Let Me Tell You About My Dissertation: Why People With OCD Will Not Always Strike You As Being “OCD” About Things

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Academics, Anxiety, Disorders, dissertation, Health, Mental health, Obsessive Compulsive, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Support Groups

I am posting this as something of a public service announcement that, I hope, will help educate people about OCD. There are a variety of typical things we associate with OCD, and these usually involve obsessive cleanliness or neatness of some form – some people in fact incorrectly boast about how “OCD” they are about cleaning their house, at which point I want to ask these people, “Really? Does apparent messiness really send you into a state of panic and anxiety based on problems that do not exist and are dealt with via compulsive responses that will not help? If you were in fact “OCD” about it, you would be too exhausted to boast (and for that matter the feeling of messiness would never go away, no matter how clean things are).” To be sure, there are people whose obsessions and compulsions involve arranging things, or cleaning, or eliminating germs. But if this is the only thing you think of when you think of OCD, there are a significant number of us you are failing to see. What I want to tell you about here is how in fact someone with OCD can, in fact, look exactly like the opposite of what people stereotypically associate with OCD.

The thing to remember about OCD is that those with OCD only feel their particular obsessions and compulsions regarding certain areas of life – in other areas, they can be as cautious or rash as anyone else. And externally, in the areas that their OCD affects, they will usually appear to the casual observer as just overly cautious because most people with OCD are good at hiding it. The question of whether OCD in fact affects their actual results in their area of obsession is debatable. In some cases it will mean a house is spotless by any normal standards even while it appears filthy to the person with OCD, much as a person with anorexia will appear to themselves overweight even when they are not – and are often indeed underweight – by verifiable standards. But in some cases OCD in fact negatively affects the exact thing one is worried about. Let me tell you about my dissertation.

Back when I was preparing my dissertation, I was editing obsessively, reading words over and over again, looking for some tricky, hidden errors that might be missed by everyone else. Finally, in exhaustion, I submitted. But I read my dissertation again just before my defense, and found all kinds of embarrassing errors. Why did I catch them the second time, and not the first time?

Upon reflection, I think the reason is that what I was doing to deal with the anxiety in the first round was obsessing and compulsing rather than editing. I was whipping myself up into a state of frenzy and looking for that one tiny thread that could pull apart the dissertation entire. But when one is looking for apocalypse, one overlooks little things, like spelling and grammar etc. – there is just not enough energy to deal with these things AND that one mysterious thing you are looking for and trying to fix lest it undo everything. In fact, there is barely enough energy to think rationally and be able in fact to tell reasonably what such a gap might look like – one is too busy looking for it to bother defining it.

So what was different the second time? There were no stakes. I couldn’t change anything even if I wanted to. And so I could read more calmly and actually see my dissertation as it was rather than as an object of intense anxiety. The difference is that there was nothing I could do about it, so I was actually reading it rather than trying to save it with an exhausted OCD hero-complex. Paradoxically, though, it was exactly this intense obsession with fixing the dissertation that in fact kept me from seeing the places where it needed to be fixed.

So how does this pan out in the rest of my life? I think it pans out such that I sometimes appear to people as lazy, only approaching something with a half effort. This is because what for most people are just the basic standards of good work are in fact what comes last in my OCD brain. Spelling errors and grammatical errors can always be fixed. But that one elusive argument that might be there and might be one’s undoing – that is something more serious, and it must be found before moving on to more basic issues. So you will see how it is that, though I have pored over my work to a point of exhaustion, these errors will still be there, coming last in the process and undertaken under the shade of a huge crisis of stress. The problem of course is that other people are not obsessive-compulsives – or rather, it is certainly not a problem, but it comes into effect when they gauge my work. There are people who stop paying attention after a few grammatical or spelling errors.

But why, you say, don’t I get proofreaders? First, getting things to them on time is nearly impossible because I am editing and rearranging right up to the last exhausting minute; I never finish things, only cast them off wildly and in a flurry at the deadline. So what I send proofreaders is a draft, if I even have that ready, and even then it will be likely that I have changed a significant amount by the time they get back to me. And then there is the problem of bothering people generally. I do not like to put people out just because I have OCD, and even if I did, I can never figure out the appropriate way to approach or ask them (another OCD thing, having to feel “just right” before doing something, for me particularly when it involves interacting with people).

So why am I writing all this? Three reasons: One is in the hope of helping people realize that OCD is not synonymous with carefulness or preciseness – indeed, obsessions and compulsions may leave no energy for other “more normal” concerns, and so those with OCD can in these areas appear negligent or lazy whereas in fact they are just exhausted. Another is that I hope others with OCD might resonate with this story, and might in fact see that sometimes identifying the toll of OCD in one’s life involves making a distinction between something like real editing and what one thought was editing but was in fact really obsession. Thirdly, I want to end in appreciation of those who do not get credit precisely for this reason, that OCD causes others to judge them wrongly. I know the battlefield for myself, and I know that many of those who judge can’t even begin to understand how very courageous and resolute you are in simply retaining your patch of small and malnourished ground in the battlefield of life. Take a moment to recognize your accomplishments – and there are accomplishments if in fact you have survived long enough to read this – and then keep fighting, if not for yourself, then at least for the sake of others with OCD.

On Suicide, Part 1: A Response to Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Illness and Health

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Christ, Christian, Christianity, church, Epistle to the Romans, Faith, God, Jesus, Mental health, mental illness, Paul, suicide

Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Health

Research suggests that religious faith protects against suicide. Why do you think that is in light of how your community responds to suicide? How can we tread the fine line of discouraging suicide while not making the grief of family members worse?

The devil took me up on a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he gave me a research statistic. With this, he said, you will conquer the kingdoms of the world for you faith. Under this sign you will conquer.

As the prior creative bit might suggest, I think a statistic like this must first of all for Christians and others of faith included in the research be a great source of temptation. It is tempting to use it in a triumphalistic way. After all, in a culture of death (as the late John Paul II described it) it is no surprise that suicide is prevalent, and it is no surprise that faith is a deterrent in such a culture. If we would turn back to God, have a revival, become a Christian nation again, we would answer the problem of suicide. As usual, God has the answer all along, and we are just ignorant of it. Of course science supports us.

Before interrogating this attitude, I would like to say a bit about the research itself. From my own experience, it rings true. It is always difficult to play the “what if” game, but, as someone who is often depressed, and for whom suicide seems at times the least unattractive option, I do think it is possible I am alive because of the habits of hope that are part of Christianity. I say habits because I am not good a feeling hope, but there is something in the Christian insistence that one must get up again after falling, and being steeped enough in the church has instilled that in me, to my benefit. But then, I also wonder what kind of study produced this information. What if it is statistically true but only because those who do end up killing themselves are alienated in church and leave long before they actually do it. What if it is just because the church does not have a place for those so troubled they are on the verge of suicide?

But to return to the prior point, suicide is complicated, and a church that merely rests on its scientific ability to discourage suicide (and implicitly or explicitly blames secular culture alone) will be marvellously ill equipped to deal with depressed people, particularly as such churches are modelled on a culture that presumes there are “normal” people and then those ill people who want to kill themselves. For a moment I want to turn this on its head. We presume that the reasonable thing is to not want to commit suicide, and that people in their natural state are and should be happy, wanting to live life. But I actually wonder if this is the case.

I wonder because for very sane people throughout history, suicide, far from being a categorical sign of madness, has in fact been a deep philosophical puzzle – we need only think of Donne’s Biothanatos or Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus to see that suicide is not only taken seriously by “crazy” people – it is perhaps also taken seriously by people who can actually see the groaning world around them. And I would suggest that at least some of the attitude that distinguishes the modern division between “normal people” and “suicides” is the result of a great modern whitewashing of the world via a media that acts as an opiate of the masses. We do not consider suicide reasonable because we have swept under the carpet all the ugly bits that might in fact drive us to it. Modern society is a culture of death. But it is a culture of the kind of death that wants eternal life, and suicide is a chink in its armour. We do not appreciate the suggestion that the world might be so bad we might not want to live in it, and we appreciate it less for the nagging bit of our soul left that reminds us there might be parts of this critique that are true. (For further clarification here, please see Addendum)

As long as Christians do not see the compelling nature of suicide and simply think of it as a madness that their own sane faith can cure, they will not be helpful. And I hope to demonstrate this via Romans 7 and 8. Read Romans 7. But omit verse 25. I suggest that the picture painted here, minus the turn to God, leaves little option but suicide. Yes, this chapter is talking about a particular kind of despair pertaining to our inability to perform the law. But I think there are lots of ways one can take this. Biblically speaking, all such frustration is the result of original sin; for instance, though the degree of my culpability is something only God can know, I feel exactly like Paul here when I look after my son, knowing how many stimulating, encouraging, and beneficial things I could do with him, but sitting there paralyzed by fear and sadness while he watches TV. The good I want to do I cannot do, or so it feels.

But now I want to pars Romans 8. On a surface read, one might feel this is saying exactly the kind of thing I caricatured before. Everything is despair, but when we turn to Christ it will all be hunky dory. But I am not quite sure this is what Paul means, and I think the distinction hangs on what is meant by Christians having “the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of creation groaning in expectation. The problem from a very practical perspective is of course this – there are very much some kinds of help that one can get for such despair outside the church, and I do believe that in the best instances these constitute real help. At the same time, there are those in the church who are very much being not helped – where is the glorious freedom we seem to be talking about?

What I want to say is that, though what is primarily talked about here are the “first fruits” of Christ, that is, his personal adoption of us, there is in this passage an implicit sense of second and third and fourth fruits. Though Paul describes what is probably the highest form of Christian interaction with Christ, we can imagine the Spirit (who hovered over the water) at work in so very many aspects of the creation we don’t understand or can’t trace, even as he is at work in so many prayers beyond the groans of our understanding. My point is that, if every good and perfect gift is from above, the business of us who have what Paul calls the first-fruits is not simply an act of entrenchment against everything else happening in the world, but rather an act of looking for places where the Spirit is working in the world – the flesh here does not in fact mean created material but rather the improper use and orientation of it. It is a Christian’s business to look for and applaud places in society and the world where God’s Spirit is working in and with material, even as it is the Christian’s business to ensure that those within the church can benefit from such material work (e. g. medicine, psychology, etc.). The church is the place where God’s first fruits have been endowed, and is thus the instrument capable of naming most fully such blessings. But the blessings themselves, like rain, fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, the hardened atheist clinician and the habited nun, and the church’s business is not so much to have a corner on this grace as to recognize and name it when they see it.

Hence, Romans 8 answers the suicidal impulse, not by suggesting the Christians have a corner on the kind of grace, hope, and discovery that helps fight it, but rather by highlighting the first origin of all these secondary graces in Christ, as well as the Christian ability to name them and recognize them in their fullness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the rocks cry out, and it is I think not untrue to say that the infinitely more odd things of God’s creation – psychologists, medications, treatment etc. – also glorify God in their way too.

This being said, the effect is not immediate. Paul still speaks of suffering (v. 18). The full redemption of creation is a long time coming. And so sometimes we need to wait with each other. There is no good excuse for sitting amidst suffering that can be avoided or helped in a healthy way, and many churches are culpable in this area. But when created matter has not caught up with our spirits, when (as with the experience of only partially treatable OCD), the tic in our brains has not yet caught up to the deeper spiritual knowledge of a graced world, we must wait with each other, weeping and laughing by turns. For this, I think, is what it means to be the church amidst a world still realizing the freedom Christ has bought and its extent into the deepest reaches of some of the very darkest corners of creation.

Addendum: I want to here clarify that I do not here mean to imply that depression is always due to societal problem that are ignored or not redressed. Indeed, depression in its most biochemically potent form will cause depression even in what is ostensibly the most perfect of external situations and environments. Of course, it is often the very fact of such an experience that many in the church implicitly or explicitly deny, for things that do not fit formulae trouble us, and when not confronted by them directly, we find it more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist.

A Response to the Patheos Conversation on Faith and Mental Illness Via St. James

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Awareness, Christianity, Evangelical, Mental disorder, Mental health, mental illness, Patheos, religion, spirituality

A response to the Patheos conversation on Christianity and mental illness, question 1:

How has your religious community historically seen mental illness? – And how does your faith, today, shape the way you see mental illness?

My background is the Evangelical tradition, so however far from it I may be at the moment (being an Anglo-Catholic), it is probably the tradition I am best able to speak out of and address. As someone who grew up suffering from some Frankensteinian hybrid of OCD and depression, and as someone who had family members who were also suffering from depression, OCD etc., I can say that, in my experience, there really was no place for people with mental illness. To be sure, if we had perhaps been more candid about it we may have found some comfort – I don’t know. But in some ways this highlights exactly the problem that has been typical in Evangelical churches. It is only in extreme situations that they actually go out of their way to say something against mental illness or against talking about it; no, the most damaging thing, at least when I was growing up, was what was not said. What was not said is that not all problems can be fixed by a spiritual high, or a neat testimony. What was not said is that some problems are as physical – biochemical – as they are spiritual. What was really not said was that it was okay to be in pain. It was of course okay provided you could reflect positively on it in retrospect – things were bad until God the deus ex machina leapt in and made everything better. But chronic suffering was not okay.

Now, it would seem, things are changing. Talking about mental illness among formerly repressed Evangelicals is now all the rage. Like our secular society beside us, we presume the way to do this is to do lots of talking – have lots of awareness etc. And neither talking nor awareness are bad things per se. But they become bad when they become a way of making us feel good about ourselves rather than actually doing something. As we know from the book of James, talk can be very hollow indeed. I suppose the question for me is whether all this talk will translate into substance. That Christianity has the resources to do this I have no doubt; whether Evangelicals wishing for further discussion and awareness are willing to pay the price of becoming Christ’s instruments of grace for those with mental illness is a question that will only be answered by their actions; by their fruit we will know them.

This may sound harsh, but I say this because, if Evangelicals have become willing to talk about mental illness rather than stay silent, they have I think been less willing to give up their wedding to simplistic fixes for things. It seems, for instance, that in many instances, the former quick spiritual fix for something like depression – you just need to have more faith etc. – has merely been replaced by a quick medical fix – you just need to see a doctor. This is of course not unique to Evangelical Christians – the majority of secular “awareness” types are also addicted to a fairy tale ending for mental illness, and we can see this “redemption story” in Obama’s speech for Mental Health Month, quoted in the original call for the Patheos forum. In the past, so the story goes – those nefarious dark ages – we never used to talk about these things. But if people will just come out and talk about them they will be cured by doctors and everything will end happily ever after. In many ways we – both secular and Christian – seem to think it is necessary to offer a unified insistence that things will turn out all right in a this worldly sense. But what about when they don’t, when medication doesn’t work, when there is an incompatibility between patient and counselor, when side effects become nearly as problematic as the illness itself? And what about those instances in which there is only a partial fix? Or those instances where other complicating factors such as homelessness and substance abuse combine and send someone into the cyclical pattern of being in and out of the hospital again and again, always caught between a world that cannot fully “fix” them and another world that doesn’t bother to love them? What then? It is perhaps a lovely middle class dream to be able to send our mentally ill of to the doctors who will “fix” them and send them back good as new, like repaired cars. But it does not always work this way. And I do not think it fair to tell half-truths about the help on offer just so more people will seek it; indeed, setting people up for a happy ending that may not be as simple as proposed is a good way to make patients already suspicious of doctors twice as unlikely to return. I had a friend who once sought help for her mental illness at the diversity office of a certain institution. Seemingly, this institution could afford large glossy signs featuring troubled youth with depression-filled thought bubbles around their heads; the implication was that these invisible problems could become visible and helped if you went to the diversity office. She went. And found no help.

So this is the question I really want to put to the Evangelicals so ostensibly interested in raising awareness about mental health issues. By all means talk about mental illness. By all means encourage sufferers in their faith. By all means send them to doctors. But if none of these things “works” in the simplistic sense you were expecting, are you willing to stick with them in their suffering? Are you willing to let a part of yourself die with them? Because it might cost you that. You might end up like Mary, a sword piercing your own soul as you weep over a person you deeply love contorted in pain you cannot imagine let alone fix. And you may find yourself crying out with Christ, with the person you so deeply love so deeply in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us.” For this too is a prayer of the church.

Put another way, I think at bottom the problem is not just with awareness but with the Evangelical theology (or non-theology) of the cross. Are we going, like we used to do in our city-wide Evangelical service, acknowledge, if somewhat uncomfortably, that yes we maybe have to talk about the cross, but then skip as fast as possible to a triumphalist read on the resurrection? Or are we going to do what Christians in fact do, which is stay by the person on the cross even when it seems all bets are off and we would do better to abandon that person for something or someone more cheerful?

Even for myself, I have a hard time answering these questions. I will with all my heart to be such a Christian, and hope there are times when I have shown such grace. But I pray for the future in the knowledge that this is something I can never do by myself. I need, and need daily, the grace of the Christ who knows what it is to suffer the full extent of suffering, the God who knows what it is to feel the pain of watching the person you love most die an excruciating death – the God with whom creation mourns, the God for whom such an act merits the ragged tearing of the temple curtain as one in mourning might tear his clothes. I need this as I daresay will anyone who is going to take on the task of caring – that is, really caring – about those who suffer from mental illness.

Such caring involves, I suggest, looking among us for the faces of the crucified, for it is in these faces that we will see Christ. This means not just talking, but doing. For instance, spend some time volunteering in some capacity where you will actually meet real people with mental illnesses, though it need not be formal. I have no doubt that all about you there are people suffering invisibly. Pray, and look for them. Seek and you will find. Watch for the ones on the margins, the ones who don’t fit in, the ones that nobody else is talking to. Watch for the popular ones hiding their deep sadness under the paint of superfluity. Watch even for the experts, even those who would seem to have far surpassed you in their knowledge of this kind of love. For these people suffer too, and sometimes the worst; it is so easy to forget that those best at loving and caring, with a seeming artfulness and ease, are also in need of love – at times starved for it. Love the foolish. Love even the wise. But, you will say, not all these people necessarily have mental illness. Yes, but it is certain you will never know which ones do until you begin to see them. Before we can start loving people with mental illness, we need to start loving people. And in order to love people, we are in most desperate need of the cross of Christ.

Judge Not Lest Ye Realize Your Neighbour is a Sinner and You Might Be Too

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Arts, Comedy, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Literature, Mental health, mental illness

One of the strangest aspects of Dante is that his hell is not made up solely of types or famous exemplars or figures, but rather local no-names; even those who were famous in Dante’s time are usually not famous enough to be remembered by the average reader. Similarly, the text is entangled in a politics that now feels obscure – the pressing issues for Dante have become historical footnotes that most of us only know in fact on account of reading the Comedy. This can be annoying for readers; these matters can feel like the inside joke that alienates those not in the know. It is no wonder that such alienated readers have been put off by the text and accused Dante of bringing his own petty concerns into a theological system that ought to be treated as so much “higher”.

But I feel like there is something more than this that discomfits readers – or at least me – upon encountering Dante’s organization of hell. Simply put, I think that, if Dante’s purpose were simply to get catharsis by putting his opponents in hell, he would sound much more like Swift in his more embittered moments. Swift had good reason to be embittered, and much of it was turned to good use, but there are moments when, reading him, we find ourselves cringing at his unabashed spite in some of his caricatures. Dante is different though. We cringe for different reasons.

Particularly, I think we cringe because our encounter with Dante’s figures and politics drives home our own proximity to sin. Modern readers are manifestly comfortable with types and symbols and such because they can remain just that – one can imagine a manifestly proud person, or an unfaithful person etc. while at the same time making excuses for oneself regarding one’s own relation to such vices: “Clearly the Satanic arch-figure is evil, but in my case there are extenuating circumstances and things are so much more complex – there is environment and upbringing and genes etc. to account for…” What makes us uncomfortable about Dante though is that he does not offer us figures that can be magicked away into irrelevant ether. We (post)moderns are polite and non-judgmental in our approach to the characters in the Inferno, but I think this approach is not always so altruistic as we think: We judge not lest we realize that our neighbours might be sinners, which means that we too might be sinners too. This is something we don’t like to think about because, whether secular or Christian, we prefer to hide behind a mask of ostensible morality, and this often involves denying, even to ourselves, the extent of our sinfulness. This I think is not hard to see in Christian circles, what with the many scandals etc. that one encounters in which people have been seemingly living multiple disconnected lives. What I don’t think we as readily notice is that the same thing happens with whatever other so-called values we adopt in society: multiculturalism, environmentalism, liberty, equality, fraternity etc. Society becomes a self-justifying system such that it needs to destroy whatever threatens its facade of progress and good values – and the things that threaten it just happen to be sinners, that is, all of us. In making this claim, I am not I hope simply inventing charges, for it comes out of direct experience I have had with societal treatment of mental health. We are far more interested in demonstrating that we are helpful, and getting the attached funding and accolades, than we are in actually being helpful.

This of course leaves us with the question of what to do about all this muck that Dante dredges up in us. The answer is simple and swift in its striking:

Kyrie eleison,

Christe eleison,

Kyrie eleison.

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

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Anxiety, depression, Disorders, Evangelicalism, Faith, Health, Mental health, mental illness, Mercedes Benz, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

I wrote this post a while ago, but was waiting for the right time to post it on account of my already numerous posts on the subject. Now seemed to be the right time, since I keep encountering people I care about suffering from mental illness, particularly now at this darkest and coldest time of winter. This is for you – you know who you are.

So, having opened up the discussion on two counts of different kinds of mental illness/mood disorder, I want to follow this up with a discussion of the difficulties posed by these things when the person suffering from them brings them into Christian communities. What makes this most difficult is that the things that most deeply affect our spiritual journeys and struggles – those very things that one talks about with Christian friends and considers part of one’s Christian witness – are not the things we have made space for discussing in many Christian circles. Let me begin, for instance, with the typical question of “Where are you at, spiritually.” It is a little similar to the most annoying question you can ask a depressed person, “What is going on? Why are you sad?” Because the problem with the deepest forms of depression is that there is no reason. There is not a narrative one can give wherein it makes sense. It is in the truest sense of the word irrational. There is a story about a depressed person who went on a nice holiday to a beautiful location. She opened the door, heard the birds singing and saw all the beauty, and began to weep. This is depression. In its deepest form, it is by its nature an enigma.

So you see how asking the depressed person about their spirituality can bring about a deep state of anxiety and fear. Not only can they often not answer the question, “Where are you at spiritually,” but simply have no answer to the question, “Where are you?” Where did the person go that seemed to have been here but that seems to have dissolved into nothing? Where did that person’s interests go? Where did the pleasure and even the pain go, that seems to have dissolved into blankness? You can see how bringing up something like this is not exactly what people are looking for in prayer groups, or when they ask after prayer requests. Because it is potentially devastating to some people’s lives and even their faith. Wouldn’t the very existence of such an inexplicable thing be an embarrassment to God, and a faith that cannot handle it? To the former I answer emphatically no; to the latter, I answer that a faith that cannot handle such things is rightly embarrassed because it is not fully Christian – Christ is sovereign, even over things we can’t explain or control.

We get something similar with OCD. There are legitimate fears that one can discuss. But the never ceasing fear that someone will go to hell because you accidentally slighted them in a way they could never have noticed is not one of these; it is an embarrassment even to try to explain because the person with OCD knows how irrational it sounds and is, though they also know how reasonable and compelling it feels. And even when one brings things like this up, the usual Christian response to it is to reason with it. Engage the alleged problem directly. And this becomes a problem. Because OCD by its nature demands such engagement again and again and again. Better to quote scripture at it as Jesus does at the devil and then move on. The primary problem with OCD is that it sets up battles that don’t need to happen and then wastes one’s own and others energy in these battles; as long as you are fighting, it wins, but it will do everything it can to convince you that fighting is the way to win. You will see the problem here. On one hand, OCD is generally off limits as a matter of discussion in Christian groups. But when symptoms are discussed, they are usually discussed as the problems that they masquerade as rather than the meaningless and nagging voice that they are. The irony is that simply neglecting them leaves the sufferer isolated and lonely. Simply engaging them can encourage them. The tricky thing is that really dealing with them is a matter of acknowledging their presence but then answering them with something other than the answer they want. For people such as Luther, Therese of Lisieux, and Bunyan, this something was the infinite and deep grace of God rather than a compulsive parry for the thrust of every obsession. But of course OCD is tricky, and I imagine that even achieving a deep understanding of this grace could fall pray to OCD. Coming out of Christian backgrounds that emphasized this, I recall fearing deeply that I had not really “gotten” grace as I was supposed, and fearing that I was still trying to save myself through works so that I was incessantly trying to have a spiritual experience all the more elusive because intangible and subject to my state of mind, and therefore the perfect prey of OCD – just “letting go and letting God,” is as vulnerable to OCD as anything else.

Of course, the even more difficult thing to deal with is the spiritual complications that things like OCD and depression cause. Some people may sin by coveting their neighbor’s wife, or cow, or Mercedes Benz, but personally I covet my neighbor’s sins. I covet the state of dealing with normal struggles that normal people deal with, that make sense when you tell them to others. Although I rarely knew any of them, I recall being somewhat jealous in high-school of the fluffy kind of people whose deepest concern was a shallow relationship with their eighth or tenth boyfriend or girlfriend. I imagine I would not want to be such a person – in fact I imagine I do not have the capacity to be such a person – but I could always wish; the grass of fluffy banality always seemed greener from the side that felt like hell. And even now I wish I had something more glamorous and dramatic to discuss than what can only be called the elusive acedia so hard to pin down and address and yet the most frequent result of paralysis from OCD and depression.

All this to say I am not sure I know how to tell people they can meet the spiritual needs of people with OCD and depression, but listening to them might be a first good step. Personally, I have no idea about the degrees of pscyhology, physiology, biology, and spirituality involved in things like this – in OCD and depression the whole person suffers and so it is a problem on multiple levels. Clearly there is a biochemical element. Clearly there is a cognitive and psychological element. And though I hesitate to say it on account of the ways that various Christians misconstrue it, there is clearly a spiritual element. To clarify for those who think this way, I am not here saying that such things are demonic in the traditional sense that requires exorcism or Neil Anderson-esque type things etc. – I have seen severe problems when people treat mental illness and mood disorder as such. Particularly, there becomes a problem when these things are construed as purely spiritual problems that can be fixed by deeper piety, holiness etc. What I do mean though is that, for instance, the texts that most resonate with me in terms of thinking about my faith are not those lovey-dovey-happy texts we put up on powerpoint – no, they are those benighted and backward texts that speak of fierce conflict with devils. For whatever OCD and depression are, they certainly feel like those fierce assaults that not everyone else can see or understand. Who knows what they are, but for my money the best way I can describe my experience of faith in the midst of these things is to have people read a text like Guthlac A – preferably in the Old English – and then follow it up for dessert with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is often very Christian without meaning to be. It is in the absurdities and inanities that the characters in these texts face that I see most often reflected my own condition: not one that fits happily into the model of struggles we ought and ought not to have according to the norms of a nice Evangelicalism, but one that finds a horrifyingly deep darkness and anxiety matched and superseded only by the grace that does not obliterate but has the power to transform and create ex nihilo.

Mental Illness and Silver Linings Playbook: One Sufferer’s Perspective

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Academy Award, Christian, film, Health, Mental disorder, Mental health, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Pat, response, review, Silver Linings Playbook

Apologies, but since it has been on my mind, and since I think dealing with mental illness is one of the things Christians should think about, I am devoting yet another post  to it.  Please bear with me and use me gently – it is a matter close to my heart, and head.

I was provoked to thought by Silver Linings Playbook, a film that is currently up for some Academy Awards, and that features characters, some diagnosed and some not, suffering from a variety of mental illnesses. I was impressed, which is saying something, because it takes something special for a romantic comedy to impress me; usually my preferred literary topics – suffering, death, theology and wisdom – are not prominently featured in this genre, at least in its modern incarnation.

In any case, following the film, I was curious regarding public response. The debate I discovered can generally be broken down into two positions. Richard Brody of the New Yorker, for instance, criticizes the film on the grounds that the film depicts a bipolar person going off his meds, willing himself to get better, and working his way up to a happy ending – all of which, by the way, are not very realistic ways of dealing with mental illness. Others note that the OCD character goes untreated, and the full effects of his illness as well as those of others are gilded over for the feel-good purposes of romantic comedy. In a quote particularly apt for the broader subject of this blog, Brody charges that “without a word about religion in the script, “Silver Linings Playbook” advocates a faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption.” Presumably by this faith-based view (a description he intends as critique and not praise), Brody means the very superficial way of dealing with mental illness (just get over it) that one is bound to encounter when one (like me) suffers from mental illness in and around Christian communities.

The film, of course, has its defenders. One of the more balanced reviews is Gwynne Watkins’s interview of Dr. Steven Schlozman, who is a better reader of the complexity of the film than, say, the tersely expressed concerns of Dr. Michael Blumenfield. Interestingly enough, one of the recurring themes in both the attacks and defences is the question of whether in fact Pat is taking his meds, and what message the film is conveying concerning mental illness.

Before going into my own analysis, though, I would like to clarify the dual battle that I fight. Many Christians I know, whether deliberately or subconsciously, approach medication and medical treatment with excessive suspicion, and to these people I find myself being an adamant defender of these things. Even those who hypothetically allow medication for hypothetical people who are hypothetically too ill to do otherwise need to realize that it may not just be hypothetical people who need medication – it may indeed be someone very close to them or in fact themselves.

But then there are the people who want medication to fix everything. Some Christians, pushing back against the suspicion of medication, go too far the other way and act as if depressed people can simply go to the doctor, get medication that fixes them, and then go back to normal. Unfortunately, in fact, a lot of the rhetoric that encourages mental health awareness comes across in a similar way – as soon as you start “officially dealing with it” things will become so much better. The reality is far more complex. I have seen medication work near miracles in people. I have also seen people migrate from medication to medication, partially helped but never wholly. And, yes, I have seen cases where medication has negatively affected people instead of helping them, and cases where those who represent the “official” public line on mental health have failed and done damage.

My policy, then, has come to be that “just” is a four letter word. If someone tells you that you “just’ need to pray more, or “just” need to talk to a doctor, or “just” need to go on medication, or “just” need to be a better Christian, or “just” need to open up and talk to someone, run in the other direction.

And it seems to me that this is the problem critics are having with Silver Linings Playbook. Some think it says, “Just will yourself to be well.”  Others think it says, “Just fall in love and you will get better.” Still others defend it on the grounds that it is not saying these things, but is in fact appropriately saying “Just take your meds.” And this annoys me. Normal people get complicated movies with complicated characters and complicated plots. But mentally ill people aren’t allowed this. No, the films we get concerning our people must be critically reduced to their message and approved by the board of censors before they can be praised.

Let me put it this way. The assumption is that this film should be perfectly mimetic of real people with real mental illness. But not all regular movies profess to be perfectly mimetic. I have not encountered a hobbit recently. And, in fact, most romantic comedies end with the “happily ever after theme,” which taken properly is not mimetic, but is a gesture or allusion to something we wish for, but only ever catch glimpses of this side of heaven – only moderns could be so crass as to take this fairy tale ending literally and then critique it for not fitting the genre of realism, which it was never intended to do. All this to say that what critics are really critiquing is the genre (it has an unrealistic happy ending), but somehow it is considered more of a problem if the film is about mental illness. One of the concerns, of course, is that allowing people with mental illness to indulge in fantastic or imaginative stories might be harmful because they sometimes can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy – it is the same impulse that tries to save the poor innocent minds of children by not reading them fairy tales. To be sure, I do think we should be sensitive to what might or might not be helpful for or trigger those we know with mental illness, or ourselves. But I sometimes worry that people stop treating us as human altogether; it is easier to treat the person as the illness, infantilize him or her, and then place him or her in a sanitized environment where people do not get real stories but rather appropriate and pre-approved messages.

To come if circuitously to my point, I would suggest that the reason I liked Silver Linings Playbook is that it was ambiguous and was not simply propaganda. Though I do not have bipolar (and I would want to talk to a few people who have it before trying to gauge how “accurate” the depiction is), I can certainly sympathize with Pat’s heroic but completely unrealistic attempt to “fix” himself so as to be acceptable to those he cares most about. One has visions and dreams of a self that is completely healthy, and vows to become that self, whereas the more realistic route recognizes that life may be more about management of illness and reinterpreting our relationships and meaning in terms of the selves that we cannot help being. I also liked that Pat’s episodes were not clearly marked, since figuring out what is oneself and what is one’s illness is part of the struggle. I liked the offhand reference to the difficulty of what it means to think of being a parent when one can barely take care of oneself. I liked the dinner table conversation when Pat and Tiffany, who have no interest in “ordinary” topics, suddenly light up when they exchange medication stories inappropriately at the dinner table. I like that the film recognizes, in the relationship with Pat and his friend, that suffering from a mental illness makes people much more willing to open up to you about their own problems, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can solve them. And I like the laughter and the happy ending that is not (as some accuse it of being) contrived by the sheer willpower of Pat, but rather happens counter to his initially doomed-from-the-start plans to re-enchant his wife, who has clearly left him.

That last statement about liking happy endings is not something you will hear me say often. But I do like this one because it is precisely what a lot of people do not want to hear about mental illness. They want it to be fixed, made better, off the screen. They don’t want to be told that, for some, the only meaning they can find might be moments of laughter and joy intermixed with their illness. They don’t want to imagine the life of a person who is mentally ill and simultaneously has meaning and hope in his/her life. For such people, a meaningful life and mental illness are mutually exclusive.

You see, I think at the end of the day what bothers people most about the film is that it is, like life and mental illness, too ambiguous. We can’t always tell when the crazy person is talking and when the “real” person is talking. And for some of us,  laughter in the midst of situations that others might consider hell is the only laughter we will get. So no, the film does not convey a clear and properly sanitized message or image of mental illness – but then again, neither do we who actually suffer from it.