Thoughts on the Depression as Diabetes Metaphor

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

I’ve shared with you my struggles with depression and darkness. It’s no fun when the lights begin flickering and my mind becomes an enemy. Eventually the lights come back on and I treasure the light even more. As I’ve written before, I’ve found that when the lights are on is the time to do fierce battle, so the times of darkness aren’t nearly as intense.

There is one metaphor that I’ve found to be incredibly unhelpful. It’s unhelpful because it is incomplete. It is the idea that depression is like diabetes. This metaphor is given in an attempt to help people not feel so bad about themselves for depression. You don’t shame someone with diabetes, you acknowledge that they’ve got a medical condition. You take medicine to help with the problem and you move on. That’s fair enough but the metaphor usually doesn’t stop there when you are battling depression.

Let’s set aside for a moment all the arguments about psychotropic medicine. Assume for the sake of argument that depression is a medical condition just like diabetes. What I’m arguing today is that if you use that depression is like diabetes metaphor you need to fill it out a bit more.

Imagine with me a woman who has been diagnosed with diabetes. She is now put on meds to get her disease under control. Is that the end of the story, though? What if she keeps eating Snickers candy bars, potato chips, and drinking Mountain Dew? Or rather than fighting the disease with things like exercise she develops an even more sedentary lifestyle? Is such a woman blame-free? Is diabetes the only problem—or is her very real biological problem compounded by lifestyle choices?

We must think of depression the same way. And while we make every effort not to shame people for having mental health issues we really need to be cautious in that we don’t at the same time give them permission to not fight it. Even if it is proven that things like depression are exactly like diabetes, it still does not mean that we don’t fight. It doesn’t mean that I’m somehow blame-free if I cave in to my desires for inactivity. Inactivity will kill a depressed person but it is the very thing that you’ll want to do. Just like a woman with diabetes might intensely crave the sugar that would kill her.

So, if you must use that diabetes metaphor at least encourage the depressed person to fight in the same way you’d encourage a diabetic to battle with their diet, exercise, etc.

Photo source: here (Sorry I couldn’t miss the chance to use a photo of Wilford Brimley while talking about diabeetus)

One Comment

  1. Fighting it can be tricky.

    Something that has worked tremendously for me is to fight it by stopping investing emotional capital in it. That is, instead of trying really hard to feel good when I didn’t, I would just focus on doing the next thing I was supposed to do whether I felt like it or not, especially that I would ignore the self-doubt lies that present themselves as explanations for the depression. If I felt worthless, I would simply acknowledge that I felt that way and move on. If I felt like people didn’t really want me, I would simply acknowledge it in myself and keep doing what I was supposed to do regardless. I wouldn’t invest in those kinds of things either by continually machinating on them or making them stronger by resisting them. Additionally, the only way to acknowledge them, given that they were lies built on some half-truth, is to rest in the sovereignty of God in the matter: “So what, even if this was true. God has provided this difficulty for his glory, has given me grace that it’s not any worse, and will give me what I need to serve him in the next moment. I don’t have to understand it, just trust God.”

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