MENTAL ILLNESS

By the way, I purposefully make my titles boring, becuase i don't like it when I am trying to find information, and the titles in a table of contents are so creative that I can't even tell what they are about.

But today I want to talk about a great article that I read on mental illness. It's called "Healing Presence" by John Swinton and was published by the center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. It was given to me at the Christian Community Development Association National Conference. The CCDA is an organization fo Christians that recognizes that there are divisions along racial and social lines that are not what the Kingdom of God is supposed to have. It's a great organization - I hightly recommend checking it out. In this post I want to offer some of the most wise and educating passages in this article:

"How do people with profound mental health problems suffer? In our highly medicalized culture, we define and respond to disease from a biomedical model. We want to fix the 'bad spot.' If we can excise or cure that bad spot then we think we have succeeded in our healing task. But suffering is a richer conecpt, and true healing requires friendship and community."

The article tells the story of talking to a man who suffered from profound schizophrenia, where it was already known that he had been able to live on his own very little in the past 5 years. The interviewer supposed that what this man would recount as the worst part of his life with schizophrenia, was having to live his life in the hospital. However when actually asking the man what was the worst part of his life with schizophrenia, he told this story: It was "a time when he seemed to be doing fairly well and was not in the hospital. He said that he had been living with his mother and then finally had been kicked out of her house and was living in an apartment. About two weeks after leaving her house he called home. She answered the telephone. He started talking, but when she heard his voice, she said "You have the wrong number" and hung up. He said that was the worst year of his life. My heart sank as he told his story. It was not difficult to understand what he meant, but the worst year according to him and the worst year according to our rating scales were very differernt. What was right?"

"Are vital demensions of human suffering being overlooked by the ways that we conceptualize particular mental health problems?"

And then the article goes on to discuss the vital role of relationship in healing. That is the healing presence that is the title of the article. And it asks how we are going to choose to order our relationships with the mentally ill. If we choose as Jesus did, we may impact their lives (and ours) much more than ever anticipated. I also like his statements about suffering being more rich of an experience than realized by most of the world.

"The friendships of Jesus, however, were based on a very different principle: the principle of love and grace. Jesus fellowshipped with people who were radically unlike him - tax collectors, sinners. people considered religiously unclean, and women - and through their friendship, he resurrected their personhood. His friendships were unbound by cultural assumptions and available to those whom society marginalized, stigmatized, and refused access to God."

"Forming friendships with people who are marginalized and different is not an easy task. Yet, if we can create forms of community with "safe space" for people to develop such friendships, even if these friendships are transient, then we will have moved some way towards faithfulness and Christ-likeness."