Prozac Christians?
Copyright 2002 by Shea Oakley. All rights reserved.
While comparing notes with some believing friends recently I discovered that almost all of us, including myself, were on medication for various "nervous" conditions. The diagnoses included Clinical Depression, Bi-polar Disorder (once known as Manic Depression), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety Disorder. Whatever the name assigned to these so called "emotional illnesses" we "disordered" people had all sought chemical help. Personally I found this discovery to be a sort of mixed blessing. On one hand I was relieved to know that so many of my fellow Christians not only struggled with some of the same things I did but also were availing themselves of medication. Yet, on the other, it seemed a little strange to me that believers in Christ did not seem to be much different than the rest of the American population. We too, apparently, are part of what one writer has called the "Prozac Nation". Perhaps we should refer to ourselves as "Prozac Christians".
Now it is true that my friends and I live in the New York metropolitan area, a region that was, and continues to be, profoundly affected by 9/11. It may be that we are not good examples of the "average Evangelical" living in the United States. But, as in the case of a recent finding that half of all evangelical marriages here end in divorce, it still would not be surprising to find that the statistics are not much different than those of the secular world. Why?
A counselor friend of mine has what I think is a plausible theory to at least partially explain the Prozac Christian phenomena. He holds that we post-moderns have far too much time to spend in the kind of morbid introspection that comes from excessive leisure. Prior to the second half of the 20th Century the average person worked from dawn to dusk starting at a young age and continuing well into old (or relatively old as life expectancies were much shorter). We married in our teens, were parents by our twenties and then led hard, yet perhaps healthier, lives that didn’t leave a lot of energy left to be spent in self-absorption.
I agree with this postulation but would add another sociological factor. Our high-tech world has gradually removed us from the kind of interdependent communities that have always sustained human wellbeing. The alienation that comes from hyper-individualism seems to be accelerating in First World nations. We have become, in the words of one recent American president, "rich in goods but ragged in spirit" and myriad emotional problems result from the ultimately isolating personal independence brought about by affluence and technology.
The Church is always influenced by the culture it temporally exists in and the contemporary Church is no exception. Western culture has looked to science to find solutions to its intrinsic problems and the Church has, to at least some degree, followed along. One somewhat rationalistic Christian psychiatrist I know has described the new generation "SSRI" drugs’ (of which Prozac is one) as "the cure" for depression . Fair enough as far as restoring balance in brain chemistry but what is the "cure" for the non-physical causes of depression? Is it possible that the only answer to this question is a spiritual one? Jesus said He came "to bring us life and bring it more abundantly". One has to question whether He had Prozac in mind as the agent of that abundant life.
So are Christians sinning by taking medication for these kinds of problems? Probably not in the case of dealing with biochemical imbalances. Such imbalances are real and may have nothing to do with where a believer is spiritually. But using them exclusively to "cure" the sickness of our souls might be another matter.