Last year, more than 32,500 Japanese killed themselves. Japan is one of the world’s three most suicidal nations along with Russia and Hungary, and this was the eighth straight year the number of suicides exceeded 30,000.

The country’s health ministry reports suicide is now the highest cause of death among young people in their 20s and 30s.

“The biggest challenge in life actually is how to make it day by day without being trapped by the empty feeling,” says Wataru Tsurumi, a former magazine editor in Japan and author of the controversial 1993 handbook, “The Complete Manual of Suicide,” in a wire article posted on Yahoo.com.

According to the article, the most recent trend has been “a spate of collective suicides by strangers who met on the Internet and arranged to meet up to end their lives together.”

“Why do the young kill themselves?” writes Tsurumi in the prologue of his book. “The question was posed over and over and over and over again. . . But no one has ever answered these questions: Why we must not kill ourselves, why we must continue living. What we need to know now simply is how to kill oneself.”

Recently I was shocked by the news that someone I knew committed suicide. It really made me want to examine what causes a person to resort to such a measure.

What keeps coming back to me, even as I deal with the “leftovers” from my own recent encounter with mild depression, is that it’s a matter of how you choose to think about your circumstances.

Even Tsurumi reasons in the story about the Japanese, “The people of this country still think negatively about belonging to a lower social class or not working hard enough.”

I know for me I’d made a habit out of feeling like a loser because I’ve been working for several years now on a book I still haven’t finished.

Just the other day I came across an article I saved from the Los Angeles Times a year or so ago about the real roots of depression. It mentioned two pioneer psychologists from the 1960s, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, who openly rejected psychoanalysis in favor of cognitive therapy.

“Whereas Sigmund Freud probed the depths of the unconscious to explain behavior and mental illness, Beck and Ellis stayed in the shallows,” the article related. “The two argued that depression was not the result of cryptic, unconscious forces, but rather of conscious, seemingly trivial negative assumptions and thinking. Maybe, they reasoned, these patterns of self-critical, pessimistic thinking are the disease, not merely symptoms.”

When my own depression seemed to be at its worst this past winter, I was fortunate to have a friend associated with my church give me a cassette tape series of studies my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) , gave in the late ’90s on the subject of depression.

I’ve written once before about what he said (To read, click on “Back Issues” and scroll down to “Contents Under Pressure,” dated Mar. 22, 2006), but after listening to one of the tapes over again this past weekend, I found more useful information I wanted to share.

Here’s just some of what he said, relayed below in some rough notes:

· There’s a formula that’s as true as the quadratic equation or anything you’ll ever learn in mathematics about depression. Your emotions are absolutely predictable because of the relationship between your emotions and your thinking process. When a person becomes depressed, it always starts with improper thinking. Your thinking about things isn’t what it ought to be. It’s improper; not right. That’s the seed bed. That’s where depression begins. That’s where it all starts.

· Depression is almost always caused by some external experience. It begins with a disappointment, or an experience in which you are displeased.

· When someone hasn’t performed up to your expectations, you get set up for depression. Isn’t that what we (Believers) describe as legalism? Basing what we do on the basis of someone else’s performance—performance-based acceptance?

· Unreal expectations and misplaced dependencies. Misplaced faith. People live like they have on rose-colored glasses, and like everything in life is just going to be wonderful all the time. Things are just always supposed to be great, and they’re never to have any discouragements, and when we do it’s treated like it’s something unusual. You get where you expect things that life just can’t give you. You expect things out of others that they just can’t give you.

· How many of you have been injured, insulted or rejected sometime in your life? How many of you have insulted, injured or rejected somebody else? Well, no wonder you’re depressed—look at how you act! I mean, if you go through life not realizing that life is what life is, and that things happen. . .

· If your dependencies are based on the wrong things, I mean, who do you depend on for your happiness? Who do you depend on for your self-worth? Whoever or whatever it is, you put them in bondage. In a bondage to failure. Because they’re not going to live up to all of your expectations.

· Thinking truth sets you free, thinking error puts you in bondage. So it’s always going to start with improper thinking. You can choose to respond with thanksgiving, or choose to respond in the flesh with human wisdom and human viewpoint—responding with fear, anger and have that fleshly reaction of unbelief to adverse circumstances. When you respond by faith and thanksgiving, it produces peace, just like God said it would. Because trusting Him produces peace.

· You have a personality and you have habits you’ve formed that determine the way you handle things. You either ventilate it or internalize it.

· Most of the time anger is fear in disguise. You’re angry from the failure. Anger sets off the use of defense mechanisms. Control mechanisms. You try to change the circumstances of life and that’s where the exhibitionism and the clinging and the attacking come from. With anger, you either ventilate it, blowing up on people, or you internalize it based on your personality. The more dangerous is to internalize it because then you begin to brood over it.

· Because nothing gets done about the problem, the anger turns into self-pity. And the brooding and the resentment and the internal struggle begins to build and just gets bigger and bigger and all of a sudden—it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. One little thing and bang, you end up like Vesuvius and nobody saw it coming.

· The proper attitude, of course, is to look at the disappointment; take the anger as a motivator. Anger’s not a sin. Paul says, “Be angry and sin not.” Anger becomes a sin when you focus it on people instead of the problem. Anger’s one of the two basic motivators God’s put in your anatomy—in your emotional makeup—to motivate you to deal with problems. There’s fear and anger. One pulls you toward and one pulls you away. You can’t get rid of them because they’re a part of you, just as much as sight. What you learn is how to deal with it properly through the proper thinking processes.

· Self-pity is the one constant in depression that influences everything. It’s always there in depression. It never isn’t there. And the more deeply you indulge in self-pity, the more deeply depressed you become. Now self-pity involves two forms of thinking. One is past thinking where you remember—you rehearse the insult, the injury, the rejection, and you just go over it and over it and over it in your mind. And then the other is future thinking where you project the insult, the injury, the rejection, into the future and you begin to have anxiety and fear about it happening in the future. And those things will eat your lunch. You won’t live above the snake line with thinking like that. That will put you in an absolute tailspin of despondency and despair.

· Here’s the self-pity formula. You start with improper thinking and then when life happens and disappointment comes, you get mad about it: “I’ve been wronged.” You focus on it to try and make things different so your disappointment goes away. But it doesn’t work and self-pity comes in. If you take the self-pity out of that, you get rid of depression, to put it bluntly. Now I know that’s not easy to receive or believe when you struggle with depression, but it’s still the fact.

· The solution to depression is in having a renewed mind. In II Cor. 2:13, Paul talks about being down, depressed. But in the very next verse he says, “Thanks be unto God.” He breaks forth into this great statement about the victorious life that you have in Christ and the ministry God’s given you in Christ. Right out of the middle of all that depression and darkness. People quote verse 14 when they want to get happy, don’t they? How do you get from verse 13 to 14? Four words: “Thanks be unto God.” That’s where it came from. He changed from the slew of Despond to the sunlight by simply changing his thinking about what was going on.

· The faith choice is rejoicing in the reality of who God’s made you in Christ. It’s thanksgiving. Now that’s a choice you make in your mind. You see the real culprit is our mental attitude toward the circumstances of life, not the trials of the circumstances themselves. Depression is an emotional state. Your emotions follow your thinking. They’re dumb. They have no intellect of their own. They don’t think; they are responders and they’re designed by God to respond to the thoughts in your mind.

· Your emotions have no ability to discern between fact and fiction or between the past, the present and the future. Watch a scary movie or watch a love story. You can watch a car chase on TV and know the car isn’t going to jump out and hit you in the face, but your emotions don’t know and they respond to that. Your emotions only respond to what goes into your mind. The emotions don’t say, “Now look, that’s just a television program.” They don’t do that. So in the battle for your emotions, the real battle is in your thinking. They respond to what you’re thinking. Somebody says, “Well, I’m feeling jealous.” Well, then you’re thinking jealous thoughts. That’s how you got there. Let’s be honest about it. Somebody says, “I’m feeling mad!” Well, then you’re thinking angry thoughts.

· Your emotions came from the way you were thinking. They’re completely predictable. Somebody says, “Well, he has an emotional problem.” No, he has a thinking problem. That’s why drug therapy, shock therapy, etc., don’t work. Tranquilizers work simply because they numb your thinking; they numb your mind. I knew farmer in Alabama once who’d been given shock treatments and he came home from three weeks in the hospital with hair that turned white as snow. He finally committed suicide. He’d go out in the field and not remember what he was there for because the treatments took away the memory. Emotions come based upon how you feel. That’s why all the therapies are temporary.

· Paul says in Romans 12:2 says, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That’s saying you have to reeducate your thinking. You have to begin in your mind to think like God thinks. You’ve got two choices: You can follow human viewpoint—Freud, Skinner, Rogers and Jung—and/or the religious systems and respond on the basis of human viewpoint, or you can respond on the basis of Divine viewpoint—the Word of God. And your happiness, your peace, is going to be a result of that choice you make. What viewpoint you choose to hold in your mind to determine how you’re going to wind up feeling. The key to beginning to correct the emotion of depression is changing your thinking patterns. You can’t change your emotions. They are what they are. They don’t change. You change your thinking.

· You’ve got a choice. You can go on the old human viewpoint, the old premises of the old life, the old attitudes, the old hard feelings. Or you can choose to allow God’s Word to transform your mind, and that will produce peace.

· Saying to yourself, “Well how do I feel about it?” and then going into your emotions, well, that is not the way God created you to function. The way God made you to work is for your will to take in the truth of God’s Word, and on the basis of a choice of faith, take the action that the Word of God says to take. In other words, you take action, not on how you feel, but out of a choice of faith based on what God’s Word says, and having taken the action, then the emotions come along to support it. If your alarm clock goes off at 5:30 a.m., do you turn if off and say, “I’m not going to work today”? No. You make a choice. It might be 10 a.m. before you feel like being up, but you take action based on some choices you’ve made and then you let emotions follow later.

· Philippians. 4:6 says, “Be careful for nothing.” That means don’t be anxious, full of care, worrying about things. Is anxiety an emotion? Paul says don’t do that. “Well, what am I supposed to do?” The verse goes on to say: “But in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” That’s what you do. Tell me something, do you have to feel that or do you have to do that? You do that. You don’t have to feel anything. Just do it. He says, “Don’t short-circuit over here with the feelings. Go directly by faith to the action. Just by faith, do it.” God says to do it by faith: “I’m going to do what God says and skip the emotion for the moment, trust His Word and act on it and see what happens.”

· Is peace an emotion? Yes. Is it the opposite of anxiety? Yes. Paul says, “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” God’s saying, “Skip the emotion for the moment, trust my Word and act on it, and then peace—the emotion—will come and keep your heart.” The Word comes into your will, and it’s your will that believes it. That’s the way God created you to function.

· You’ve got a choice. Are you willing for the Word of God to be what teaches you, reproves you, corrects you, trains you, or is your premise in life, “I’m gonna seek success at any cost. I’m going to be rich and happy no matter what.” God says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Which one are you going to believe?

· How can I be depending on God if I’m depressed? The answer is you can’t, so just accept that. When you’re depressed you’re not depending on the Lord. You need to recognize that. Accept the provision He’s made for you in Christ is true and go free from the burden of guilt. Rejoice in the one who gave Himself for you. “The just for the injust.” Who’s taken you in your flesh and forgiven you your sins. Rejoice in the one who says, “Come now, and let us reason together: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” He’s saying, “I’ve taken care of it for you. Just rejoice in the reality of who God’s made you in Christ.”

· God never changes his mind about you. Don’t forget that. When things come along and you get disappointed in them, remember God didn’t change His mind about who He says you are. And let that begin to renew your mind, and as it does, it will retrain your emotions to respond in a different way than before.

· You don’t get where you are with one bad thought. You get there by a long process of bad thinking, and the way out isn’t one thought; it’s a consistent process of correct thinking. It starts with a choice to take your stand in the totality of God’s love and grace toward you in Christ, and let that renew your mind. Think like God thinks.

Editor’s Note: I was writing this piece earlier this afternoon when I got a phone call from a friend in Alabama (To read a previous story on her and her husband, go to “Remember the Titans,” dated Nov. 22, 2004).

She asked me how I was doing and I complained about the oppressive “heat wave” we’ve had here in New York the past three days.

She said she and her husband were laughing when they watched the network news the night before and heard all the talk about New York’s 98-degree weather, saying to themselves, “What babies!”

Of course, Alabama is disgustingly hot all through the summer months. Today, according to my friend, the heat index is 102 and there’s no relief in sight, unlike here in New York where a cool front’s moving in. My friend’s husband works as a bridge-welder who must wear a Hazmat Suit through his morning and afternoon shift outdoors. When he gets home, he’s got no trouble going back out in the heat and doing yard work. My friend says, “He loves working with trees, shrubbery, plants.”