Some quotes from a book my counselor is letting me borrow..."You didn't do anything to become depressed. Your failure to do something didn't cause your depression. Depression is an illness. You are no more at fault for having depression than if you had asthma, diabetes, heart disease, or any other illness.""There are many misconceptions concerning God and depression. These include: 1) Depression is a punishment from God. 2) To seek help for depression is to doubt God's ability to heal it. 3) Depression is a spiritual illness; the only treatment should be God's personal intervention. ...In fact, God and God's benevolence come in many forms and manifest in many ways. Among these we must include modern science and the entire healing profession. (God moves in mysterious ways; psychiatrists are just one of them.) ...It is hard to find the believer who will not take penicillin for pneumonia, insulin for diabetes, or have a broken bone properly set. ...Modern treatment of depression is a gift from God.""Some people seem morally opposed to antidepressant medication. They have a firm belief that pain must be "dealt with," experienced, analyzed, categorized, and, at all costs, must not be avoided. Antidepressants do not numb the body, mind, or emotions. On the contrary, they usually make a person more perceptive and aware of feelings. The suffering of depression is not the ordinary occasional pain of living. Suffering, in fact, interferes with the processing of, and taking appropriate action about, pain. Pain is a signal that something is not right. Far from covering this pain, antidepressants help you deal with it more effectively. People being treated for depression often find that the clarity of mind, relief of emotional suffering, and increased energy allow them to clear up problems - mental, physical, and emotional - that had been festering for years. Antidepressant medications, then, are not an escape, a cover-up, or a short circuit for life's difficulties. They are a medicine to heal disease and end suffering."I don't know if you'll find any of those quote useful or helpful in any way... but they were the main ones that stuck out to me when I read the book... Sorry the quotes were so long.. that last one was nearly a whole page in the book... I just thought they might help somehow.