Chude Jideonwo, award-winning filmmaker, media entrepreneur, host of the viral talk show #WithChude and chair of the Fourthmainland creator Fund, is offering one of the most startling revelations in his Amazon bestselling memoir, ‘How Depression Saved My Life’: the moment his battle with depression pushed him to the edge of unbelief. In a chapter marked by raw honesty and spiritual interrogation, Chude Jideonwo recounts how months of despair and what felt like silence from God collapsed the version of faith he had been taught, forcing him to confront the hardest questions many people are afraid to say out loud. “I reached this conclusion from a place of anger, but once I reached it, it suddenly made sense. Once I decided that God was a waste of time, a delusion, a fantasy, I stopped struggling. It now made sense. This was all my fault. I was trusting a God that wasn’t there. So how could this non-existent God help me? I made a decision to abandon my faith,” he writes, describing a season where the rituals, rules, and transaction-based ideas of religion no longer made sense in the face of pain.
In the book, Jideonwo frames the breaking point as a crisis of meaning: not just the weight of depression, but the shock of realising that his life was no longer following the “pictures” he had carried in his mind, about success, entrepreneurship, relationships, even nation-building. As the spiral deepened, he found himself wrestling with the ultimate taboo: thoughts of suicide, and the unbearable question of whether God was present at all. The turning point came when he concluded that the faith he knew had failed him. “Collapsing under the weight of my questions and the silence, I soon concluded that everything I knew about my faith, too, was false. The Christian faith was false. This whole God thing was false. If there was God, that God would hear me and help me. And God wasn’t. Every failsafe the church taught me had failed. So, someone had clearly lied to me.” he writes, detailing how he began ordering books on atheism and agnosticism, searching for a worldview that could withstand suffering without pretending. In that search, he also confronts the darker side of religious manipulation in African society, and the damage caused when faith becomes fear, coercion, or false promises.
Yet, the memoir makes an unexpected turn: the same journey meant to dismantle belief becomes, paradoxically, the pathway back to a deeper, more grounded spirituality. Jideonwo recounts how reading the Bible “without fear… without mythology… without taking it at face value” rewired his understanding of God, which is not as transaction, but as love, transcendence, and meaning. He writes that in the midst of trying to “kill” his faith, he “got to the end of the road and met God there,” emerging with what he calls a “muscular faith” that respects doubt, recognises the dangers of religion, and refuses easy answers.
‘How Depression Saved My Life’ is now available at bookstores nationwide, on Amazon and Kindle, and via book.withchude.com.
