An atheist helped me understand depression. Here’s what the Church is missing

I sang the song with tears.

“To every soul held captive by depression, I speak Jesus.”

Every word, meant. Every prayer, real. For someone I love, through a long season of depression that wouldn’t lift. I was doing everything I knew to do. Worshipping. Interceding. Asking questions I couldn’t form properly about causes and origins. But underneath the worship, something pressed.

I didn’t know whether she needed medication or whether I just needed to pray harder. Both felt true in different moments. Neither felt sufficient. What was I asking Jesus to do? I wasn’t sure I understood what I was looking at well enough to know.

I didn’t find the answer in a sermon. A secular atheist gave me the clearest view.

The fractures beneath depression

Jounralist Johann Hari was diagnosed with depression as a teen. In Lost Connections (Bloomsbury) he recounts his journey of exploring why so many people are struggling with poor mental health. He concluded that depression is more than a chemical malfunction; it’s a response to lives increasingly stripped of what human beings were built for: belonging, meaningful work, awe, genuine connection, a future worth moving toward.

As I read it, I kept stopping. Not because the science surprised me, but because I recognised the map.

Every disconnection Hari identified — meaningless work, thin communities, distance from the natural world, lacking a hopeful future — was what Genesis 3 had already named. The fall didn’t just affect brain chemistry. It fractured everything: work, relationship, the ground beneath our feet.

And if the fall is that comprehensive, if depression is not just a personal affliction but a symptom of a fractured world, then the Church’s response needs to be comprehensive too.

Community is a genuine offer - of belonging, of meaning, of being seen - which the world around us is desperate for

We were taught, somewhere along the way, that naming something spiritual meant the solution had to be ‘spiritual’ too. That to look elsewhere was a kind of faithlessness. That belief was the equation and healing was the answer, and if the answer wasn’t coming, we must have got the belief wrong.

That lie doesn’t belong to us. It was handed to us. But we’ve been living inside it long enough that it can feel like faith itself.

There is a version of pastoral care that individualises the problem without asking what produced it. It’s genuinely kind but also genuinely incomplete. It’s not a failure of love. It’s a failure of imagination.

Belonging before wellness

In my own community, I’ve watched people find their way - imperfectly - back to some of what Hari describes. Not through anything we designed, just through what genuine belonging does when it’s actually working; someone welcomed before they were well enough to perform wellness. The slow dismantling of the ‘myth of more’, named, laughed at, resisted together.

Last autumn, 30 of us planted bulbs in our local park on a Saturday morning, hands in the soil. Nobody was fixed. But the following Sunday, something shifted in the room that I couldn’t quite account for.

At Christmas we give gifts to people in our community, nominated by those who know them. Specific to each person’s history and what they’re carrying. It started as generosity and became something else: a practice of paying attention.

But this is more than being kind to each other. We can sit with someone and ask what their work is actually doing to them, whether it’s giving life or draining it. We can choose, as a community, to live differently from the culture around us. That’s more than pastoral care. It’s a different vision of what human life is for, practised together.

Hari didn’t know he was reading Genesis 3. But the Church should. The fall fractured exactly what he’s describing: belonging, meaning, creation, a future worth moving toward. The gospel is the story of those fractures being healed. At our best, we’re a community that can create the conditions the research is now pointing toward. 

We were taught that naming something spiritual meant the solution had to be ‘spiritual’ too

There are people in our churches who are still struggling. This is not a promise that community fixes everything. But it is a genuine offer - of belonging, of meaning, of being seen - which the world around us is desperate for.

Jesus heals depression. I still hold onto that. But perhaps the healing doesn’t always arrive the way we expected.

Perhaps it comes through a friend who shows up. Work that finally means something. People planting bulbs in the mud. A gift that tells you someone was paying attention. A community that doesn’t need you to be fine before it lets you in.