Anxiety and depression in an evangelical context: part 1

Anxiety and depression in an evangelical context

A reflection on a young Scottish evangelical Christian’s experience of anxiety and depression in the late 1970s and 1980s.

For years, a Christian conference had been held each autumn at the Butlin’s holiday camp at Filey in Yorkshire, and I was asked to attend the 1977 event by the youth organisation Scripture Union for which I had recently begun working as a bookshop manager. It was my responsibility, assisted by a colleague, to staff a bookstall of SU publications during the event. I found the long hours, the unfamiliar routine, and especially the unconventional personality of the man I was not just working alongside but also sharing a chalet with, cumulatively very stressful.

I remember walking up the dark stairwell leading directly into the brightly lit auditorium one evening after a conference session had begun, feeling the empty poignant sadness of exclusion as the crowd sang with an impassioned yearning

Open our eyes Lord, we want to see Jesus
To reach out and touch him                                                    
To say that we love him.

On the final evening of the event, I spent a hectic hour shifting unsold Christmas stock to my car to take north to my bookshop in Falkirk. The next morning, after a restless night, I left Filey, and headed north. After a few miles, completely unexpectedly, I was overcome by an intense conviction that a fatal accident would end my journey. Mile after mile I drove in terror, tensely gripping the steering wheel, fearfully eyeing each vehicle coming in the other direction. Would this be the one?

I stopped at a motorway service station on the M6, and so certain was I that my death was imminent that it was only with difficulty that I restrained myself from phoning my parents (with whom I was still living at this point at the age of 25) telling them not to expect me back. It was only when I reached Lanark, a few miles from home, that I could admit the faintest possibility that I might, after all, make it back safely. Eventually, I turned into our drive, switched off the engine, and slumped back in my seat.

Before this, I had been no stranger to anxiety and stress. There were days in childhood when, I now realise, I was experiencing depressive symptoms, and my teenage years were a painful time of spiritual and existential turmoil and I had been grateful for the blessings of carefully-prescribed Diazepam, but that experience on the road back from Filey was more severe than anything I had endured previously. Although the anxiety did not remain constant at this intense level, that day signalled the start of a 13-year period of considerable emotional pain which forced me to acknowledge that I had a mental health problem, and was only relieved when an effective long-term medication was identified.

Symptoms

Although there was a depressive element to my condition, the dominant symptom was a seldom-absent fear and anxiety. Its mercilessly insistence on having my full attention was difficult to combat. It was most powerful in situations where I felt I wasn’t in complete control. I was afraid of being overcome by panic when I was speaking in public; or when I was sitting eating a meal with others and was committed to remaining at the table at least for the ten minutes it would take to finish the main course; or when I was overtaking another vehicle on the motorway, and I was out there in the fast lane, committed to keep my foot on the accelerator until the car on my left was safely behind me. I felt claustrophobic in railway carriages, especially when travelling into Glasgow, and the train lingered in the dark tunnels before Queen Street Station. When out walking, I’d be afraid I wouldn’t make it back to the house – afraid that I’d collapse, or explode, or implode, or run madly until my heart burst. And while in the open air looking skywards - through the day, but especially at night - I’d be aware my own smallness and vulnerability as I stood on the world’s crust, utterly insignificant in comparison with the vastness beyond, afraid I would fall off into space.

There was also fear about what I might do to myself. Some days, whenever I saw a rope or a cord – discarded on the ground, or attached to curtains in a window, or curled on a shelf in the ironmongers – a strident thought reminded me that I could use it to end my life. I was constantly aware of the lethal potential of pills, knives, express trains rushing through the station as I stood on the platform. When it was necessary for me to visit an office or house in a tower block, I had to force myself into the lift, so afraid was I not just of enclosure in a small box, but also that once it had deposited me high above the ground some invisible force would compel me to open a window and thrust me out, or prompt me to jump.

I deliberated whether I was truly suicidal or simply afraid of being suicidal: the distinction was an important one to me. I drew considerable comfort from the thought that rather than being an expression of any real desire to harm myself, the suicidal thoughts were emanations of the deep anxiety which lost no opportunity of making its presence felt. I certainly fought furiously against the lethal attractiveness of knives and trains and high windows.

Yet there were occasions when I was almost engulfed in a suicidal hopelessness. I particularly remember one evening over the Christmas holidays when, living on my own now in Airdrie,  I was alone in the flat watching the film Manon of the sources, the sequel to Jean de Florette, set in rural France in the 1930s.  In the first film, Jean Cadoret moves with his wife and daughter Manon from the town to a piece of land in the country, determined to make a success of small-scale farming. An unmarried neighbour César, who deeply regrets his own childlessness, covets Jean’s land and sees possession of it as essential to the future prosperity of the Soubeyran family which means everything to him. With the help of Ugolin, his rather simple but industrious nephew, he schemes to drive Jean away by blocking up and concealing the existence of the stream which would have ensured the success of Jean’s project. Jean’s determined struggles to make a success of the farm ultimately lead to his death.

In Manon of the sources, Ugolin falls in love with Manon, but she, aware of his involvement in the events which indirectly resulted in her father’s death, will have nothing to do with him. In the end, Ugolin, unable to bear the pain of unrequited love, hangs himself and César discovers that Jean Cadoret was in fact his own illegitimate son about whose existence he’d been completely unaware, and so faces the crushing reality that his conspiracy has destroyed the one thing he ever longed for. My own sadness fed hungrily on the terrible tragic melancholy of this beautifully photographed and brilliantly acted film, and I felt the fingers of despair tightening around my heart. The positive spirit of resistance and hope which enabled me to survive was at its weakest that evening.

I was also afraid of what I might do to others. Frequently, the word ‘kill’ would assail my mind. It wasn’t that I heard an audible voice, but the hated syllable penetrated my consciousness in an insistent barrage. ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ This inescapable irritant was, thankfully, never an instruction to act. But equally inescapable was an awareness of how easy it would be to hurt people That family walking on the pavement: just a turn of the steering wheel and they would be wiped out. Once again, it was comforting to regard these thoughts as expressions of anxiety rather than evil impulses, but I could never be sure that they were one and not the other, and consequent perpetual concern fed the anxiety.

These fears were accompanied by what I suppose were relatively mild compulsive/obsessive tendencies. Before I left the flat each morning I had to check not once, but several times that the taps were off, the windows closed, electrical appliances unplugged. I’d know the key was turned in the lock, but I’d try it again, and then once again, just to make sure. Occasionally, I’d unlock the door, and then lock it again, to be absolutely certain it was secured. But of course the more I checked that all was as it should be, the more uncertain I became. I struggled to discipline myself to check each switch, and window, and turned key just once, or at the most twice, and tell myself that all was well, and then walk away, acknowledging, but not responding to the gnawing uncertainty.

Fortunately, despite this cluster of anxieties, I didn’t normally have much difficulty getting to sleep at night. But I’d waken fairly frequently at around 5am, feeling negative and depressed. I developed the routine of getting up, having a drink, before curling up in bed again and reminding myself of the verse in the Psalms (Psalm 127:2) which reminds us that God ‘gives his beloved sleep,’ and almost invariably that gift would be mine.

Very occasionally, my sleep would be disturbed. Once  I woke to find the curtains and curtain rail from the window beside my bed lying on top of me. I think I’d been trying to open the curtains in my sleep, and had tugged over-enthusiastically. On another occasion, when I was staying for a week at a Christian centre, I must have tried to get out of bed while still sleeping, and gave myself a huge bruise on my chest when I collided with the round-topped wooden bed-post. It was a painful awakening.

I had a recurrent dream in which I’d be climbing a long staircase, and I’d realise that the sloping ceiling above the stairs was coming lower and lower, until my head banged against it as I climbed. Then it would descend lower still so that I had to force my way through the narrow gap between stairs and ceiling until finally the gap would disappear and I’d be trapped, unable to make any progress forward or back, and I’d waken, drenched in sweat.

This raft of anxiety symptoms rumbled away continually, often not too obtrusive, but occasionally thrusting themselves to the very forefront of my consciousness. But there were also various crises during the 13-year period.

(Part 2 is here.)