honesty about depression on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

This is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this week on the podcast, we want to talk about

the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder, and that is the one in the family of depression.

More Americans and more Western Christians are diagnosed

with this mental disorder than any other one, and those numbers are going up, not down.

When we talk about mental illness in general and depression in particular, you can come at it

from a couple of different directions.

On the one hand, you can talk about how to think about and understand these problems in the right

way and from a perspective that is fully informed by the scriptures.

Another way to think about these problems is how to respond to people who are diagnosed with them.

We have a number of resources about how to think about the problem of mental illness and depression that I'll recommend at the end of the podcast.

But on the podcast today, what I want to do is talk to you if you are struggling with depression or if a loved one is struggling with depression.

And you're wondering, how should I think about this in my own life? How should I respond to it in my own life?

And what I would want to say to you is that the Bible is very, very honest about the existence of

and the experience of the kind of sorrow and sadness that we call today depression.

There are so many places in the Bible that talk about this, but just one of them is the

102nd Psalm. And in the 102 Psalm, the Psalmist gives us a very, very

candid explanation of the kind of realities you struggle with with depression. He talks about

feeling sorrowful because of the fleeting nature of life. Verse three says,

My days pass away like smoke. He also talks about how his body aches. He has physical trouble because of the

...