Mr. Bobby Maddex: Welcome to Ancient Faith Presents…. I’m Bobby Maddex, station manager of Ancient Faith Radio. Today I will be speaking with Fr. Samuel Seamans. Fr. Samuel is the founder of the Orthodox Christian Anxiety and Depression Support Group. Welcome to the program, Fr. Samuel.
Fr. Samuel Seamans: Thank you very much, Mr. Maddex. It’s good to be with you.
Mr. Maddex: Why don’t we begin by learning just a little bit about you. What is your background, what parish do you serve, and where are you located?
Fr. Samuel: Sure. So, I am the pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Orthodox Church in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and we’re a parish of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church USA, under the omophor of Metropolitan Anthony and Archbishop Daniel. I serve here as the pastor and have been, oh, in ordained ministry—my background is Protestant, so I am a convert, like so many people out there. I was ordained as an Orthodox priest in 2017. Prior to that I spent many years as an Anglican priest, so I kind of read my way into holy Orthodoxy. That’s kind of a little bit of my background.
Mr. Maddex: Why did you decide to start this support group, and where can it be found online?
Fr. Samuel: Okay, the support group can be found on Facebook. Simply, you just search like you would for any other page. You would just search for Orthodox Christian Anxiety and Depression Support Group, and it should pop right up. There’s an icon on the title page there, and we presently have over 2200 members there. I started this page, this support group, because I realized in searching for it myself in the past that there was no—what I could find, at least—dedicated page or support group on Facebook for Orthodox Christians who also suffer from anxiety, depression, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), bi-polar—all of those things that a lot of Christians might suffer from, but specifically wanting a resource for mutual support from Orthodox Christians.
That’s why I started this group, because I realized, after becoming Orthodox and reading the Fathers more and more, that many of them—the Fathers and Mothers—spoke to these issues in spiritual ways that many people can benefit from. So I wanted to create a safe place where people could come together and openly discuss these things. So it’s important to know that it’s a private group. You have to request membership and then there are three questions that are asked of you: Are you an Orthodox Christian; have you been chrismated; are you a catechumen? What jurisdiction are you in? And can you agree to the terms? Once those questions are answered and you’re admitted to the group—and it’s a private group… Besides being the creator, I’m the moderator, and it turned out to be a heavier job than I thought it was going to be. Never in a million years did I [think] that two years in we would have over a thousand Orthodox Christians in this group.
It has proven itself to be a safe place for those Orthodox Christians out there who struggle with these things, because oftentimes I’ve discovered in ministry that people who suffer from anxiety and/or depression keep that a secret. They don’t feel a part of the group. They have expressed that they sometimes feel like they’re all alone, like no one else feels like they do. Then they judge themselves to have some spiritual poverty by wrestling with depression, and not realizing that there’s an Orthodox approach to how to address these issues. So this group, besides being private, also focuses on quotes not only from holy Scripture of course, but the Church Fathers. There are books out there that talk about the things that these people encounter in their Christian life. So I wanted to make all of that kind of available in one place, and I chose Facebook because it is a social media platform that’s available to just about everybody. We have members in our support group literally from all over the world, on every continent. It’s amazing how many people that we have and where they’re from.
Mr. Maddex: So even faithful Orthodox Christians can suffer from anxiety and depression. To what do you attribute that?
Fr. Samuel: Yes, well, God made us physical beings and he made us spiritual beings, but there’s also a psychological component, isn’t there? And the Bible talks about our thoughts, the mind. One of the most popular books that our members discuss is a book by Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, and the title of the book is Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus. Elder Thaddeus wrestled with depression himself, and as you read the Lives of the saints, you study hagiography, you find out there are many, many great saints in our holy tradition that suffered from despair, despondency, and I mean, what I would consider to be clinical, consistent, long-term depression, and these were crosses that they bore that God used to make them more faithful Christians. Instead of it being something to be ashamed of, it was actually something that God used to draw them closer to himself.
When you look at it from that point of view—How can I benefit from what I am encountering in my life, and how can it draw me closer to Christ; how can it draw be God-ward?—I think then you realize that sometimes—and this may be a surprise to some people, and even a shock—sometimes anxiety and depression can be a gift. It can be a gift, because it can draw you closer to God. So, yes, Orthodox Christians can be faithful, they can be faithful attenders of the services, be there every time the doors are opened, they can say their prayers, they can say the prayer of the heart, they can cross themselves, do all the things that we do, use the prayer rope, but yet they find themselves wrestling with depression or anxiety, and a lot of times it’s related to issues that are not their fault.
We have medical doctors who are also Orthodox—you can find these folks on the internet—[who] write about these things, that teach us that sometimes a person is sometimes clinically depressed because of a chemical imbalance. So there are certain medications that can be given to help fix that. But there are no magic bullets. You have to address the whole person.
I just wanted to create a place where people could come and share their struggles together in a private format. There [is] a list of rules that we follow that just the other day, as a matter of fact, someone wrote a comment that they felt that this was the most peaceful and safe Orthodox group that they had found, because, as you know, if you spend any time on the internet, sometimes those chat groups or Orthodox pages can erupt into arguing and fighting and jurisdictional squabbling and all of that stuff. You know, there are pages for that stuff. If you want to argue about Orthodox theology and patristics and jurisdictional issues and the patriarchs—if you want to fight about that, fine; you go do that somewhere else. This is not the place for that. So I as I moderate it, I make sure that everybody sticks to the rules and we discuss the topic at hand, and that is: How do we as Orthodox Christians who may suffer from anxiety and/or depression, how then do we live our lives and how do we address the very real issues that come into our lives that present a struggle to us? It’s men and women; it’s teenagers… I see members of every age in there.
And I’m very, very happy and thankful to God that I know of at least two or three situations where a person has written to me privately and said, “This support group saved my life. I thought I was the only one that wrestled with depression as I stood there during the Divine Liturgy, when everyone else seemed to be in tune and focused on the prayers, and I felt a lump in my throat because I had been struggling with depression, and I thought it was a sign of spiritual weakness.” So instead of that person pursuing a path of self-annihilation, they saw that other people, and indeed saints, have dealt with these things. So they stayed with the good fight, and they’re here today, and so I’m very thankful for that.
Mr. Maddex: Fr. Samuel, has the pandemic exacerbated matters, and if so, how?
Fr. Samuel: I think that the pandemic has probably exacerbated matters in the fact that God has also created us as social beings, and not having facetime with people and having to keep a distance from people you love, a lot of Christians, a lot of Orthodox Christians express these feelings of being kind of alienated because when they used to look forward to going to Divine Liturgy on Sunday, now in some states and in some cases and by the orders of some bishops, they have to keep their distance—only ten people maximum per Divine Liturgy, and things like that—so that may be the reason that we’ve had a—I guess I could call it a rash of people joining the support group here lately. It’s been probably two or three a day, and in some cases, the other day I think I added five successfully to the support group. So I imagine that a lot of these people are hurting because sometimes some people, especially if they’re older or they live alone or they have family that lives in other states, a lot of times the only social interaction they get is going to church, is going to Divine Liturgy. So, yeah, I think that a lot of these people are really struggling with all of this.
And not only that, but you’ve got all the rules that people are following, and people are arguing about it. They’re a little bit uptight about masks and social distancing. We can’t deny the fact that there is a political element to all of this stuff, and it just seems that a lot of people are maybe not clinically anxious, but anxious about what’s going on. So, yeah, I think the pandemic has had an effect.
Mr. Maddex: Are group participants encouraged to seek therapeutic help, or is this mainly just to provide a forum for interaction to try to work on the problem from that standpoint?
Fr. Samuel: Right, well, it’s a forum for mutual support; that’s the main thing. When you look at the rules of the group and the description of the group, it’s quite clear. The Orthodox Christian Anxiety and Depression Support Group is not a substitute for your church. It’s not a substitute for your spiritual father, for the divine services. It’s not a substitute for confession, and neither is it a substitute for your medical doctor or your psychiatrist or psychologist or whatever professional you’re working with, your professional counselor. It’s not a substitute for any of that. So my advice to any of those folks has always been: If your medical doctor recommends medication for you, do your research, talk to others, maybe get a second opinion or whatever it is, but then go ahead and take the medication that you’ve been given. But that does not mean, in and of itself, that that fixes everything, because it certainly doesn’t.
An SSRI may help with physical symptoms, but you still have to address the heart of the matter, so I think that that’s why it’s so very important for people in our group to be able to talk to one another. For example, it’s very common for a member to say to another member, “Hey, I have gone through the exact same experience that you described, and this book helped me immensely.” So they recommend an Orthodox book.
We do stick to the Orthodox way. There are other support groups for people that want to use meditation, music, aromatherapy, all of that; there are other groups for that, but this group is Orthodox, and we’re concerned with the Orthodox approach to psychotherapy. I make sure that those rules are followed.
Being healthy for a person may include not only medication, but it may also include counseling, hopefully from a certified Christian counselor, hopefully from a certified Orthodox Christian counselor, but as you probably know, Mr. Maddex, they’re kind of hard to find. I would say there’s a multi-faceted approach to being healthy. It’s not a substitute for any of those things that I mentioned, but hopefully it is a help along the way, because I have found oftentimes that many people have been absolutely emotionally and psychologically freed when they realized that they weren’t the only person in the world that suffered like they do, that they weren’t alone in their struggle.
And I talk to people all the time. I can’t tell you… Sometimes it takes me a while to get through private messages that are sent to me, by people saying thank you: “Thank you, Fr. Samuel. Thank God for this support group, because these things that I wrestled with, these thoughts, these behaviors, these feelings, I thought I was the only one, and I thought that I was not on the path to salvation, because how could I be a good Orthodox Christian and wrestle with these things?” I always love getting those messages and responding to them, because they are not alone, and so the main focus of this group is not therapy but mutual support along the way.
That’s why we post quotes from the Church Fathers, and we post videos of Orthodox teachers that are talking about these things, and book recommendations and things like that.
Mr. Maddex: As we conclude here, Fr. Samuel, I think it would be a good idea for you to remind listeners about where and how they can join the group.
Fr. Samuel: The group is found on Facebook. It is a private group; you have to search for it. It is the Orthodox Christian Anxiety and Depression Support Group. You click on that, and it’ll come up, there’ll be a description; and I would heartily recommend and invite you to join if this is something that you think might be beneficial to you. There are three questions, as I said, to answer to make sure that this support group is a fit for you, and you’ll have access to comments from other members and all the other things that we talked about.
Mr. Maddex: Fr. Samuel, thanks so much for joining me today.
Fr. Samuel: Thank you so much for having me, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this and kind of get the word out. The more people that need this kind of support group and join it, I think the better it’ll be.
Mr. Maddex: Excellent. Once again, I have been speaking to Fr. Samuel Seamans, founder of the Orthodox Christian Anxiety and Depression Support Group. I’m Bobby Maddex, and this has been a listener-supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio.