I was born at the tail end of Generation X and was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical, slightly pentacostal church environment known as the “Holiness Movement” or CHM (the Conservative Holiness Movement) at a time filled with eschatology and Frank Peretti. Lengthy reel to reel films depicting the book of Revelations gave me nightmares for decades. I was brought up to be wary of anything that could possibly invoke demons, including meditation and psychologists, particularly if the two were combined. Healing services were standard. Sometimes a person was healed of a physical illness. Sometimes, they were not and sought out a route of Western Medicine treatment with no stigma. Just more prayer for their surgery or procedure and an acceptance of God’s will if they died.
On rare occasions, it was whispered that their death or illness was related to unconfessed sin – theirs or a family member’s. There was a horribly tragic story in my extended family that took place long before my birth that I’ve heard was “caused” as punishment for the teenage rebellion of another extended family member. It was a frightening way to grow up. If you weren’t one hundred percent sure you were “right with the Lord” at the end of a service and didn’t go forward to an altar call, chances were you would get hit by a train that night or the Soviets would launch a missile and you would go to hell. Every service ended with the question, “Is every heart clear?” I was left continually wondering if I was saved or if I accidentally lost my salvation somehow that day. Just to be sure, I would re- get saved each night. And I know I’m not the only one who performed this nightly ritual. Fear was my primary reason for being a Christian.
What was absolutely not acceptable in this brand of Christianity was mental illness. If you were depressed, it was because you hadn’t sought the joy of the Lord, which would be your strength. If you had anxiety, you weren’t following Paul’s command to be anxious for nothing but in everything give thanks. The cure for any illness relating to the brain or chemical imbalance was, “Get right with the Lord.” There was no medical backup plan and you certainly weren’t going to a healing service to admit depression or anxiety! If your mental health was worse than general anxiety or depression – you were shipped off to the “State Hospital.” This was also known as the Funny Farm or the Looney Bin or the Nut House. By that point, it was a joking matter. In my growing up years, I spent time around two adults who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I can soundly verify that the Church did not welcome them with loving arms of acceptance. They were laughed at behind their backs for being crazy.
Ironically, in the CHM church culture in which my husband Wes and I were raised, behavior that the general population would view as “being crazy” was proof of being filled with the Holy Spirit. My earliest memories of church prayer were gibberish of 100+ people praying loudly at the same time. I never had any idea what was being prayed for or about. On the rare occasion that I am back in that culture, I excuse myself to use the restroom during prayer because I get so confused by the cacophony. If you didn’t occasionally run frantically around the church sanctuary or make odd noises or burst into uncontrolled laughter or start singing loudly in the middle of a sermon or whatever, it was doubtful that you had fully surrendered your life to God. Time for another altar call or the Soviets would get you.
Fast-forward 25 years and the more modern evangelical and holiness Church culture (My husband is a Wesleyan pastor) on the surface seems to have become more accepting of mental illness, but there is lingering suspicion about the psychiatric community. I will admit that the emotional, psychological, physiological, and spiritual are sometimes difficult to parse out. Certainly someone’s explosive temper can be a sin. It also can be due to damage in a frontal lobe of the brain. It also could be caused by a chemical imbalance. I love an elderly matriarch of our church who told me, “I’ve learned that when I start seeing and talking to people I know have died, I have to go to the doctor because I have a UTI.” And she’s correct. UTIs often cause hallucinations in the elderly. If such a person lost their temper with a caregiver, which happens, they aren’t sinning. A UTI has caused mental illness.
I had been a happy, career-focused, family-loving, intelligent, stable pastor’s wife. Capable. Confident. In love with Jesus. Healthy. Athletic. I was a type A perfectionist; and to be honest, if given a task of any kind, I knocked it out of the park. I was mostly cheerful and other than a winter slump in Michigan’s January and February, I found life enjoyable.
And then everything rapidly came crashing down around me. Numerous autoimmune diseases. A stroke. Stessed-based seizures. Unusual compulsions. Bouts of rage – which were completely out of character. Waves of manic can’t calm down heart racing run around getting everything done. Bouts of I can’t even get out of bed because the effort to stand up is just too much. Everything got very, very bad in a relatively short amount of time.
Wes and I knew that what I was dealing with was much than depression and anxiety. Bigger than the aftermath of a stroke. Bigger than a therapist could handle. I needed more help. I did go through the process of being annointed and prayed over in accordance with scripture. I examined my spiritual life. I fought hard for a spiritual life! I even went to a pentacostal mystic elderly woman who had books written about her gift of healing, who laid hands on me and prayed for my mind. I wrote out verse after verse after verse about having a sound mind and claimed them.
For those of you that are like what the actual heck? I don’t even know what to tell you. It’s a culture. And Wes and I were both raised in it.
Looking back, I am bewildered by some of our decisions. This was not 1960 and we belonged to a modern typical evangelical church. But we felt an obligation to the church board to notify them that I would be seeing a psychiatrist. I know each member knew that my behavior had been bizarre, but this information stunned them. I cried. I felt completely disgraced while waiting for them to somehow approve as if it were a motion on the table. The stigma is very much alive in the evangelical church. They discussed their concerns and was I going to be sure to go to a Christian psychiatrist because secular ones can really mess you up…. I do think some of that stemmed from misunderstanding between psychologist and psychiatrist.
Word spread as it always does. An older woman I love dearly grabbed me on a Sunday morning and said, “Oh I wish you wouldn’t keep going to all these doctors when what you need is to run to Jesus!” Another woman came to me and said, “Are you really crazy?!”
Why did we think we had to have some type of spiritual approval to go to a medical doctor? We certainly didn’t go to the board for approval for our eldest to have her renal system reconfigured. We didn’t have a meeting every time I caught pneumonia. Wes didn’t add to the agenda that he was taking blood pressure medication. Our youngest’s chronic strep throat was never discussed – we simply made an appointment and had her tonsils removed.
In the course of the past let’s say 5 years, when it came to my mental illness – and yes, I eventually would be diagnosed with autoimmune bipolar disorder (an autoimmune disease attacked my brain and manifested with the same symptoms of bipolar 2)- in the Christian community I experienced:
* Being shoved into a brick wall while an exorcism was attempted – because I had been wandering aimlessly outside in the snow in my bare feet and was confused
* Being asked by my Christian therapist if I had dabbled in Satanism
* Was told that my emotional imbalance was evidence of living in unrepentant sin
* Accusation that a family member’s serious illness might be caused by my heart full of bitterness, followed by pleading with me to “get right with the Lord” so they wouldn’t die
* Was told repeatedly that depression and anxiety were evidence of a life unsurrendered to Christ
* One of Wes’s family members had researched Graves Disease, informed the whole family of the potential psychiatric side effects, and if I entered a room she was in, she would grab her child and leave the room. We spent one Thanksgiving with her upstairs with her child, not joining the family, and one Christmas on opposite sides of the living room with her looking terrified while clinging to her child. We quit attending family events
* Feeling scrutinized continually – I don’t know if people anticipated horns growing out of my head or what exactly
* Had people leave our church
* Was accused of committing insurance fraud because having emotional problems isn’t being disabled
A few years before, a woman well-known in our circles who is my age and in my stage of life had some type of mental breakdown and was in and out of psychiatric facilities. She had always been a well-respected, intelligent, Christ-filled, career balanced with family, dedicated to church, lovely and well-loved girl. The breakdown made her prime fodder for gossip among Christians, with an emphasis on which sin she may have committed. I heard phrases like:
* She went off the deep end
* She’s bonkers
* She’s back in the nuthouse
* Did you know —– went crazy?
* She’s in the looney bin again
* —– went nutso again
Her tribe most definitely abandoned her. Your tribe runs away at the time you most desperately need them to lean in.
I knew exactly what to expect from the Church.
I so much love Ann Voskamp and her bravery in telling her own story. How she sat in church while her mother was institutionalized and listened to the pastor tell a joke of which the punchline was looney bin. How the people around her laughed.
She poses the question- if the Church isn’t for the broken, then who is it for? Jesus said the healthy aren’t in need of a doctor. He came for the wounded.
Wes and I attended a fundraiser event for Right-to-Life of Michigan about a year ago. One of the speakers made a joke about crazy people. Wes’s posture changed and I saw his muscles tighten. My head dropped in shame. The audience laughed. Our table members laughed. People who knew better laughed. My face was hot and my eyes filled with tears. If Right-to-Life doesn’t view all of humanity as made in the image of God and therefore worthy of dignity and respect, then they’ve lost their purpose.
Christ is always inclusive. He is always for the marginalized. He is always for the poor in spirit, the meek, the lonely, the betrayed, and every other category that makes society nervous. His fiercest judgment was reserved for those who thought they had it all figured out. The most respected and revered by people are the ones he railed against. His Kingdom is all about the forgotten, the ignored, the mocked, the ridiculed, and the condemned. He adores the addict, the prisoner, and yes, the “crazy.”
The Jesus I have come to know and love doesn’t accidentally lose people. Do I think someone can leave God. Well, I believe in free-will so I have to say yes. But I also believe in the God of C. S. Lewis. The God Who is the “Hound of Heaven.” I believe in the God of Rev. Albert Barr, who actually said in a CHM campmeeting service that you can try to leave God, but He will fight every step of the way to keep you. There’s no accidentally losing your salvation, getting hit by a train, and going to hell. If the Russians launch a nuclear missile at us – Hallelujah, we are going to heaven!
The Jesus I love sat with me when I crawled into my closet or under tables. He walked next to me as I wandered in confusion. He held me as I sat on the floor of our bathroom writing the word, “worthless” all over my body with a marker. He cried with me as I used sharp objects to cut my skin. He held me back when I was about to jump off our balcony because I thought I knew how to fly. He loved me while I used a meat tenderizer to smash every one of our drinking glasses. He didn’t reject me when the rage caused by Graves Disease in me was so strong that I lashed out at people with the power of my written word. He knew that the continual compulsion to use scissors to cut up my clothes, my dishcloths, my hair was out of my control.
My brain breaking was no different than a liver wasting away or an appendix bursting or kidneys requiring dialysis. He remembered my frame – that I am but dust – and His heart was filled with compassion. He prevented my children from ever seeing me in the midst of a psychotic break. He gave me a husband who is with me every step of the journey.
He led me to the exactly right doctor, who figured out the right formula to bring my thoughts into sanity. Who restored my brain. Who balanced the chemicals. Who made me feel mostly normal. Normal enough that I can hide the fact that I’m not.
He helps me fight the continual thoughts that my family would be better off without me. That my contribution to the world has been nothing. That if I disappeared, no one would notice.
I have learned the beauty of grace. We sing, “Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace; Freely bestowed on all who believe.” Then we refuse to accept it. Refuse to extend it. We desperately need less law and more grace.
Church… we have to do a better job. We have to radically change our thinking. We have to look. We HAVE TO LOOK AROUND US! It requires intentionality. It requires a willingness to step out of our comfort zone. If you look outside your little group that makes you comfortable and is so much fun, you will see lonely, broken people. It’s not always going to be easy. Mental illness is tough stuff. It takes a lot of grace and patience and forgiveness and knowledge to truly befriend someone with mental illness.
Nichole Nordeman, in her song “Dear Me,” (which broke my heart to listen to how badly I had understood Jesus all wrong) says, “Jesus loves you this I know; And there are no exceptions.” No exceptions, Church. Not even for the mentally ill.
Christians, when it comes to the church’s view of mental illness, it’s time to get right with the Lord.
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*Clarification – the toxic church culture I am referring to for the most part is NOT my years in Buckley. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I had one foot in a “typical” church and one foot in the Conservative Holiness Movement my parents and extended family were part of (NY Pilgrim). Wes was raised entirely CHM (Allegheny)
Speaking the Truth...In Love 