Depression is not a Choice

It wasn't that long ago that I wrote about how Matt Walsh is an ignorant fool who leads on his audience with words they want to hear, but very little truth. Well, after Robbin William's death Matt Walsh wrote a post wherein he declared that "depression will not appear on the autopsy report, because it can’t kill you". The post went viral, and not surprisingly Matt Walsh has received a lot of hate mail in return.

Unfortunately, Matt Walsh revels in this kind of attention. From an interview he gave about the reaction to his article he seems to believe that people are mad because he is right. My impression is that he envisions himself a crusader for truth, and that this hate just reinforces that idea that he is trying to save the world from the devil's lies.

In many ways Mr. Walsh is a perfect example of the Christian who has fallen in love with the "no true Scotsman" fallacy; most of what I have read of his writing has been about how various other people aren't as good a Christian as he is.

Anyways, with this post being so widely discussed, I am not going to go through it point by point. I am just going to refute an assumption that lies at the base of it.

I serious doubt that Mr. Walsh understands what depression is. He says he has suffered from it, but his description of it sound more typical of a person who has no experience with the condition. Depression is not the same as being really sad, though being really sad can be a product of depression. Major depressive disorder (also known as clinical depression) is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive and persistent low mood that is accompanied by low self-esteem and by a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.

I have a lot of personal experience with depression and suicide. When I was three years old my father committed suicide. When I was twenty three years old I tried to commit suicide. When I was thirty eight years old I found my wife's body, in a failed suicide attempt.

Mr. Walsh seems to believe that people say that suicide isn't a choice to comfort themselves and to relieve the victim of the blame. If he really had depression he would no how little control you have over your actions when you are in the grips of depression. Your conscious thoughts can tell you that a simple little action might make your day a little less crappy, but you still don't take that action for reasons you can't explain.

Killing yourself isn't something a healthy person ever considers, no matter matter how bad life gets; humans have a drive to survive that normally makes us fight through anything that threatens us. That is why there is no correlation between quality of life and suicide; most war refugees don't commit suicide, but some millionaire actors do. This, by no coincidence, is why I have started using suicidal thoughts as the ultimate gauge of how depressed I am.

Suicide is not a choice because ultimately, when you are that depressed you have little to no control over your conscious thoughts and actions.

And finally, Mr. Walsh wants us to believe that depression is largely a result of not being properly in touch with God. I think before that idea can be taken seriously he needs to account for why depression rates are lower in atheists.