Third. Sometimes the flatness is not about worship at all

Depression removes reward across the board, and it does not announce itself. It does not arrive saying it is depression. It arrives making everything cost more and give back less.

When that happens to a religious person, the first place they notice it is the prayer mat, because that is where they are paying attention. So they describe a depressive symptom in religious vocabulary, and everybody around them treats it as a spiritual problem.

That is how people end up in years of religious remediation for something a doctor could have named in twenty minutes. Lesson six comes back to this.