Ultimately my upbringing with the religion did really help me get through my depression because even when I struggled a lot, I always got out of bed, I always went to school, I always went to work, I never hid from life and I think that a lot of that was what I was taught through my faith. You know, you still try, you still get up, you still do it and it gave me persistence. I think it made me work hard and I think that ultimately it gave me courage to face some of the things that I was going through and it gave me the strength to feel like I could do it.

I put my belief in God and started listening to God, because God granted us free will, so he’s not going to go, I believe he’s not going to go and control me I used to say that I believe, let me rephrase that. I believe he’s assisted me in helping me over my depression and shown me a path of the righteous, you know, of being able to get out of the hole of depression and anxiety.

The one positive experience I’ve had with religion was probably maybe three years ago. My father had this big spiritual overhaul, kind of like a new born Christian and it made him a much nicer person.

Like I don’t adhere to any beliefs myself, but all I can say is it really softened him a lot and he’s a lot nicer than he used to be. After having this and doing things I would never see him doing. He like goes to bible meetings and group sessions and he leads this men’s group now.

Stuff I would never have associated with my father. But he’s a much more, he’s not gentle he’s still fairly a hard stoic man, but he’s a lot more easy to communicate with and he doesn’t feel as judgmental as he used to.

I was brought up like, what is the specific term? Some sort of Christian, like a small group of Christian and sometime during early high school I started to like not identify with those values but my parents were still making me go to church so I had a sort of antagonistic relationship with religion for a while . Now it’s sort of, I don’t know, agnostic I guess. I don’t really know but I don’t know but I can’t say that it doesn’t exists because I don’t know so I think it’s only an interacting thing with my depression as my parents are concerned because they’re super religious and I’m not so not being able to relate to them on that level, yeah. It’s sort of depressing at times.

I believe that each individual constructs their own sense of purpose and meaning of life, constructs their own system by which they judge themselves to be valuable or not valuable. I absolutely think that religious faith can be an appropriate and healthy and good and beneficial way in which someone can construct their view of the world and of themselves. I also think that it is possible for religious faith, like any framework of looking at the world, to be unhealthy or destructive or negative.

Around age 14, I went through an experience that made me question my devotion to the Christian faith, and, ultimately, I decided that I no longer believed in the tenants of the religion I was raised in, and that was when my first bout of depression had lasted many, many months occurred, due to a variety of reasons: The stress of having to conceal what I knew my parents would not approve of from my family and from the rest of my community; my nagging fear of what if I’m wrong, what if I go to hell, I don’t want to go to hell, which is a thing that tends to make people uncomfortable. And along with that just the typical growing pains of adolescence of, you know, I was raised to believe the world is, I wasn’t raised to believe that. I grew up thinking that the world is very safe and secure place and I’m now starting to sense that in some cases it is, in some cases it is not. Magnified, in my typical the case, by the extremity of the stakes that had been attached to my religious beliefs.

I notice that, that people didn’t really start acknowledging depression until I was maybe 18. That, that was the same time that I found the whole [inaudible] and everything. And I kind of think the 2 are related because that’s when I noticed a general acceptance of depression rather than just being like, you ain’t depressed about nothing. All you got to do is pray and find your joy in the Lord and yada, yada, yada. Our church choir had a song about that, let’s see, I don’t remember the name of it, but the lyrics were, “I almost let go. I felt like I just couldn’t take life anymore”. I don’t remember the lyrics after that, but that was like the first acknowledgement of depression in the church that I’d ever heard of. And it’s like whoa, they actually think this is an illness. They actually realize that this probably isn’t something that you can just pray away, you know?

I was instilled with the values of a person’s purpose in life is to glorify and serve their divine creator, and if one is not able to do so, one’s not doing anything valuable with one’s life. Which I didn’t completely grasp in those words when I was four or five years old, but I think sat with me and did, in some ways, that I no longer so feel the need to describe I was not living my life in 100 percent devotion to my divine deity because I did not believe in this divine deity that caused this disconnect between what I felt like would make me, would give me value, and the actual value I was perceiving in myself.

I grew up as a roman catholic I had when I was younger a very ingrained idea of sin. I do think that I no, I no longer practice anymore I don’t have any religious association, but when I was younger I very much used to guilt myself about oh my gosh you yelled at your sister you did this terrible sin, I have to go confess, you know it, it very much, I don’t know if it necessarily contributed to anything but I do think that the overall feeling of guilt leads to negative self-worth. It makes you feel like you aren’t doing well enough that you’re doing something wrong.