Doubt, Meaning and Depression

I wanted to follow up on last week's post about the co-incidence of doubt and depression. 

One of the things I described in that post was how doubt can trigger a season of depression. Faith is a meaning-making structure, and when that meaning-making structure is deconstructed or lost life becomes evacuated of purpose and significance.

For example, as described by psychologists, meaning in life has three ingredients--coherence, purpose and significance. By coherence we mean that your life "makes sense," that you can meaningfully narrate your life story. By purpose we mean your life as a goal or direction, your life exists for a "reason." Lastly, your life matters and is imbued with value, worth and sacred significance.

For believers, faith carries coherence, purpose, and significance. Faith holds us in a story, gives our lives purpose, and grounds the value of our lives. Consequently, if you lose all this, mental health consequences often follow. Our lives start to feel meaningless, random, purposeless, pointless, drifting and devoid of significance. Once, everything mattered. Now, nothing matters.

To be sure, a new existential equilibrium can be achieved. New non-religious meaning-making structures can come to replace faith. But the initial season of doubt, along with the season of transition, from the old meaning-making structure to the new, can be difficult and emotionally treacherous. And some never really fully recover their emotional and existential footing. The fullness of meaning experienced within faith is never completely recaptured by the irreligious replacement. Meaning after faith can feel arbitrary, fragile, and thin. Faith cannot be sustained, but the loss of the fullness of meaning continues to haunt, the faint echo of God in the restless human heart, a residual sadness that never departs.