"Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God" (Psalm 42:5). The Bible does not pretend that believers never feel crushed. The psalms are full of people talking honestly to God from the bottom of a pit.
These four stories about depression, retold in our own words, come from a president, a pop star, an actress and a novelist. None of them is a neat success story. Each shows that depression can touch anyone, that being admired from the outside does not cure the darkness inside, and that help and hope are real. We close each one with a takeaway for preaching or reflection. For further reading, Sopranu has thoughtful pieces on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and on Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
Stories in this post:
- They Were Depressed: An Imaginary Dinner Party of Famous Names
- Judith Durham: A Star Who Hated Her Reflection
- Angelina Jolie: Finding Purpose by Seeing the World
- Amy Tan: When Success Did Not Cure the Darkness
They Were Depressed: An Imaginary Dinner Party of Famous Names
This is an imaginative scenario. Biographers have written about periods of deep melancholy or depression in the lives of these figures, but diagnoses made long after a person's death are uncertain.
Imagine being invited to a dinner party with an unusual guest list: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Vincent van Gogh.
When you arrive, Schumann and Beethoven are deep in conversation about the movements of their latest compositions. Poe and Twain are listening as van Gogh explains what he is trying to say through his paintings. Roosevelt and Lincoln are talking politics.
You wonder why these people are all here. After all, this is a fundraiser for people who suffer from depression. Perhaps each of them has someone in the family who struggles with it?
Then comes the time for speeches from the special guests. To your surprise, one after another, each of these famous people stands up and describes their own battle with darkness.
Lincoln even reads from a letter he wrote to his friend and law partner John T. Stuart on 23 January 1841: "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me."
But he does not stop there. He encourages everyone to keep going, because years later, in the middle of a terrible civil war, he was able to write very different words. In his Thanksgiving proclamation of October 1863 he began: "The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies." He went on to say that these blessings were so constantly enjoyed that people were prone to forget the source from which they came.
Takeaway: Some of the most gifted and influential people in history knew what it was to feel hopeless. Depression is not a sign of weakness or a lack of faith. Elijah, after his greatest victory, sat under a tree and asked God to let him die, and God's first response was to let him sleep and to feed him (1 Kings 19:3 to 8). Lincoln's two quotes, years apart, remind us that the darkness we are in today is not necessarily where we will stay. If you are in that place, who could you let walk beside you?
Source: Based on an article by Liora Nordenberg, "Dealing with the Depths of Depression", published by the US Food and Drug Administration. Lincoln quotations from his letter to John T. Stuart (1841) and his Thanksgiving proclamation (1863).
Judith Durham: A Star Who Hated Her Reflection
Judith Durham was one of Australia's first international pop stars. As the lead singer of The Seekers she toured Australia and the world and had a string of hits. In 1965 "I'll Never Find Another You" went to number one in Britain, making The Seekers one of the first Australian groups to find major success overseas.
Yet while Durham seemed to be on top of the world, inside she was in turmoil. While her fans adored her, she became deeply depressed about her weight and appearance. She began to hate her face. She thought it was too round and her eyes too small. She came to loathe her body, believing her fuller figure was unattractive.
When the very thin model Twiggy became the face of the fashion world, Durham's self-loathing grew worse. Even after losing sixteen kilograms, she still felt fat.
Her depression, she said, was matched by loneliness. She felt there was nobody she could talk to about it. "I was just consumed by it," she said. A doctor might give you diet pills, she explained, but she did not know of anyone she could have talked to who could have changed what was going on inside her head, someone who could have convinced her that it was all right to look the way she did.
Durham went on to have a long career and was deeply loved in Australia until her death in August 2022.
Takeaway: Applause from thousands of fans could not quiet the voice inside Judith Durham's head. What she longed for was one person to talk to. God looks at the heart, not the outward appearance (1 Samuel 16:7), and the psalmist praises God for making him "fearfully and wonderfully" (Psalm 139:14). Churches can be places where people find the conversation Durham never had. Who around you might be hiding a painful battle behind a confident smile?
Source: Story and quotations as reported in the original illustration; we were unable to confirm the original interview. Career details from published biographies of Judith Durham.
Angelina Jolie: Finding Purpose by Seeing the World
Like most of us, the actress Angelina Jolie went through a long period of working out who she was.
In a 2003 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, she reflected that she felt more centred than she once had. She admitted that she had been lost at times in her life. She liked to think she had never been a bad person, but there were certainly times when she was not clear about who she was.
According to Jolie, what changed her was seeing the world. There was a time, she said, when she never had a sense of purpose and never felt useful as a person. She believed many people know that feeling: wanting to kill yourself, or to take drugs, or to numb yourself, because you cannot shut the pain off. You just feel bad and you do not know where it comes from.
Around this time Jolie had begun travelling to places affected by war and poverty, and in 2001 she became a goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency. Meeting people whose suffering was far greater than her own helped give her a sense that her life could be useful.
Takeaway: Jolie found that part of the way out of her own darkness was turning towards the needs of others. That is not a cure for clinical depression, which often needs medical care, but it echoes a promise in Isaiah: if you spend yourself on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, your light will rise in the darkness (Isaiah 58:10). Has a sense of purpose ever helped lift a heavy season for you?
Source: Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 2003. We were unable to access the original article to confirm the exact wording.
Amy Tan: When Success Did Not Cure the Darkness
This story mentions suicide, abuse and violence. If it touches something painful for you, please see the note at the end of this post.
Amy Tan is the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning and the essay collection The Opposite of Fate.
What is less well known is her long struggle with depression, a struggle that runs through her family history. Tan has a photograph of her grandmother with three other women from her family. Every woman in the photograph later took her own life. Her mother expressed her own depression through violent rages, overturning and even smashing furniture, and often threatened suicide.
Tan says she first experienced depression as a young child. Life gave her many more reasons for pain. Her father and older brother both died of brain tumours within months of each other when she was a teenager. She suffered abuse in her youth, and one of her closest friends was murdered. Her depression, she said, showed itself as numbness alternating with intense anger.
Even enormous success as a writer did not end it. In 1993 she went to the premiere of the film of The Joy Luck Club. Instead of feeling elated, she was overwhelmed by a sense of meaninglessness. Everything in life seemed ugly, and she felt completely alone.
It was after this that Tan began taking antidepressants, and she found they made an enormous difference. "I know I will always have some degree of depression," she said. "I still have to wrestle with it, but I see where it fits in with my mother's life, my grandmother's life, my own life. For a long time I didn't know how to be happy, and I didn't trust happiness. I felt that if I had it I would lose it. But today, I am basically a happy person."
Takeaway: Amy Tan's story is a reminder that depression is often an illness with deep roots, and that medical help is one of the ways God brings healing. Seeking treatment is not a failure of faith any more than taking medicine for an infection would be. The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18). If someone you love is struggling, how could you encourage them to get the help they need?
Source: Reported in an interview in Who magazine, 21 May 2001. Biographical details from published accounts of Amy Tan's life.
Final thoughts
A president who wrote that he was the most miserable man alive, a pop star who hated her reflection, an actress who felt she had no purpose, and a celebrated novelist who felt empty at her own premiere. These stories about depression show that fame, talent and success are no protection against despair. They also show that despair is not the end of the story.
If you are walking through depression now, you are not alone, and you are not a lesser Christian. Talk to someone you trust, see a doctor or counsellor, and keep bringing your honest feelings to God, as the psalmists did.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or are worried about someone else, please contact a crisis line today. You can find one in your country through Find A Helpline, or call your local emergency number.
More stories you may like:
- Best Stories About Hope
- Stories About Suffering and Grief
- Stories About Meaning, Purpose and Self-Image
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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