Finding Jesus in the Storm. John Swinton
The Suffering That Emerges from the Ascription of the Demonic
The Suffering That Emerges from Truth Telling
Conclusion: Redescribing Healing
Epistemic Healing and Epistemological Generosity
Appendix: Mental Health Resources
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE I SHOULD THANK IN RELATION TO THIS BOOK. It has been a long time in the making, and it’s been a difficult journey. My family have as always been remarkably supportive and forgiving as I have complained, moaned, and wrestled with this book. They always saw the end point even when I could not. I’d like to thank my friend and colleague Warren Kinghorn for his wisdom and insight, Katie Cross for her thoughtfulness in commenting on a later draft of the book, Joy Allen for her comments on depression, and Hannah Waite for her deep and personal insights into the important issues that this book wrestles with. I am grateful to Uli Guthrie for her guidance and insight, and I am thankful for the skills that Steph Brock brought to the project, and for her husband, Brian, whose constant encouragement has been a blessing on me for many years. Thank you also to the folks at Eerdmans, who have been extremely supportive and have encouraged me in times when I felt like finding something else to do! They have become friends, and I am grateful for all that they do. Thanks must also go to Michael Thomson for taking this project on before he moved on to Wipf and Stock. Thank you to Ronald Otto and the folks at Thresholds in Chicago (https://www.thresholds.org) for their help early on in the project. Most importantly, I want to thank the people who gifted me their life stories. This book is about you and for you, and I am thankful and humbled that you have trusted your stories with me. I only hope I have done your gifts justice. Finally, thank you to God for being gracious and kind and for teaching us that there is nothing in the realm of mental health and ill health or anywhere else that can separate us from God’s love. That is the blessing that keeps us all on track.
INTRODUCTION: LIFE IN ALL ITS FULLNESS
Living Well with Jesus
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
—John 10:101
A FEW YEARS AGO, I ATTENDED A LECTURE ON THE POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS between religion and mental health given by an eminent professor of psychiatry. He opened his lecture with an intriguing, if somewhat disconcerting, statement: “I only have fifteen minutes to see a patient, and I spend the whole of that time looking at the computer screen trying to work out the patient’s blood levels and checking the efficiency of the patient’s meds.” The rest of the lecture was excellent, but I couldn’t get past that opening statement. As a former mental health nurse, I understand the pressures of a busy, understaffed, and often underfunded health-care system. Nevertheless, that the psychiatrist decided to spend all of the paltry fifteen minutes of each patient’s visit looking at a computer screen is telling.
A person’s biological functioning is certainly important. If one assumes that mental health experiences can be primarily or even fully understood and explained in biological terms, then scrutinizing a person’s blood levels for chemical imbalances and checking the impact of medication on blood cell count make sense. However, human beings are not simply a conglomerate of chemical interactions. Humans are persons, living beings who have histories, feelings, experiences, and hopes, and who desire to live well. Living well is not determined by the functioning of our biological processes apart from our individual social, interpersonal, and spiritual experiences. Similarly, understanding the biological dimensions of mental health experiences may turn out to be helpful, but it is unlikely to solve problems that emerge from poverty, loneliness, war trauma, and abuse. It is also unlikely to tell us much about what it means to live with and to experience these things scientists describe as “symptoms.” If you don’t know what these symptoms actually mean for an individual, it is difficult to know what you are trying to control and what a “good outcome” might look like. If you have only fifteen minutes with a patient, you don’t need rich, thick experiential descriptions. Thin ones will do just fine. Time is an issue, but the problem of time reflects deeper issues.
THICK DESCRIPTIONS
The purpose of this book is to provide readers with rich, deep, and thick descriptions of the spiritual experiences of Christians living with mental health challenges. It assumes that in order to understand people’s mental health experiences, we need to find time to listen carefully and cannot be bound by assumptions, even those of powerful explanatory frameworks like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This book is about how Christians living with severe mental health challenges—depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder— experience their faith lives and strive to live life in all its fullness in the presence of sometimes deeply troubling experiences. The book is not about “severe mental illness” understood as a clinical category. Rather, it is about the experiences of unique and valuable disciples of Jesus who seek to live well with unconventional mental health experiences—experiences that some choose to describe as “severe mental illness” but that can also be described in other important ways.
Life in All Its Fullness
In John 10:10, Jesus makes an intensely powerful statement: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Life in all its fullness is certainly not life without suffering, pain, or disappointment. That much is clear as we reflect on Jesus’s own life. Nor is it a life without joy, hope, and resurrection life in the Spirit. The quest for life in all its fullness is not the basis for a theology of glory—one that minimizes pain and looks past suffering.2 Rather, it is the foundation for a practical theology of the cross that takes seriously the freedom and release that we have gained through the death and resurrection of Jesus