Growing Your Faith as a Person with a Mental Illness
It is an honour to welcome Therese J. Borchard as a guest blogger to Brownblog. Therese is the author of the hit daily blog “Beyond Blue” on Beliefnet.com, which is featured regularly on The Huffington Post and was voted by PsychCentral.com as one of the top 10 depression blogs. I invited Therese to write on growing your faith as a person with a mental illness, in part to encourage you if you have a mental illness, but also to reveal the challenges faced by those around us with a mental illness. What follows is stirring stuff. Therese writes,
This morning was fairly typical: I was both inspired and ticked off by the reading of the day, in Mark’s gospel, when Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever. Jesus grabs her hand and her fever immediately leaves.
“Nice, Jesus, good going with that one, ” I said to the Son of God, half sarcastically and half sincerely. Because all of us who live with severe depression, bipolar disorder, or any mood disorder know that our illness is chronic. Even on the good days, we wade through some pretty thick crap, and sometimes it feels like we spend the entire day on our knees, begging for that tap on the hand-when the negative thoughts will painlessly evaporate and our hippocampus will stretch instead of shrink, when all the cells housed in the prefrontal cortex of our brain get ready to party, and tell our nervous system that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
But that’s not the way faith works when it comes to a mental illness. At least not in my life and in the lives of most of my readers.
The healing process is slow. Really bloody slow. Most often we take three steps backward for every four forward.
The most difficult task for me-and for many believers-is to weed out the illness from the spiritual flat tire. Because yes, depression can be a telltale sign that something is amiss in our lives, that some aspect-in our marriage, in our jobs, in our relationship with God–needs attention. It’s screaming: “Yo, me! Some care, please… over here!” That is, if we slow down long enough to listen. And I don’t mean just depression. Any illness-arthritis, chronic fatigue, sinus infections–can indicate that a piece of our mind-body-spirit puzzle is hiding underneath the couch cushion, waiting to be found.
I agree with author Tim Farrington who writes in his forthcoming memoir, “A Hell of Mercy,” that “doubt as to whether you are in a dark night or ‘just depressed’ is probably a very good sign; it means you’re alive and paying attention and that life has you baffled, which is the precondition for truth in my experience.” And I also agree with Peter Kramer, author of “Listening to Prozac” and “Against Depression” that with more education and research, depression will be stripped of its charm and its virtues, that “we idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues.” When treatment for depression becomes routine, Kramer asserts, “we may find that heroic melancholy is no more.”
I know my position sounds wishy-washy: because either depression is an illness that we treat systematically without regard to the life of the spirit, or we pray away our sadness, because, if we believe enough, Jesus really will tap us on the hand and make it all go away.
The water between those continents is murky, and I wade in it every morning as I pray. Even as I write this, I’m blasting Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up,” hoping it will give me the spiritual gas that I need to drive my bipolar car, to ignore the negative intrusive thoughts and keep writing these paragraphs. An hour ago, when my jumbled brain and I sat down in front of a blank screen, I prayed that God make me an instrument, a mere pencil in his hands.
Every day my biggest job is to try to grow my faith as a person living with a mental illness. I ask God to help me know what my job is … the cognitive behavioral techniques, the gratitude worksheets, a better sleep schedule, more therapy, or less caffeine and chocolate. And then I beg him to take the rest … all the stuff I’m pretty sure I can’t control.
I agree with Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche, an international work of communities for the mentally disabled, that the healing process is gradual for the majority of believers. It’s no tap on the arm. Vanier writes in “Be Not Afraid”:
Being reborn in Jesus is not rapid for many of us. It is a quiet, gentle growth, like the growth of the child in the womb of his mother and like his gradual growth in knowledge, affection, physical strength, and understanding after birth. The healing power of the Spirit is a quiet, gentle power. He makes die in us all the fears, the desire to possess or to destroy, the hurts and the frustrations, all the power which wants to dominate. There is a growth in the power of listening, the power of compassion, of patience, of learning to wait for the hour of God. We learn to surrender to the power of the Spirit and the power of God, to stop agitating, to let God take over our lives, to abandon ourselves to the Supreme Healer.
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Check out Therese Borchard’s blog at Beyond Blue
Filed under Self Care, resourcing | |
8 Responses to “Growing Your Faith as a Person with a Mental Illness”
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Thought-provoking, and inspiring.
Thanks
I really appreciate those that have the courage to talk about mental illness especially in relation to faith. It’s no secret amongst those that know me that I have battled with severe depression and anxiety for years.
I can honestly say that I no longer suffer. I went on a healing retreat with Ellel Ministries about six months ago. The change in me has been dramatic - I laugh so much more often and more readily, I don’t have anxiety attacks any more, I’m not on medication and I don’t live my life ion a constant state of fear. There have been some unexpected bonuses as well, I no longer have back pain, my neck and shoulder pain has severely reduced, I’ve lost weight with no change to my routine and I can sit up straighter.
The idea of deliverance ministry used to fill me with unwavering sceptism or fear until it became apparent to my husband and I that my sickness had spirtual elements. It was still a few years later that we figured out what to do about it and then for me to get up the courage. If this piqued anybody’s interest I would recommend checking them out www.ellelministries.org
Thanks for your thoughts!
Thank you for this blog; a blog after mine own heart. I could relate to so many of the mental processes.
However, “we idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues”…“we may find that heroic melancholy is no more”. I’ve not encountered this way of thinking. My cultural circle does not extol the virtues of depression; if anything it is intolerant of its hindrances to the everyday life of the individual, and how that will impact the collective.
I’ve hidden my tendencies well. I’ve tried medication on two occasions, and both times I chose the hovering dark cloud over the alternative, a mental haze with zero visibility.
A few years ago I discovered Christian counselling; through prayer, God’s Word, and an openness to hear the Lord and to trust Him I’ve discovered it’s okay to be melancholic in nature, it’s okay to walk in faith at a snail’s pace, and it’s okay to be different from others - even Christians - because the Lord accepts me just as I am, wherever I’m at, whatever I’m wearing, however I look; and best of all, He’s always with me!
Does it mean I am free from depression and anxiety attacks? Sadly, the answer is an all too real NO. I can spend hours working through it; sometimes I am victorious, and sometimes I am not. I believe life is for living so in my moments of defeat, self-hate, and utter despair I prayerfully (and tearfully) go through how I will do things differently. God is good and ultimately the victory is His.
My heart goes out to all those who are caged in by this monstrous condition. This perspective has opened my eyes to a world I only knew in adverts. But to all those who are suffering because of this condition, I say believe in god who heals all our diseases. confess the word of God during those blissful times to counter the negative times. when we fill our hearts with the word of God we create faith, which can move mountains and heal TEXT
Why be depressed ? Every day you have the opportunity of changing your life.Upon waking, you have the choice to try a new way, or go back into the familiar rut.Some people just choose to be depressed because their habits form their character.
Habits are hard to break…if your habit is a cycle of morbid gloom then it will take over. There is a whole awesome world out there…you have been given, by God… the gift of life to live…not exist in self absorbed pity.
Most depression starts with thoughts of failure, sorrows or regrets from the past. Move on today, live for tomorrow. Happiness starts when we laugh at ourselves…and don’t take ourselves too seriously.
And yes, I’ve lived with tragedy, heartache, obstacles of life, depression, self doubt and failure….and I’ve lived with humour…hope,vigour, enthusiasm, enlightenment and success. It all starts with YOU deciding you are going to live a principled, fulfilled, hay life…never mind anyone else.Be true to yourself…then God’s way will be revealed.
[…] was voted by PsychCentral.com as one of the top 10 depression blogs. Her first guest blog post was Growing Your Faith as a Person with a Mental Illness, seriously worth checking out if you missed it. In this stunning post Therese writes on how […]
To Gary Mills; I am responding as a committed, born-again, “Bible-believing”, evangelical (plus whatever other criteria you may need) Christian who battles with major depression and other mood disorders every day.
One of the unfortunate things about our language is that a single word may have a wide variety of meanings; for example, what we encapsulate in the word “love” is spread out over four different ones in Greek! “Depression” is another word with a wide span of meanings.
It seems you use “depression” in the common sense of “the blues”, down feelings, the feelings from disappointments and other transient things. These kinds of feelings and thoughts often pass by themselves over a
“Depression” as meant here might be better described as “major depression”, “clinical depression”, “medical-grade depression” and the like. It is a medical condition, brought on by many different kinds of causes, and plunges a person into a deep emotional abyss that they cannot control. This kind of depression involves a malfunction of the brain just as real as my diabetes is caused by a malfunction of my pancreas, people’s thyroid conditions are caused by a malfunction of the thyroid, dwarfism and giantism are caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland, and so on. Things that help someone in a transitory or situational depression more than often do not help someone with medical-grade depression, esp. to the level where they can get out of it. Same with the other mental illnesses; it’s a whole different ball of wax.
I believe that the spirit (and God’s Spirit) are involved in healing from these conditions, at the same time recognizing that relatively few receive the same kind of instantaneous healing that Peter’s mother-in-law received. I don’t understand it all; much of it falls into the category of “mystery”; things we either don’t have the full information on or simply can’t process with our limited human minds. I am on a spiritual quest to learn about the way our spirit-man is involved in mental health and how to find healing.
In the meantime, friend, I encourage you to listen and seek to understand and not to judge. Most people who have never had this kind of condition have no clue what those of us who do deal with on a daily basis. In some ways it’s like Christian conversion; one can’t really understand what it means to be born again until you have been.
God bless you, friend. Open your mind to keep learning.