Courses › When you are told it is weak faith
Low mood and hard feelings
When you are told it is weak faith
What depression actually is, why doing comes before feeling, and what the tradition really says about grief.
If you are having thoughts of ending your life, this course is not the right place for you to be right now, and reading further will not help you today. Please tell someone today. Call your local emergency number or go to your nearest emergency department. Ring a crisis line in your country. Ask your doctor for an urgent appointment and say the thoughts out loud, in plain words. Or tell a person who is physically in the room with you and stay near them. Having these thoughts is a symptom of an illness, it is more common than people say, and it is treatable. Telling someone is the thing that helps, not the thing that condemns you.
What this course teaches
Behavioural activation
The claim is that depression runs as a loop of falling reward and rising avoidance, and that the way out is through what you do rather than through what you think. You schedule small activity before you feel like it, because waiting to feel like it is the trap the illness sets.
Why this one
This is the strongest self help evidence in this whole field. When cognitive behavioural therapy was taken apart and the activation component run alone, it matched the full treatment, and it has matched medication among more severely depressed people. That is a strong claim and it is supported.
What this course will not do
Decisions about medication and therapy. This course will tell you what the evidence says about both and will not tell you what to take or when to stop. That is a conversation with a doctor.
Six short lessons for anyone who has been told, or has told themselves, that a flat and heavy few months is a religious failure. It separates depression from sadness, explains why the low state keeps itself going, and puts the belief that this means weak iman next to what the Qur'an and the sound reports actually contain. Lesson four teaches one change, and it is deliberately the smallest one that works.
Who this is for
Anyone who has been low, flat or exhausted for weeks, anyone who has stopped being able to do things they were doing three months ago, and anyone who loves someone in that state. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not treat or diagnose anything, and it does not do trauma work. It will not ask you to write out or revisit the worst thing that happened to you, and it will not ask you to approach a situation you are afraid of. It gives no fatwa, and it replaces neither a doctor nor a scholar. It is not a substitute for seeing someone, and lesson six is about how to do that.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. What it looks like from the insideNot sadness. Something that takes the reward out of everything and then tells you that is who you are.7 min
- Why it holds itself in placeDoing less is the sensible short term move, and doing less is what removes the last of the reward.7 min
- It is not weak faithA prophet wept until his sight went. Nobody in the text calls that a failure of iman.8 min
- Doing before feelingIn depression the motivation arrives after the action, not before it. Everything else follows from that.7 min
- What feeds it, and what to stop addingGoing over it, sleep, being on your own with it, and the advice that is meant kindly.7 min
- When to get help, and what help looks likeHow to raise it, what treatment actually involves, and what to do today if it is heavier than that.6 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:184 to 185, 2:286, 12:84 to 86, 65:7. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. Qur'an 39:53 is deliberately not used anywhere in this course. Its most common use in practice is as a rebuke to a person in despair, and its placement near this subject is held for a clinical reviewer's decision.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1117, 1283, 1303, 5641, 5678, 6470; Sahih Muslim 2999. Only reports graded sound are used. The reports on suicide in Bukhari and Muslim do not appear anywhere in this course, by editorial policy, and neither do Sahih al-Bukhari 5652 or 5671, which are held pending joint scholar and clinician review.
- Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, Masalih al-Abdan wa al-Anfus, second part, the chapter on al-huzn, which distinguishes sadness with an outward cause from sadness arising without one and treats them differently; English rendering by Malik Badri, Sustenance of the Soul, IIIT, 2013. Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 32 on patience and thankfulness, and Book 33 on fear and hope. Al-Ghazali book numbering confirmed against the ghazali.org listing. Al-Balkhi chapter divisions await a reviewer checking the Arabic edition.