Christianity and Depression
Christianity and Depression
Tasia Scrutton
SCM Press, 2020, xvi + 236pp., pbk, £19.99
This clear-thinking and pastorally sensitive book sets out not only to describe different ‘interpretations’ of depression, but also to evaluate them, assessing their coherence, their fidelity to experience, and their ‘helpfulness’ (16). Undergirding this project is the conviction that ‘interpretation’ is never an ‘add-on’ to a ‘bare’ experience, but rather is integral to experience itself (4), and that the meanings and metaphors which we apply to depression therefore matter deeply. What Scrutton offers, however, is a ‘largely deflationary account of the relationship between faith and mental illness’ (105): she finds spiritualising accounts of mental illness to be the most problematic, since they tend ignore complex social and political factors underlying depression, placing blame on the sufferer and compounding their suffering. Key to Scrutton’s approach, therefore, is the rejection of an insidious dualism: if the physical and the spiritual are not easily separable then it makes little sense to ask whether depression is a physical or a spiritual condition, and much more sense to treat the whole person, combining the spiritual and the biopsychosocial.
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