What if I Just Can't?

Some people have depression so severe that they literally can’t get out of bed. Just being around another person is almost unbearable; scriptures and prayer only cause more guilt; going to church is simply impossible. I have never experienced quite this degree of depression, but I know that others do. Many people cannot imagine that it actually exists, and they ask, can’t a person always at least try? I don’t have all the answers, but a few things I do know. Many good people and good members of the church experience this illness to this unbearable degree. It is not their fault, and they are still good people. For them, trying may mean deciding that they are going to keep existing. Trying is deciding that they will not turn their back on God, even when it seems that He is failing them. Trying means hanging on and waiting for it to get better, because they remember that it has gotten better before.
Depression is a medical illness. We cannot just decide to get better. When you’re sick, often you have to stay in bed. Sometimes you have to miss work or church. This is true with severe cases of depression. You cannot do the things you normally do, and that does not make you a bad person. This is my first suggestion: refuse to feel guilty for the illness. You didn’t decide to be depressed. The Lord doesn’t expect you to do as much as you usually do; He expects the best that you can do right now, with the situation He’s given you. That is different for every person, but there is no need to feel guilty about not being happy. If you decide that there are things you really can’t do, then let them go and don’t feel guilty about it. Lighten up on yourself. “For it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize” (Mosiah 4:27). Do what you have strength to do.
Sometimes we think that the gospel must apply to everything but depression. This is simply not true. Though we struggle to see how the gospel or the atonement can help us, the Lord knew every trial that every person would go through before this all began. We have been told countless times that in our deepest despair we must turn to the Lord and trust in His promises. And if it just doesn’t seem to work? Well, then, we wait. That is my second suggestion: know that it will get better, and just wait it out.
I am reminded of Joseph Smith’s account of the darkness that overpowered him just before the first vision: “I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
“But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light” (Joseph Smith—History 1:15-16).
God will never allow us to be taken beyond what we are able to bear. He will only let us go so far, and then He will pull us back, at the very moment we need it. So often, with this in mind, we think, “OK, this will be the last day, because I know that I can go no further. I’m done; I can’t live with this anymore.” But it continues, for weeks or months longer than we feel we can stand. It means that the Lord is there, saying, “yes, you can.” We have to keep trusting him, because if we don’t we are cutting off our one possible source of comfort—the one person who has any hope of helping us.