to lifeline.org.au. In the US, suicidepreventionlifeline.org. In the UK, go to samaritans.org.au.

Have you got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them. You can tweet us at Undeceptions, send us a regular email at questions at Undeceptions.com, or if you're brave, record your question for the show by heading to Undeceptions.com and click record. While you're there, check out everything related to this episode and plenty of other bonus content.

And if you feel like helping out the larger Undeceptions project, please click the donate button, the really large donate button. We still haven't quite worked out how to cover all the costs, even of this podcast, let alone the wider writing and speaking associated with it. So your support means a lot to us. Your response last season was amazing. Thank you. Any amount is deeply appreciated.

And if you like our show, check out With All Due Respect by Megan Pal-Dutrois and Michael Jensen. They talk about contentious issues without killing each other. They're part of the Eternity Podcast Network.

Next episode, we're going for guilt. Yes, a whole episode on guilt. Is it morbid self-flagellation? Was Freud right that it's a kind of neurosis for which we need therapy? Many think so, but I'm going to try and convince you that guilt is good. GILT

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley, who not 30 seconds ago told me to play that with a straight bat. So there you go. Straight.

Bat. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Good job, buddy. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is part of the Eternity Podcast Network, an audio collection showcasing the seriously good news of faith today. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and lots of other stuff related to our episodes.

Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.