God Never Asked You to Be ‘Normal’

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1 Cor 12, martin luther king quote, mental illness, pat deegan, recovery, schizophrenia, what is normal?

Pat Deegan encourages others with mental health diagnoses to become the unique people they are, instead of trying to be “normal.”

Pat Deegan, who has schizophrenia, owns a mental health consulting firm and teaches at Dartmouth medical school. She recently blogged about “being normal.” For us of faith, the crux comes when she describes what “recovery” from a “mental illness” should look like:

… recovery is not about becoming normal. The goal of recovery is to become the precious gift that we were born to become. …The goal of our recovery is to become the unique, never-to-be repeated gift that we are.

7 Ways Having Bipolar Helps Me Know God Better

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bipolar, fear, knowing god, mental illness, resilience

“Strength for Today … Hope for Tomorrow” is the theme for one World Bipolar Day event in Australia this year. Churchgoers will recognize the echo of a popular hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness” and recall that our strength and hope are rooted in God.

Living with bipolar disorder shapes my life in ways that many people define as “broken.” It often makes me an outsider. It can generate thoughts and behaviors that make other people anxious if I allow them entry to my world. It makes me subject to both stigma and discrimination in both subtle and not so subtle forms.

Still, I would say that my condition adds value to my life and to the Body of Christ. It allows me to serve in places where others are afraid to go and challenges me to seek God in ways others feel uncompelled. Here are 7 ways I’ve noticed that mental illness helps me to know God.

The Normal Stress of Self-Concealment

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disability, discrimination, mental health, mental illness, stigma

Most people with mental health diagnoses live “behind a mask” of whatever their community calls “normalcy.”

A few years back, I interviewed for a 20-hour job at a mental health nonprofit. The part-time, benefit-free position offered a paycheck comparable to what a hospital in the same city paid its part-time switchboard operators, but since everyone seemed to consider me overqualified to run a switchboard, I kept applying for positions in line with my experience.

I made it to the second interview and found the team quite concerned about whether I would be able to consistently represent their views about mental health at all times, in all places. Even though I was being considered for a part-time role outside the community where I lived.

This wasn’t the first time that an organization expected my paycheck to buy round-the-clock commitment. I started my career in news media at a time when they were expected to be politically “impartial” and so prohibited staff from any public engagement in causes. I later worked for a large civil engineering company that was often the presenting consultant at local meetings. I therefore could only participate as a citizen in public hearings when I agreed with the view the firm propounded.

In the case of the engineering firm, the paycheck was big enough to buy almost anything. In the case of the news operation, the honor of the profession (at that time) allowed me to walk proud even under constraints on my citizenship.

But the idea that I should never express a view about mental illness different from that of my part-time employer in exchange for less than $15,000 a year — I found that staggering. I didn’t think it would be a problem to present their program to potential funders, but it would definitely be a problem to limit myself to their perspectives during the remaining 7,696 hours per year.

Thank God for Mental Illness? That’s Crazy!

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bill bright, campus crusade, crazy, cru, kay arthur, mental illness, psychosis, thank god

I was in a Sunday school class where I was taught that the right answer to difficult circumstances was to thank God for them. The specific example from the Kay Arthur text, which drew on Bill Bright’s experience in Campus Crusade (now known as Cru), was a girl depressed after her fiance died in a car crash. According to Bright, her depression vanished as soon as she learned to thank God for the car crash and her fiance’s death.

That  sounds a bit crazy to me. Also a bit off the mark. I respect God’s power, but I’m not sure I’m ready to blame God for creating evil, much less thank God for doing it. That feels to me like the worst kind of taking God’s name in vain.

What the instructor had no way of knowing was that I was sitting in the class suffering the side effects of a medication that was clearly the wrong medication for me. It was causing me to believe that God was evil and that the Bible was just a pack of lies God had given us trying to convince us God was other than God actually is.

If I believed the instructor’s guidance, my meds-induced psychosis would have lifted as soon as I thanked God for being psychotic.

Seriously??

Besides, I couldn’t possibly thank a God that (buried somewhere deep in more than 20 prior years of Christian living) I knew was good for putting me in (what I desperately hoped was) a temporary meds-induced state where I was entirely convinced God was evil. Why would God want me to believe that God is evil? This was evil itself at work. To thank God for it would be the most horrible form of taking God’s name in vain.

Happily, God never suggests we do such a thing. God urges us to remain thankful for whatever good we can see and find during trying times. Sometimes, that good may seem quite small. So we say:

• Thank you, God, for making it possible for me to put one foot in front of another again today.
• Thank you, God, for the blue heron I can see fishing in the lake right now.
• Thank you, God, for an apartment I can afford.
• Thank you, God, for extra hours (=extra money) this week.
• Thank you, God, for a (new) pastor at my (new) church who notices that I’m not there on Sunday and actually calls!
• Thank you, God, for a $12.99 job interview dress that matches accessories I already own.
• Thank you, God, for phone calls from friends.

But never “Thank you, God, for the sin and failures and disaster that has made such huge and difficult changes in my life.” Just thank you that God, being God, is able to take sin and disaster — which God neither authors nor approves — and work them together for good on the path I’m walking because I am among those who are called according to God’s purposes.

God is good and God is with us. When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us. Even when it is difficult to see God along the path we are walking, God is present in all of the good we encounter and God does not abandon us in all of the evil we encounter.

So should we thank God for mental illness? If you think you should thank God for cancer or kidney failure or a blown rotator cuff, then I’d say sure.

But if you think you should only thank God for being present in love and care when you suffer, and teaching you lessons you might not have learned without suffering … then I’d say it’s not the illness for which you are grateful. It’s God.

And God deserves the glory.

Did Robin Williams Have to Die?

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bipolar disorder, mental illness, Robin Williams, suicide

Robin Williams in his last role as Teddy Roosevelt

I suspect I wasn’t the only person who teared up when the Teddy Roosevelt statue came to life in the last “Night at the Museum” film.

Critics said the late Robin Williams turned the rough-riding president into an on-screen “father figure” for the rowdy crew of cave men, dinosaurs, cowboys, and gladiators who rode rough through the series of crazy comedy films. The role was Williams’ last; he committed suicide by hanging in his home on August 11 last year.

Williams “neither confirmed nor denied” having bipolar disorder. I can’t imagine that anyone who knows bipolar was uncertain that Robin Williams depended on bipolar for the verbal velocity that fueled his comedy.

‘He’s Mentally Ill BUT He’s Very Successful …’

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mental health, mental illness, stigma

Earlier today, I was at a meeting where the team planning a mental health conference excitedly reported that one of the speakers was bringing his son to the event. “He has bipolar but he’s very successful professionally,” the conference team member said of the younger man. Did that raise your hackles, too? Let’s try a few similar sentences and see how well they work: “She uses a wheelchair BUT she’s a really good graphic designer.” “He has Lyme disease BUT he’s an excellent father.”