Depression

You’ll love this depiction of how Christ joins us in our trials.

Challenges like depression can make it difficult to feel joy, but Elder Uchtdorf shared some comforting (and easy!) suggestions.

Manti Te’o was targeted in a high-profile catfishing scam in 2012. The experience brought him to a dark place, but he found light again through Christ.

Whether you’re managing depression or struggling to find joy this season, the First Presidency Christmas devotional invites us to remember the light.

While missionaries’ challenges are many, our support from home can make a big difference! Here are a few practical ways parents and friends can help.

“When I was in the depth of my depression, depression not only blocked all feeling for me but it also included blocking feelings of the Spirit, and so I remember for long stretches of time I just didn’t feel God’s love.”

Church leaders today are not naive to the exponential growth in the number of individuals around the world struggling with their mental health.

When depression and anxiety robbed my ability to feel the Spirit, I learned how to choose to trust God even when I couldn’t feel Him.

Hannah’s story represents the feelings of many couples in our own day who suffer similar concerns.

In talking with friends who are wrestling with their testimonies, I’ve noticed a common concern: They’re not feeling the joy of the gospel.

A wise therapist once told me that life isn’t really about being happy. It’s about finding peace. This lesson struck me with renewed force when I learned the story behind our beloved Latter-day Saint hymn “Where Can I Turn for Peace?”

Global research shows mental health issues in youth have doubled since the pandemic.

The new self-reliance course includes resources for developing healthy thinking patterns, managing stress and anxiety, understanding sadness and depression, and overcoming anger.

On an episode of All In, psychologist David Morgan spoke of depression and the importance of understanding our identity.

Here are four suggestions to change your social media experience so that it positively influences your life.

Now, more than ever, we need to keep talking about depression and doing things to help those who feel desperately alone. 

When award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson was in the depths of clinical depression, she didn’t want to talk about it. Feeling embarrassed and ashamed and living her life under the public eye, she wondered what people would think if she revealed her emotional state. But as she started to come out of that and began talking with other people, she began to realize how many people had a similar experience as her.

In a new video on the mental health website for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles teaches “those with the greatest need often need the greatest compassion.”

“As she shared the story of her own father's suicide, Sister Aburto brought compassion to a subject in a personalized way that I believe has never been done before from the general conference pulpit. It was groundbreaking. It was courageous.”

Depression can—and often does—seem like a mask overlying your loved one’s true and former self. Feeling that “this is not the person I know” is typical, but depression shouldn’t be allowed to also subvert a caregiver’s authentic self.

In a BYU-Pathway Worldwide devotional, Jane Clayson Johnson shared the importance of speaking up about struggles with mental illness.

Contrary to the unfounded ideas of some, depression isn’t chosen, nor can it be overcome simply by “pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.”

Four months after being drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, NFL kicker Matt Gay has been featured in his fair share of viral videos from preseason games. No doubt Bucs fans are excited to see Gay in action during the upcoming season.

We often talk about the struggle that those with a mental illness have, but how does it affect their family members and close friends?

“For many years I have been interested in the relationship between mental health and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Satan, with his clever and sophisticated attacks, has created great deception on this topic.”

Being at church has at times been a major struggle for me. My first major panic attack happened during a Sunday School lesson while I was in college, and the months following that experience I struggled with inexplicable intense anxiety in both church and other social settings. After some time and with the help of therapy, medication, and prayer, church became again a place of peace rather than panic for me. Unfortunately, that anxiety returned full force last summer.

The unraveling that is depression can come on swift and strong, and it hit one teenager, Isabela, in middle school. Here’s how she and her family navigated that difficult time.

I will never have a “normal” life, but I have found a way to live a happy life by relying on the Lord, and looking to the narratives in the scriptures that continue to guide my journey to this day.

While speaking at an LDS Business College devotional, Sister Sue Clark, wife of Elder Kim B. Clark, shared a powerful prompting she received in the middle of the night that helped her seek help for the depression she had been struggling with all her life.

Jane Clayson Johnson shares an open and frank exploration of her own harrowing journey through depression.

One in four people worldwide will be affected by mental illness or neurological disorders at one point in their lives.

There was a time when Jane Clayson Johnson felt so depressed that she planned her own funeral and secretly searched for a woman to replace her as the wife and mother in her family.

Missionaries can deal with a slew of issues, and as a parent, sibling, or friend reading and writing letters from afar, you may feel helpless. But you’re not. Check out some ways you can help them with some of these most common struggles, and some prophetic counsel that may help as well.

For many people the Christmas season is exciting and enjoyable as individuals engage in the hustle and bustle of varied festivities, and this is how we hope and want it to be. However, for some the Christmas season increases stress and can amplify feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety, loneliness, hopelessness, and even feelings of suicide. Oftentimes it is hard for those who do not deal with mental health struggles to comprehend why a time of year that is supposed to be uplifting and fun can be dark and empty for many.

Early in my career as a psychologist, I worked with a client who suffered from depression. Knowing that depression is primarily fueled by inaccurate, negative thoughts, I set out to help him change his thinking. Each week he would come in with a very pessimistic view of life. I’d tell him to try to focus on the positive. One particular time, he responded by providing a long list of negatives in the world, including widespread poverty, school shootings, dread health crises, pollution, domestic violence, hatred, ethnic genocide, social inequality, etc. He said, “How can I focus on the positive when there is so much negative all around us?” His answer gave me pause. I didn’t know how to respond. Was he actually correct? Were my attempts to get him to “think positive” simply a naïve overlooking of all the drama, death, and injustice that seem to plague the world every day?

The following is part of a transcript for the Deseret News podcast "Therefor, what?" Listen to the podcast below or view the full transcript on deseretnews.com.

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Depression is a difficult reality for many people. Maybe you experience it yourself or you know someone who does. Whatever the case may be, we've gathered an assortment of resources with the hope that one or more will be useful to you or those around you who could benefit from further understanding on this important topic.

Suicide can be preventable, and learning what to watch for can save lives.

With teen depression and anxiety on the rise, it's more likely than ever that missionaries will encounter mental illness in themselves or their companions. For example, between 2005 and 2014, the incident rate for teens experiencing major depressive episodes rose from 8.7 percent to 11.3 percent and 8.8 percent to 9.6 percent in young adults, according to a 2016 article in Pediatrics journal.

It was a regular Sunday morning in October 2015 as 19-year-old Jacob Pinkston sat with his family waiting for sacrament meeting to start. As the meeting began, his mom, Christine, leaned over to him and asked excitedly, “Do you know who’s on the stand?”

Throughout my service as a full-time missionary, I was blessed to serve closely with many people who touched my life in unique ways. Many of these individuals faced emotional struggles, like anxiety and depression. One of them was my own companion.

We don't always recognize when someone is struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide. Sometimes, we may even think the opposite: that everything seems to be going their way.

Working with a collaboration of Christan artists, Paul Cardall released music videos for a new Stone Angel album, Worth of Souls: Songs to Rescue & Restore Faith in Jesus Christ. Performed by over 10 contemporary Christian artists, the album features 13 beautiful songs to uplift and restore peace to troubled hearts.

In the Bible, there is a story of two disciples who were discouraged and grieved. Their leader and exemplar and friend Jesus Christ had died and they thought he was gone forever. They were walking to a town called Emmaus when a stranger came up to them and they conversed and walked together. The stranger asked what troubled them, and they told them all about the horrific death of their beloved Jesus. The stranger quoted scripture and told them to not worry, that Jesus Christ would rise again. That stranger was Jesus Christ, but as it says in Luke 24:16, "Their eyes were holden that they should not know him."