Francis Schaeffer writes the following in a personal letter to Kristina, a woman who had experienced years of chronic depression. She had suffered much personal isolation and had lost the comforting sense of the reality of God. This excerpt strikes me as having a gospel-centered approach in counseling, in that it fully recognizes the effects of the fall (in all of us) and of the reality of grace and hope through Christ. (The highlights below have been added by me.) "I understand too what you write about the difficulty of finding a consolation and reality. I think there are really two things to see: first, that when a person goes through the kind of difficulty you have gone through, this kind of feeling is not to be unexpected; and secondly, all men since the Fall-- although in a far lesser degree and a far lesser agony than you have known-- also have some such problems. "Increasingly I am so aware that just as there are no perfe...