The Cure to Suicidal Depression, Free book God's Path to Sanity

This is not the most spiritually loving book I’ve read (that would be Ascetical Homilies of St Isaac the Syrian) or the most insightful, or profound, but it is the book that most helped me with suicidal depression. It is simple, plain prose, from a Christian psychologist, and I offer it here free

God's Path to Sanity

Or you can download the PDF from the file section from this facebook group :

DEE PENNOCK'S God's Path to Sanity Facebook Group

This book made clear my desire to die was correct, but that my suffering was my refusal to be born anew,  openness to relationship was a burden I would not take on, from the book :

"Suicidal urges can occur in individuals whose willfulness has carried them into such painful depression and hopelessness that they become enveloped in bitterness and a persistent hatred of life. They see no escape except death. So they desperately want to die. I met a young woman like that, hours after her second (and last) attempt to commit suicide had been thwarted by some of her children. All she wanted, she wailed, was to die. “Do it,” I urged her. “It’s the greatest of all adventures! I can’t tell you what a marvelous thing it is when you do it in the right way. And I know, because I’m into it myself.”   

     Laughing through streams of tears, she said, “You’re some kind of friend, telling me to go ahead and kill myself.”   She showed intelligence in disagreeing with those who argued that her life as she was living it was worthwhile, and that she should go on like that. The wish to die when life is full of pain from our passions is always intelligent—provided, of course, that you die in the right way. (As people used to say, “You have to wake up, and die right.”) That’s what Paul meant by sorrowing unto repentance—die to your old life by repenting your way into a divine lift out of its misery.

    
     With some exceptions, suicidal urges are a sign that a person is spiritually dead. What does it mean to be spiritually dead? It means to be carnal, like Esau. It means to be concerned with everything that’s temporary and nothing that is eternal, as the fathers say. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace (Rom. 8:6). Dying, through repentance, to the passions that cause spiritual death is the God-given course that suicidal persons (and the rest of us as well) are meant to take, and can later rejoice in taking.   People who are suicidal aren’t trying to move into what death really is. They’re already in that death. It’s a preview of hell, and they can’t bear it. Death, rightly speaking, is being separated from God, explains Maximus the Confessor. What they’re desperate to do is die out of that death, and into Life. They’ve mistaken spiritual death for Life; it’s that spiritual death that they can’t stand.   

        
     Feeling a need to die to it somehow, to make some sort of change, is profoundly right. The saints recognize an instinctive intelligence in it. It would not be intelligent to want to stay in our fallen state and remain deadened by passions. John Chrysostom, in fact, rebukes people who haven’t the sensibility to despair when, being spiritually dead, they ought to despair. “If, therefore, present existence is but darkness, let us flee from it, let us flee by retuning our mind and our heart. Let us have nothing in common with the enemy of God”

      
     So those who are thinking of suicide want to wait just a minute—long enough to learn about the great adventure of repentance. An adventure? Yes, because of the soul-changing discoveries ahead. The first step is praying, for long periods of time, to be delivered from the ignorance of Pride and to receive self-knowledge. This prayer very soon brings some relief by clearly revealing errors in one’s thinking—like the errors of self-importance and thinking we know best about everything. Then we’re moved to pray for deliverance from those proud thoughts that have been shown to us. To climb out of the blindness and ignorance of the old fallen self that have led us into confusion and willfulness, and frustration and anger and depression, we want frequently to pray:   Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Pride and give me self-knowledge."

Here are the other prayers she gives :

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM PRIDE AND GIVE ME SELF-KNOWLEDGE

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM BELIEVING AND OBEYING IDOLS.

LORD JESUS CHRIST, DELIVER ME FROM SELF-IMPORTANCE AND THINKING I KNOW BEST, AND GIVE ME SELF-KNOWLEDGE.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from self-justification and show me my sin

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from anger (and hatred), and give me love.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into accepting reality.

Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into living my life according to your will.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from willfulness, and bring me into accepting and doing your will.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from Vainglory and give me natural affection.

This here is the cure to feelings of suicide: this prayer. 

I know, it sounds ludicrous! Beyond absurd. I’m serious. Ask God to deliver you from depression and despair, and expect Him to, because He most certainly will. This isn’t theory, when someone is depressed it takes an incredible amount of strength to turn outward toward God, and not just think about it, but TO ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY PRAY THESE WORDS.

I know it works because I say this prayer. I bought a prayer rope and when I’m driving instead of listening to the radio, out loud I repeat the above prayer...


I’ve also appreciated Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s insights in her paper Acedia’s Resistance to the Demands of Love: Aquinas on the Vice of Sloth , you can read HERE :

“Acedia’s resentment, listlessness, sullenness, and apathy stem from perceiving oneself as ‘stuck’ in a position (the new) which one does not wholeheartedly endorse but also cannot fully escape 

...acedia as sorrow at the thought of being in relationship with God because of what I will call “the burdens of commitment.” In fact, a symptom of acedia is that one perceives being in a relationship and maintaining it as burdens to be borne. Love and friendship are felt as making demands on us, and acedia resists them as such....

Acedia sorrows over being in a relationship of love to another. The claims of the other, the transformation of the self required, the commitment to maintain the relationship even when this requires sacrificing one’s own desires

...acedia prefers alienation to what it sees as the burdens of commitment.

Acedia, then, is a profound withdrawal into self. Action is no longer perceived as a gift of oneself, as the response to a prior love that calls us, enables our action, and makes it possible. It is seen instead as an uninhibited seeking of personal satisfaction in the fear of “losing” something.

The desire to save one’s “freedom” at any price reveals, in reality, a deeper enslavement to the “self.” There is no longer any room for an abandonment of the self to the other or for the joy of gift; what remains is sadness or bitterness within the one who distances himself from the community and who, being separated from others, finds himself likewise separated from God.

Aquinas traces our surprising, negative response to God’s love— he goes so far as saying we can feel “dislike, horror, and detestation” toward it!—to

“In their reluctance to die to the old self, those with acedia choose slow spiritual suffocation tothe birth pains of new life. They cannot fully accept the only thing that would ultimately bring them joy. They refuse the thing they most desire, and they turn away from the only thing that can bring them life.”

Noting that “acedia is a disdain for that life inside of one that would participate with God,” Michel pinpoints the vice as “a failure to celebrate the image of God in one’s human nature.”

Here is a Podcast with Dr. Rossi discussing the book

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/healingpresence/path_to_sanity