Hi Pam, I really appreciate the feedback and engagement for a necessary discussion. I don’t believe you can pray away depression either, and I respect your perspective for why the book and the perspective might be BS for a lot of people, and especially people who are in situations like yours where suffering is a matter of life and death. I have friends that disagree a lot with me and SSRIs have literally saved their lives.

But there are also people that medication has hurt more than it helps, including people I know and people in my family. The prevailing narrative in the field is the biochemical model and just having different perspectives for how they address their depression. For me, it’s things that are more social more than it is anything I can take and that’s why I stray away from medication, and I’ve always felt like there was something wrong with me when I felt terrible, when in reality there were very valid concerns like grief or disappointment or failures.

Anyways, to the point that it’s not wrong to suffer, it’s more so that beating yourself up for feeling bad is counterproductive. I look to Scriptures like Romana 5 and James 1 for how suffering, while inherently bad, can be used for good. And you have to accept it before you can work on it and fix it — just my two cents and thanks for the feedback again, Pam!