I have sat down to write this many times, without the ability to finish. However, the words I feel compelled to speak are important and so often never said. The topic of mental illness and Christianity are so infrequently discussed that you begin to wonder if mentally ill christians even exist. Too often, mental health and scripture are addressed by people with no understanding of clinical mental illness, leaving those who struggle to feel even more isolated and alien than they already do. My voice is important because christians with mental illness do exist, and they need to know that they are not alone.
My mental health journey over the last eighteen months has been long and exhausting. It's only in the last few months that I've been able to "come up for air," and I want to let others that are struggling know that it is possible, and that you are not less of a christian because of it.
The day Hannah was born, I had held her for about fifteen minutes when I noticed the nurses started to worry and quietly call for the Doctor. I was still in the haze of soaking up this new little life; my miracle baby who I had desperately hoped for, and been told about ten months prior that scientifically speaking, I wouldn't be able to have. The nurses were working quickly and calling for the Doctor more urgently, but I still wasn't too aware of them, as I was staring at Hannah and trying to get her to latch for the first time. For me, pregnancy, delivery, and the hours that followed were sacred; the one time in my life where the line between the "human" and the "holy" disappeared. I had known leading up that this was probably the last time in my life that I would endure the process, and I wanted to savor it. I had an epidural during delivery, but had turned it off about twenty minutes prior to pushing, as I'd felt it was too strong and I wanted to truly experience delivery for the final time. Hannah was crying, and I remember saying "I know sweet girl, you've had a hard day," to which the nurse replied "Mommy's having a bad day too, baby girl." I was? Before hearing her say this, I really wasn't aware of the fact that anything was truly wrong.
My epidural wore off, and so did the glow of delivery as I heard the Doctor run back in the room and the nurse exclaim "she's lost about 200 ml of blood," and notion towards the trash cans full of bloody towels and sheets they had already discarded.
I asked Ben to call my Mom, as I needed someone to help me, and my mind had gone immediately to the worst case scenario: "if something happens to me, Hannah needs to bond with Ben." The minutes that followed were the most excruciating pain of my life so far, as the Doctor attempted to remove the piece of placenta that had attached to my uterus and separated as the placenta passed, and control the bleeding from the hemorrhage with an intrauterine "balloon" contraption. I wept and screamed and almost squeezed off my Mom's hand as she tried multiple times without success to control the bleeding.
After a few minutes, the nurse explained that I needed to go to the OR, so they could stitch the hemorrhage and get the bleeding under control, and there wasn't time for me to be sedated. Hannah was taken to the nursery. In moments, the last few minutes of "sacred" were ripped away and I was transferred to the OR. During surgery, I had a massive panic attack. I was given sedatives through my IV that were ineffective, as my adrenaline was running way too high. I remember a blurry nurse trying as hard as she could to help soothe my panic, help me to breathe rhythmically, and settle, but it didn't work. I was conscious through the entire surgery, and every available stimuli (voices, noises, florescent lights, scrambling nurses) were amplified to about 100x more than they probably were IRL. I finally fell asleep after being transferred to ICU, and woke up without awareness of what had just happened, where Ben was or where Hannah was.
The months that followed were dark and hopeless. My history of postpartum depression was something I had been aware of the possibility of, but the trauma of the surgery broke open the dam that had been holding all the despair, darkness, mental noise, and anxiety in check. For months, everything went black. For months, I couldn't separate one train of thought in my head from other and I couldn't tell where my conscious and unconscious thoughts ended and began. Everything was a blur. My brain was filled with a noisy, blurry static like at the end of a VHS tape after it's run all the way to the end. I picked fights just to diffuse some of the noise and nervous energy that constantly overwhelmed me, but nothing really helped. I had constant, repetitive, violently consuming thoughts of terrible things happening to my children. Over and over and over again. It was like having nauseating nightmares that would typically frighten someone awake, but I was awake, and they were constant, all throughout the day. I had no control over them. I was so overtaken by these thought patterns that I became extremely sensitive to any outside stimuli, I couldn't handle noise, I couldn't handle lots of visual stimulation, I couldn't handle any kind of challenging conversation or, god forbid, a disagreement or confrontation. Everything just made me feel like I was going to explode, like I was going to crawl out of my own skin.
The incessant noise (in my head) drove me to the brink of absolute insanity. I felt like I was too fragile to handle anything, and the more I had to keep living my life and facing my basic, day to day responsibilities, the more exhausted I was. The more exhausted I became, the more depressed I became. The more depressed I became, the more suicidal I became.
Knowing what I have always known about God, the Bible and eternity, I reached in every direction I could for support from the spiritual community. I attended christian counseling, I kept attending church, I did a devotional, a prayer journal, a bible study. I searched online for resources about what the bible says about depression. I drove to Lifeway christian bookstore to search the shelves for something, anything that would address the issues of depression and mental illness in relation to christianity. Do you know what I found? Nothing. Either, the resources exist and I just couldn't find them or, there's nothing available for christians with mental illness. I prayed, and prayed, and prayed. I asked, begged, pleaded for relief from what I was experiencing. I asked for miracles, asked for healing, asked for deliverance. When that didn't come, I asked for a little bit more strength, a little bit more helpful resources to help me cope. When that didn't come, I very quietly resigned to the notion that I had been abandoned, and God had turned a blind eye to my suffering.
Being raised in the church, this was completely counter intuitive and even sacrilegious to suggest that God wasn't present in my suffering. What I had heard up until now was "knock, and the door will be opened unto you." "Ask and you will receive." "Commit to the Lord the desires of your heart and you will succeed, because He cares for you." "I waited patiently for the Lord, He inclined and heard my cry. He lifted me up out of the pit." But it wasn't happening for me. I was screaming, banging on the door, on my face begging for help and God seemed to not be answering. I've never felt such a low level of despair. There's nothing to compare it to. When you're this low, death feels like it would be a mercy or a relief. The door was closed. God was on the other side of it, and He wasn't opening it. I felt like a small child standing in a dark hallway in the middle of the night, knocking for a parent that wouldn't open the door. I was scared, vulnerable, alone.
The trite "words of wisdom" I found online in regard to "what the Bible says about depression" didn't help any more. I felt a low level of shame upon reading "if you're depressed, you're living in the past. If you're anxious, you're not trusting God with your future!" Many pages pointed to the scriptures such as "be anxious for nothing," and "cast your anxieties upon Him, because He cares for you." None of them had anything to do with how to deal with my mental illness. I was casting my anxiety upon Him, I was praying, I was trusting, and it was yielding nothing. Relief didn't come.
This led me into a period of doubt. I had no doubt that God existed. It was the fact that I understood that He did exist, that He was a good, just, fair God that was so confusing. How could a good, just, fair, caring, compassionate God with the power to do anything just sit and ignore me while I suffered? Was my idea that God was involved in all the details of our lives wrong? Was I expecting too much? Had I done something that was unforgivable and cut myself off? Surely He knew that I needed Him. Surely He knew that I was dying inside. God is good, but He wasn't being good to me, as far as I could tell.
It wasn't until over a year later that it was discovered that I was living with undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and severe chronic depression. The OCD was a result of physical and mental trauma experienced on the day of delivery and my brain was scattered, broken, trying to find ways to cope with the negative feelings and side effects. My OCD looks like repetitive, overwhelming, nightmarish thoughts of terrible things happening to my children, and the inclination to control certain things in my environment as a coping strategy. It is extreme sensitivity to noise and an inability to deal with stress. It is separation anxiety in my relationship with Hannah (caused by being separated from her after birth for several hours). It is waves of depression that show up without warning. It is an otherwise normal day that gets ruined by a sudden flood of anxiety that feels like a swift punch to the chest. It is an inability to sleep for days on end and then sleeping too much for weeks. It is the inability to keep up with maintaining my household tasks and then panic when I fall behind. It's compulsive eating and spending. It's extreme issues with emotional and mental boundaries.
So, I came to the place where I was out of options. I had prayed until I lost my voice, and on paper, I'd done all of the things that a person of faith should be doing. I was doubting God's goodness and was falling into a spiritual crisis. I decided that the only thing I had left to do was to read the entire bible. It was literally the only thing that I hadn't tried and, if I was going to find fault with the scriptures, I at least needed to know what I was finding fault with. So I started reading. Finally, I came to Job.
The book of Job opens with God and Satan having a conversation. God mentions Job, how good and pure and blameless he is, to which Satan replies "of course he is, you've built a hedge around him. No harm has come to him, of course he fears you. If you took all of that away, surely he would curse you to your face." God challenges Satan and says that Satan may test Job, as long as he spares his life. Within one day, Job lost everything. His children, servants, property, livestock, everything. Gone. Later, Satan vows to take away his good health and plagues him with boils from head to toe. Because Job refuses to curse God, the story is often concluded there. The Sunday School version of this story is that Job still remained obedient and faithful to God and everything was given back to him, but that's not the end of the story.
The next several chapters of Job are filled with him cursing the day of his birth, wishing that he had died before he was ever born. Job weeps and mourns and despairs, saying that he did everything right and still he was punished, while the wicked do whatever they want and don't suffer like he does. Job cries "why give light to those in misery, and life to those who are bitter? They long for death, and it won't come. They search for death more eagerly than hidden treasure. They're filled with joy when they finally die... why is life given to those with no future? To those God has surrounded with difficulties? What I've always feared has happened to me. I have no rest, only trouble." (Job 3)
Job was depressed. Job was suicidal. And still, God saw him as good and faithful.
So, why is this portion of Job's story never addressed? It's depressing, it's uncomfortable, and it's real. Job's despair, anguish, and mourning wasn't sinful. Job's wishing for death wasn't sinful. His depression wasn't sinful. In the end, when God saw fit to correspond with Job, He was still pleased with his character and his spirit. He never disciplined him for his grief, He instead brought him healing.
One major thing we can learn from Job's suffering is this: there are things we experience in this life that are worse than death. The grief that Job experienced was more suffering than his children who had passed away experienced. For those of us who are living with mental illness, our misery may feel like it is a punishment worse than death. We may often feel like there was no purpose to being alive if we have to carry the burden of mental illness with us for the rest of our life. Unfortunately, we are often made to feel ashamed of this suffering and desire for relief within the church. The character of God in the story of Job shows us that God is not indifferent to our suffering nor does He condemn us for the negative feelings associated with it. He does not abandon us forever, even if He allows us to suffer for a time.
Meanwhile, I still have OCD, depression, and anxiety, and may continue to for as long as I live. And still, it's seems as if God is choosing to remain silent and not grant me relief. I may not know why on this side of Heaven, and that's OK. In the words of Job "should we accept only the good things from the hand of God and never any bad?" I may not ever have complete relief. I may always live with a mental handicap. But scripture shows me that I can experience all of these things and not be sinning in doing so. It's not a result of something that I've done or that someone else has done. It's not a result of some unforgivable sin that I've committed that's caused me to get cut off. Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes He lets it rage on around us, and we never get to know why. We can rest in knowing His character and hope in the promise that He will someday give us peace.
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