HOW TO BE CHRISTIAN WHILE MENTALLY ILL

Photo by Kenny Luo, found on Unsplash.

I might feel lonely, but I’m never really alone. The further I get from other people, the greater the noise inside my own mind. The interior conversation raises to a pitch that at a café would gain disapproving looks from other tables. Sometimes the conversation is expansive, beautiful, incomprehensible. At other times, my own thoughts wrap me in a facsimile of eternal torment. I wonder, could hell be worse than this?

The symptoms of mental illness necessarily arise before the diagnosis. Daily life began to take on piquant overtones of hopelessness or despair. My inner monologue began to shift in tone. I repeated such thoughts as “I’m evil”, “God hates me”, and “My existence makes the world worse” like a mantra. Bear in mind, this began years before I had the term “mental illness” to label these thoughts. At the time, my experience was indistinguishable from reality. So, like any person, I furnished explanations for it, and since I treasured my faith above quite nearly everything, I used it to make meaning of my nascent, isolating pain.  The Holy Spirit is giving me this shame to convict me of my sin. My lack of hope traces directly to my lack of faith. These evil thoughts are the devil’s fiery darts, and if I resist him he will flee. God has abandoned me; God is giving me my first taste of the outer darkness.

I observed to a friend recently that mental illness is bound up with profound loneliness. Both its contributing causes - trauma, abuse, illness, addiction - and its sets of symptoms - depression, anxiety, psychosis, mania - are nearly indescribable to those who haven’t experienced them. These experiences can be so intense, so disruptive and disorienting that they bend our lives and stories into new, unrecognizable shapes. Yet we find ourselves in a double bind to communicate these parts of ourselves. In the midst of a depressive episode, for example, I cannot imagine life outside it. It seems life has always been the depressive episode and always will. Conversely, when the episode passes, I remember that I was depressed, but I cannot feel the depression. And as the episodes recur in my life, I accrue memories which even I struggle to understand. I begin to wonder if I am becoming difficult for other people to understand. How much more if I am in an episode? How much more if I were to endure the reality-breaking terror of psychosis? Many around us are confined in these mental tortures (and many literally confined in our prisons). A considerable 20% of American adults receive a mental health diagnosis every year, and roughly half will receive a diagnosis at some point in their life. Consequently, I would be surprised if people experiencing mental illness were not already in your church, praying, listening, wondering if Christianity can bear their loneliness.

The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. My illness takes the most benign verse and twists it. Love - you love no one, least of all yourself. Joy - you have never felt joy. Peace - I can’t make my mind stop. Patience - every moment stretches to eternity. Kindness - I hate everyone, myself most of all. Goodness - all you’ve done today is stare at a screen and cry. Faithfulness - you’ve stopped praying. Gentleness - thank God it’s only a scratch. Self-control - you’re addicted. My mind is an unabashed accuser (abuser?), and it commits itself to my utter depravity like a principled aesthete. Much better not to be in my mind. Games, television, food, sleep, work - these all drown out the voice for a moment. Yet it waits patiently for when work is done, the sun sets, friends go home, and we lie in bed awake, alone.

Then a few weeks later, I wake up and I am God. Or close to God. I will be the next Martin Luther. I meant to go to morning prayer but instead I researched electron clouds: I intend to understand the workings of agency and probability from scale of the quark to the known universe. I made sure the lunch table knew. I couldn’t get the reading done because of all the hookups. Maybe I’m in love. I need new clothes. I need a refrigerator. I need to re-pot all these plants. New plants too. I’ve discovered the nature of the Eucharist. I will pay off my credit card when I’m famous. I will start a new religion. I should trim my hair. I should disassemble the trimmer and see how it works. It no longer works.  I haven’t prayed in three days. When I die I will be made a saint. Maybe I’m a genius - dear God, am I insane?

For me, a diagnosis of Bipolar II with attendant PTSD was like the water from the rock in the midst of a dry country. For many others, the diagnosis means stigma, the threat of limitation, the specter of disability. But I am already the peculiar phenomenon of the gay seminarian - my life is exposure therapy for stigma. But the label gives me an efficient shorthand. It’s quick and clean. No need to go into the details of what that looks like (Thursday, the hypomania was so expansive that I stayed up past midnight scribbling thoughts about the randomness of quantum particles and the emergence of moral agency in the cosmos, but Saturday when the depression hit I could no longer discern any meaning in life); I can just utter the four syllables “Bi-po-lar two” and we can move on. But this still feels like loneliness. What about the people I alienated? What about the thousands of dollars I spent on a whim? What about all the nights weeping on the floor, asking if God sees me? Does my illness explain my passions, my sense of calling, me? Would I be a burden to a partner, a family, a church? The label does not answer these. The label cannot answer these. With knowledge in hand, I search for wisdom.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes in his book The Sickness Unto Death, that the human self is in despair until it is “transparently grounded in the power that posited it”. In this he echoes far older Christian voices, like St. Augustine who famously wrote that the soul is restless until it rests in God, or even St. Paul, who in the opening chapter of Romans locates the fundamental sin of humanity in our refusal to worship God as Creator. Kierkegaard takes up this essential relationship between the creature and the creator present in Paul and his later interpreters, and turns its lens on human psychology. Most of humanity lives in a state of despair, he says, a kind of side effect of sin. A majority undergo despair passively, clinging hard to the pleasures and cares of life to drive out questions of being and eternity. But others, often as a result of significant pain, find that their consciousness of their despair grows to a point where it begins to warp their lives. Some despair at their passivity, at their unwillingness to become the self they sense they ought to be. Others despair actively, striving to overcome suffering by their own efforts. People in active despair set their minds on an image of self-actualization and aim to reach it by force of will. Their efforts are inevitably frustrated. We ultimately find that we cannot win the good life for ourselves, and thus, Kierkegaard claims, a choice confronts us. We can continue striving to mend ourselves on our own, where the best outcome is frustration and the worst a counterfeit success, the delusion of having created ourselves, or we can completely yield our trust to Jesus, who alone grounds us again in God.

Read superficially, this scheme may lend itself to the ever-poisonous narrative that faith can cure suffering, even the suffering of mental illness. But that would be striving – just a subtler form of active despair, not an escape from it. Kierkegaard was too familiar with suffering to peddle a gospel for the strong-minded. Instead, he presents a framework for thinking about Christian discipleship that resists the distorting power of disordered mood. By locating discipleship within the dichotomy between creature and Creator, he makes space for a Christianity that is truly individual. Set alone before God, there is no normal from which I can deviate, no other to whom I am opaque, only that Other who has handled my pain intimately. For a moment, the disintegrating tangle of other relationships pauses, and the mutual obligation of love between the creature and the Creator becomes transparent: the human loves God through obedient worship, and God loves the human with mercy and grace. Discipleship becomes disentangled from thoughts and feelings and becomes recentered in doing and being: loving and being loved.

Where does this leave me? If my depression says I have done no good, I am reminded that God has made me judge of no one, but bid me give and receive love. If hypomania inflates my ego, I remember that discipleship consists not in trying to become a certain type of person, but on trusting Christ to make me the person I ought to be. When I feel meaningless, I remind myself that I am a creature and God the creator, and all creation testifies that God made it. In short, I am assured that discipleship is a matter of faith, and faith a matter of loving God. 

So what about the problem of loneliness, the problem we began with? Being an individual before God sounds like a lonely position. Where is the church in this? Where is the community? Yet I see it the other way. Faith conceived in the relationship between the Creator and the creature is faith that can still live in the midst of loneliness. If faith is possible in the loneliness of mental illness, then so are grace and love in the Holy Spirit. Grace and love are bridges out of myself; grace and love are hands to steady me. Against the cascade of broken thoughts, grace proclaims the possibility of repair. In the very center of isolation and loneliness, the love of God draws me to others with pure, unanxious bonds. The ultimate acknowledgment that God is Creator means that my recovery draws from the same source as does my being. Here is the possibility that Christianity can be good news to me again. Here is the basis on which I bring myself fully into the community of the church.

God sets the lonely in families (Psalm 68:6), and perhaps the power of testimony is that the Spirit may use it to help some give thanks for the presence of similar graces in their lives, and others to seek those graces. My experience is as limited as it is individual. Others who live at different intersections, who experience different symptoms, or have met God differently in their illnesses doubtlessly have words they too could add. I can only share what I believe God is teaching me: God is my creator, and I God’s creature. The more transparent this relationship, the less powerful the isolation of illness becomes. The more grounded I am in God as Creator, the less my idiosyncrasies are sites of shame. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). Of course, my mental illness did not go away. I take my medications. I’m in therapy. But, when I feel the loneliness, somehow God has become a consolation. There is a reason for my being, for my existence on earth. This is the sort of thought that leads one to pray.