Depression
(despair and hopelessness) is caused by anxiety (stress, worry, trauma, tension
pressure = fear), Proverbs 12:25 Anxiety
in the heart of man causes depression. The primary anxiety in this verse is
feeling unloved by man, but God’s perfect love cast out fear (1 John 4:18). Depression is defined as: a mood disorder
marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentrating,
a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping,
feelings of dejection, despair, hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies.
Oppression
is defined as: the state of being subject to unjust treatment or control from
persecution (harass or punish). Synonyms: abuse, maltreatment, ill-treatment,
tyranny, despotism, repression, suppression, subjection, subjugation. Symptoms
can in include nausea, fatigue, compromised, immune system, memory issues, low
metabolism, and weariness (exhausted depleted in strength and energy) to name a
few.
Constant and
continuous depression over years and even decades without relief turns into
oppression where the person spirals down into darkness making it very difficult
for them to come out of this captivity.
In the Bible it is also called prison as David explains in Psalm 142:7 Bring my soul out of prison,
That I may praise Your name. The
person loses the will to live and is only a shell of what they were previously
and not what God wants for them. God wants them to come out of prison and He
has anointed us to do this as it says in Isaiah
61:1 “The Spirit of the Lord
God is upon Me, Because the Lord has anointed Me To preach good tidings to the
poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty (freedom) to the captives and the
opening of the prison to those who are bound. They become fatigued as a result of the
stupor they are in. A stupor is defined
as 1. A condition of greatly dulled or completely suspended sense or
sensibility, a drunken stupor, specifically: a mental condition by absence of
spontaneous movement, greatly diminished responsiveness to stimulation, and
usually impaired consciousness. 2. A state of extreme apathy or torpor (mental
and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility, a state of lowered
physiological activity typically characterized by reduced metabolism, heart
rate, respiration, and body temperature) resulting often from stress or shock.
To reiterate, depression and oppression is
mental illness.
What does
God say about oppression and what causes oppression.
The bible
speaks of a spirit of stupor (oppression) in Romans 11:8 “God has given them a spirit of stupor, Eyes that they
should not see and ears that they should not hear To this very day. Interesting that the person is not able to
see (spiritual eyes) or ears to hear from God.
Satan has used the spirit of stupor to not only control people, but to
remove life and love from their soul.
Isaiah 5:7 For the vineyard of the
Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, And the men of Judah are His pleasant
plant. He looked for justice, but behold, oppression; For righteousness,
but behold, a cry for help. Many oppressed are crying out for
help, but nobody has answers.
Isaiah 3:4-5 “I will give children to
be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. The people will be oppressed,
everyone by another and every one by his neighbor; The child will be insolent
(overbearing) toward the elder, And the base toward the honorable.” Mankind will oppress mankind and children play a part in the oppression
of the elderly.
Isaiah 3:12 As for My people,
children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O My people!
Those who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths.”
Notes: The point is that the leadership allowed this to happen. The leadership as well as the men have
failed. Godly order was not followed and
the result was oppression for all.
Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 Then I returned
and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: And look!
The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter—On the side of
their oppressors there is power, But they have no comforter. Therefore,
I praised the dead who were already dead, more than the living who are still
alive. Yet, better than both is he who
has never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Consider those in the world who suffer
oppression. In a statement brimming with passion, he finds the oppressed have
no comforter (champion or anyone that has answers) and power lies on the side
of their oppressors. Because of
these two factors, the oppressed have no hope and continue to slide into
darkness.
We must look
at the two major root causes of depression and oppression? 1). Fear of mankind
(including self) is a major cause of depression/oppression/ mental
illness. Mankind has assaulted our soul
with hurts to the point that our soul is in prison and we are not able to
praise His name (Bring my soul out of
prison, That I may praise Your name…” Psalm 142:7). Depression and
oppression is a spirit of heaviness (Isaiah
61:3). We have opened the door to man as a result of pride fullness and
closed the door to God and His word. We
have chosen to buy into what people have said or done to us instead of ignoring
their offenses and forgiving them. If we
forgive them and love them as God loves us, the offenses do not have a legal
right to control us or torment us as in depression and oppression. 2). Trusting
in man’s love instead of God’s love brings torment to the soul resulting in
sickness (physical and mental) and disease.
This is a fear of not being loved, of not being accepted, and fear that
we do not measure up. Mental illness
will take us down to the pit without hope to God’s truth, (For Sheol cannot thank You, Death cannot praise You; Those who go down
to the pit cannot hope for Your truth Isaiah 38:18). We have been consumed by man’s inequities, (But we are all like an unclean thing, And
all our righteousness’s are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our
iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away (into the prison). And there is no one who calls on Your name,
who stirs himself up to take hold of You; For You have hidden Your face from
us, And have consumed us because of our iniquities Isaiah 64:6-7). Mental
illness is devoid of love. You have
an orphan spirit because of what mankind (including self) has done to you.
Interesting,
the medical field doesn’t know what causes mental illness, so they treat mental
illness with drugs. But God is very
clear in His Word. Even prisons full of
prisoners have much to say about metal illness from experience with those who
have been placed in solitary confinement.
The same solitary confinement (spiritual prison) where many
non-prisoners are held captive. Both
prisoners and non-prisoners have an orphan soul without a name and without hope
deep in the depths of the spiritual prison.
I encourage
you to give some thought to the below piece on solitary confinement in
correctional facilities that I found on the internet. There are astonishing similarities with those
in in prisons and those who are not in these facilities, but who are in a
spiritual solitary confinement.
What does solitary confinement in prison do to your mind? Solitary confinement is described as a prison
within the prison. For 23 hours a day,
inmates are kept inside a small cell.
It’s not unusual for inmates to spend years at a time in solitary.
Medical literature says solitary confinement can also take a heavy mental toll.
Does solitary confinement make you crazy? Researchers
have found little to suggest that extreme isolation is good for the psyche. In
a study at University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry Harlow placed rhesus
monkeys inside a custom-designed solitary chamber nicknamed “the pit of
despair.” Shaped like an inverted pyramid, the chamber had slippery sides that
made climbing out all but impossible. After a day or two, “most subjects
typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus.
One might presume that they find their situation to be hopeless.” Harlow also
found that monkeys kept in isolation wound up “profoundly disturbed, given to
staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages
repetitively, and mutilating themselves.” Most readjusted eventually, but not
those that had been caged the longest. “Twelve months of isolation almost
obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow found.
Similar studies on human subjects are rare, but in 1951
researchers at McGill University paid a group of male graduate students to stay
in small chambers equipped with only a bed for an experiment on sensory
deprivation. They could leave to use the bathroom, but that’s all. They wore goggles and earphones to limit
their sense of sight and hearing, and gloves to limit their sense of touch. The
plan was to observe students for six weeks, but not one lasted more than seven
days. Nearly every student lost the ability “to think clearly about anything
for any length of time,” while several others began to suffer hallucinations.
What are the effects on prisoners? In short, not much
better. Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty
member at Harvard Medical School, has interviewed hundreds of prisoners in
solitary confinement. In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary
inmates were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Grassian has since
concluded that solitary can cause a specific psychiatric syndrome,
characterized by hallucinations; panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished
impulse control; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; and difficulties with
thinking, concentration and memory. Some inmates lose the ability to maintain a
state of alertness.
Does solitary make prisoners more dangerous? At the very least, solitary can certainly
make prisoners much more of a danger to themselves. Inmates in solitary, for
example, have been found to engage in self-mutilation at rates that are higher
than the general prison population.
Suicide is another major concern. In one study of
California’s prison system, researchers found that from 1999 to 2004 prisoners
in solitary confinement accounted for nearly half of all suicides. A 1995 study
of the federal prison system found that 63 percent of suicides occurred among
inmates locked in “special housing status,” such as solitary or in psychiatric
seclusion cells. As one inmate cited in the study explained: The Hole and
Segregation cells are depressing enough to drive many men to take their lives
in order to escape. For some it would appear to be the only way out.
Is it possible for inmates to adjust? It’s tough. In
a study of inmates at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, psychologist Craig
Haney found that prisoners “lose the ability to initiate or to control their
own behavior, or to organize their own lives.” Haney, a professor at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, attributed this loss to the near total
lack of control that prisoners have over their day-to-day lives in solitary.
Often time, he found, prisoners in solitary “begin to lose
the ability to initiate behavior of any kind — to organize their own lives
around activity and purpose.” What results is chronic apathy (lack of feeling
or emotion), lethargy (abnormal drowsiness and fatigue), torpor (mental and
motor inactivity), depression as result of despair and hopelessness, (Job
12:25), that ultimately leads to severe oppression. The atrophy (wasting away or progressive
decline), and the anxiety (fear) which surrounds social interaction can be
extremely disabling.
Depression
and oppression will cause us to wither away mentally and physically. Mental
illness has a root cause and it can be traced back to the generations of not
feeling loved or unworthy to be loved and especially when the father fails to
say the words “I love you” or fails to nurture their children or wives. The
result of feeling unloved causes mankind to turn to wickedness (iniquities) and
un-forgiveness causing bitterness rage, anger harsh words, slander that dominates
our lives, (Get rid of all bitterness,
rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior
Ephesians 4:31). Self-pity (nobody loves me) is another spirit tied to
depression/oppression. Little is known
about self-pity, but it is a powerful spirit that fans the fire of
hopelessness, despair, and stupor (depression/oppression) causing us to go
further into solitary confinement.
Until we are
ready to educate people on how this occurs, we will continue to suffer from
mental illness. You see, mental illness
affects each and everyone one of us to some degree. Every one of us has
suffered depression at one time or another, yet we are afraid to confess this
so that we can be prayed for and healed (James
5:16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that
you may be healed).
We are
affected by people who have mental illness.
Yet we ignore mental illness like the plague. We ignore people who are
suffering. Homeless people are most
evident because we see them in the streets.
Can we assume that they have lost hope?
We spend trillions on ourselves, but cut programs for those who are
suffering from mental illness.
The Body of
Christ does a poor job of dealing with or praying for mental illness. People with mental illness who are suffering
with mental illness, are held captive in prison, and we do very little even
though we are anointed to bring them out of prison (Isaiah 61:1) where their soul is held captive. Their soul in solitary confinement.
I would like
to share a true story about two brothers.
Bob the eldest, was in mental institution and was in a catatonic state
of existence. Bob had been beaten down
over the decades to point of hopelessness.
He was no longer responding to humans and the institution said there was
no hope. Jerry, the younger brother
started to visit his older brother every day after work and showered Bob with
love. He told Bob how wonderful and
worthy he was. One year later Bob had
come out of the spiritual prison fully healed.
We tend to
make healing mental illness complicated, but in God’s mercy, He has given us
hope on how to combat mental illness in His Word. In Isaiah
58 God talks about fasting that is pleasing to Him in verses 6-14.
Specifically verse 6, fasting
to loosen the bonds of man’s wickedness that we spoke about earlier. To undo the heavy burdens that man
experiences. To let the oppressed, go
free. To break every yoke of oppression (Isaiah 58:6 “Is this not the fast that I
have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To
let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke?
6 Keys to healing mental illness
We heal
mental illness by: 1). Prayer and
fasting (even if it is for only one day) because the spirits involved in
depression and oppression are powerful (Matthew
17:21 21 However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting”). 2).
We call on the Helper for answers (Psalms
91:15 He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in
trouble; I will deliver him and honor him) and direction. 3). We lead them in prayer of
forgiveness for those who have hurt them including self (Jerimiah 20:13 Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord! For He has delivered
the life of the poor from the hand of evildoers). 4). We declare the garment of praise for
the spirit of heaviness/depression/oppression (Isaiah 61:3 The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That
they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He
may be glorified”) so we can bring them out of darkness. 5).
We declare our love and God’s perfect love over them to overcome the fear and
the torment, (There is no fear in love;
but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who
fears has not been made perfect in love 1 John 4:18). 6).
We pray consistently for them and continue to minister to them until they are
healed even if it takes a year.
We don’t
need to go to mankind with all of his treatments that don’t work. God gives us the keys to healing mental
illness in His Word. Glory be to our
Father in Heaven.
Jerimiah 17:14 Heal me, O Lord, and I
shall be healed; Save me, and I shall be saved, For You are my praise.
Amen and
Amen, blessings to all, Tony Sanchez 3-9-18
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