Depression and Metaphysics

What helps? What hurts?

AI-generated Google Gemini image. Prompt: “depressed meditator.”

Having worked in spiritual publishing for more than 20 years, including as a vice president and division editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House, I have had the mixed blessing of seeing how the sausages get made.

I have personally witnessed bestselling inspirational and metaphysical writers—including some you may avidly read and follow—behave with truculence, anxiety, and occasional freakouts. (In their defense, they have probably seen the same from me.)

I have experienced coworkers running into my office in tears after some author known for dedication to mindfulness, meditation, or “spiritual activism” tore them a new one over a petty or perceived slight or inconvenience.

The fact is that the spiritual search does not equate with or necessarily result in emotional health. Too often, the search can actually serve as a diversion from workaday issues of accountability, maturity, and maintenance of normative relationships.

To be sure, I have often written in defense (and critique) of positive-mind metaphysics. I have witnessed motivational philosophies, such as those espoused by Anthony Robbins, and programs of spiritual mutual aid, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, make a great difference in the lives of people in recovery. But when someone is suffering from crippling depression or intense anxiety, the urging to “be positive,” in whatever form, can come across like telling a bullied kid to “stand up” to a physically stronger and more intimidating tormenter. It may be an ideal, but it is often a psychological, and perhaps physical, impossibility.

As someone who has long written and spoken in favor of the therapeutic benefits of contemporary spirituality, and who has visited and delivered talks at most growth centers in the U.S., I also believe that real treatment requires a complex of factors: cognitive, meditative, spiritual, and, sometimes, pharmacological. I discourage knee-jerk reaction against SSRIs or other psychoactive drugs found within some quarters of the New Age or alternative spiritual culture.

Until recently, I took—and, I believe, benefited from—an SNRI. SSRIs and SNRIs, among other psychopharmacological drugs, are highly individualized in response. They require research and constructive relations with a caregiver.

Some object that these drugs are over­prescribed, which is almost certainly true. I have witnessed it firsthand in my own kids—and in myself. For one thing, SSRIs are better at treating depression than anxiety, the latter my own personal poison. Depression or anxiety sometimes respond to a combination of exercise, eating habits, meditation, sleep, and—the most underrated, I believe—separation from cruel people.

In any case, I am transparent about my use of a prescription because, in instances when pharmacological treatment is helpful or needed, I want no such option stigmatized. I have since discontinued my prescription (following the brave and appropriate lead of one of my grown kids); but that, too, is an individualized decision about which I will write in a future article.

I have also witnessed people combining meds with the practice of Transcendental Meditation, for example, with encouraging results. Traditional psychology and psychiatry and the self-enacting energies of the mind can form a ­ powerful complement.

In that vein, some psychiatrists have noted that expectation of recovery from depression is often the key factor in whether any recovery occurs at all. I write as a layperson, but I have personally witnessed psychological and emotional recovery begin when an individual commits to a serious form of treatment, such as electroshock therapy or hospitalization. In some cases, relief starts to arrive before the treatment actually commences. I know of cases where the treatment itself became unnecessary or was more efficacious than expected because improvement was already in process following the patient’s commitment and before the start date. (Again: these decisions are highly individualized and must be made in an atmosphere of trust, good information, and transparency.)

The more thoughtful medical professionals have observed that the commitment itself—and the willingness it represents to charge at a problem with all available resources—is therapeutically meaningful. The sense of personal agency that arises when you cross a threshold, when you commit to withholding nothing in pursuit of a solution, can amount to the solution that is sought. The mental act is catalyzing.

As alluded, programs of spiritual development and religious traditions can be a great help in this regard. In The Miracle Club, I write about the experience of Emily Grossman, an extraordinary mental-health professional, who began the long road back from a diagnosis of bipolar disorder through her own spiritual search combined with traditional medicine.

At the outset of Emily’s road to recovery in the late 1990s, her younger sister Pam Grossman—a brilliant artist, author, and seeker who has pioneered the latest wave of witchcraft revivalism—handed Emily a copy of Anthony Robbins’ self-help book Awaken the Giant Within. The book gave Emily a renewed sense of inner drive and pushed her to explore new possibilities in treatment.

A coterie of journalists and social critics regard Robbins, the mountainous life coach and purveyor of you-­can-­do-it ethos, as something of a joke or huckster. He is no such thing. His message of self-­possibility has saved lives. It opened Emily to options.

After bouncing in and out of jobs, Emily began to regain her footing. She moved to New York City in 2005 to attend Teacher’s College at Columbia University, from which she graduated the following year. At the time, she half-­jokingly told a classmate, “One day, I’m gonna move to California and become a Buddhist.” The friend replied, “Well, I’m from California, and I’m a Buddhist, and there’s a meeting tonight.”

That marked her introduction to the daily chanting of nam myoho renge kyo, the core practice of Nichiren Buddhism.

This mantra was originally written in Sanskrit and reformed into thirteenth-­century Japanese. Derived from the title of the classical Buddhist text The Lotus Sutra (a lotus is the flower of self-rebirth), the phrase means roughly: “I dedicate myself to the mystic law of cause and effect.” Chanting these four sounds—nam myoho renge kyo—forms the heart of Nichiren Buddhism, named for its founder, a thirteenth-­century Buddhist priest, and practiced today by Soka Gakkai International, or SGI (a group I admire but have no connection to).

“Very soon after I started practicing,” Emily said, “I noticed that I was not as symptomatic—I wasn’t feeling as depressed. In fact, I was feeling happy. My medicine—which hadn’t changed—was working better.”

Like me, Emily grew up in a traditional Jewish household; in her case, in Marlboro, New Jersey. I had a small orthodox bar mitzvah at a synagogue in New Hyde Park, Queens. Neither place is on the leading edge of New Age spirituality. But during her recovery, Emily experienced what I consider a breakthrough spiritual insight.

While she was experimenting with the ideas of Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Sharon Salzberg, and other alternative-spiritual thinkers, and while at the start of her journey into Buddhism, Emily prayed to the God of her childhood “for a practice that reflected everything I was reading in those books.”

Rather than feeling that she was abandoning her childhood tradition, Emily asked her old tradition to open a new door for her: “I chanted and I said, ‘God, I’m going to be talking to you in a different way now.’”

Read her remark again: “God, I’m going to be talking to you in a different way now.” That statement displays great moral aptitude—and summarizes the challenge and courage of mature New Age and positive-­mind metaphysical practice. New Age is often used as an epithet to connote the fuzzy-headed and fickle. I reject that. I consider New Age a radically ecumenical culture of therapeutic spirituality.

Seen from a certain perspective, all religion is syncretic. Our myriad faith traditions, while using vastly different liturgies and sometimes harboring different aims, nonetheless serve as interlocking chains that can deliver us to what is intimately needed, even if a method or practice lies outside the borders of a tradition itself. The paradox of religion is that it can deliver you to solutions beyond its own premises—including those of traditional psychology and psychiatry.

When coping with emotional duress or mental illness, I endorse taking a “D-­ Day approach”: Throw everything you have at your problem. See what works. Radically (and intelligently) experiment. Rule out nothing. Do not feel bound by subculture peer pressure, which may entail remaining silent about your efforts.

Spirituality is not a panacea or all-­in-one treatment for severe depression, anxiety, or any emotional disorder—just as psychology alone cannot substitute for meaning or a search for the greater.

Twentieth-­century spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti observed, “Truth is a pathless land.” When confronting personal crisis, never feel limited by any one path, including the spiritual.