Terrified

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Catholic, Catholic Church, evil and suffering, Jesus, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Protestant

It was Good Friday, and I was doing, for the first time really, the stations of the cross. This was my first time, not because as a Protestant I had had any major problems with it, and not even because I was not attracted to it, but simply because, as a Protestant, doing the stations of the cross would have involved making a fuss of the emergent or high-Anglican variety. Anglo-Catholicism was the closest I could get to Rome outside of Rome, but it always seemed to involve a certain kind of hyper-ostentation, distinguished as Anglo-Catholicism is by such loudness. It is thank God possible to be quietly and anonymously Catholic (in humility rather than shame), but, as an Anglo-Catholic, one needs to be very loud about how Catholic one is, perhaps with a shrillness designed to convince oneself of something about which one has doubts.

In any case, it was Good Friday, the day before my reception into the Church, and I was doing the stations of the cross with my RCIA group. I was kind of hoping to slide into the Church – quietly, and without much fuss – and I knew my relationship with God well enough to know that I needn’t expect anything of the mystical or experiential variety – my relationship with Him was and remains enough, and it was sufficient for me to take this step He called me to without much ballyhoo or other diversion of the experiential, spiritual, or social variety. As is typical of my experience of God, he disappointed my expectations.

To contextualize this, I will need to backtrack a bit regarding the ongoing saga of my struggles to understand matters of faith, suffering, and death. As someone with a longtime history of depression and OCD (in the official fancy language my condition would cheerfully be termed “comorbid”), and further with various family members and friends suffering from such things, the question of the place of suffering in faith has always been much less easy for me to ignore than it seems to be for some Christians. Add to this the death of a close friend three years ago, deep alienation from Christian community (too Catholic for Protestants, too Protestant for Catholics, and deeply wounded by the effects of some nasty church and parachurch politics), and a tendency to always put my worst foot forward when it comes to interviews or applications in the area of my vocation, and it is fair to say that frustration is not likely to be something I can forget anytime soon. A fever pitch of suffering would be a bad way to describe it – that happened in the much more volatile period of our younger romance – and now Suffering and I had settled into the familiar routine of destroying each other even while relying on each other for stability like an addictive drug when the exotics and passion are gone, and all that is left is bathetic routine. Not only did I know Suffering, but I made myself an expert in all her ways – I would be the prophet proclaiming her existence to a stubborn and obstinate church. I could, quite literally, say what most could only say figuratively – I really did do a Doctorate on suffering.

But I return to the stations of the cross and Good Friday, with a caveat, which is this. When I describe what follows, I do not necessarily mean that all this hit me on the head at once, or that I immediately came to this realization. I’m pretty sure that every moment we mark of deep significance in our lives is preceded by so many other important moments we don’t notice, and, furthermore, may not even be initially understood – the post-experience reflection on the experience is as much a part of the experience as the temporal moment when one first marks it. What follows is the totality of my impression – thus far – of what happened on Good Friday.

What happened was that, at some point while we were doing the stations, I realized that I had met my match when it came to the understanding of suffering – in this church, in this place, I was becoming part of a people that knew suffering in her bones. Not in the sense that the Church has necessarily suffered more than other groups – indeed, in her imperfection here on earth, she has on a number of occasions been the cause of suffering – but rather in the sense that here, in Christ’s body, a body I could taste, touch, and smell in the sacraments and in my fellow Christians – here, in this body, suffering was understood, in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word. Yes, other churches I had been part of had the crucifixion narrative as well – but the crosses were bare. In contrast, here was a devotional practice that was not trying to be radical or prophetic or sexy or relevant or any of those other things – it was not screaming for attention, as was my own “prophetic” bent concerning suffering – rather, it simply was. It was not some radical thing (except in the most literal etymological sense) that would strike like lightning and change my life fifty different ways to Sunday. No, it was a basic and humble grammar of suffering. And I, the expert, the self-proclaimed seer, with the Doctorate on Job, stopped my mouth, and was silent. No longer could I say, “But you don’t know what it’s like” – because She did. The Church did.

I don’t recall too precisely the exact moment this all came upon me, but I do feel it had something to do with the third time Christ stumbles in the stations. I knew enough of them prior to know that this is the part I most valued, the part where Christ looks at us, after having stumbled twice before already, and we have no clue what to do. Is it about us? Are we selfish enough to be glad for Christ’s suffering because we suffer too? On the other hand, when he looks into our eyes like that, the cross breaking his back, is there anywhere we can flee to evade that look that says it has everything to do with us? Is it an example? An act of empathy? The suffering servant? The broken beast of burden? Christ is physically naked, but it is we who are ashamed – he has looked into our souls. To stumble once might be a token example – even the best stumble. To stumble twice is a little more, but perhaps just another token – we can draw on his forgiveness if we happen to fall a few times, so long as we are generally consistent. But a third time. That is the clincher. He means it. He will really be there. Every time. Seventy times seven times, and more, if necessary. Every time. The face full of sorrow that is also mercy and grace. Eye to eye, and heart to heart.

That is a broken description of the glimpse I had into the Church – the place where suffering is uniquely understood – and the place where I covered my mouth. At that same moment, I felt a kind of release. It is a heavy burden to think of oneself as a prophet on behalf of all suffering everywhere, and suddenly I saw – Christ’s body, the Church, was carrying this burden. It was not mine to carry. I could help or participate or pray or not – I could understand or not – but whatever I did, God had suffering and death taken care of. And it was then I realized the most terrifying thing, that I was free, free to explore that thing far more frightening and unpredictable to me than any kind of pain or suffering: joy. I still have very little idea what this means – particularly as I am accustomed to associate the word “joy” with the facile glossing and painting of pain. And I don’t like joy, because it comes at all the wrong times, and doesn’t come to everybody equally. But it is a treasure, of Christ and His Church, and having retired from the position of self-proclaimed prophet of suffering and pain (though I make no promises concerning relapses), I am at liberty to explore it – joy – the greatest problem that we face as humans. I am terrified.

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Academia and Mental Illness: Some Personal Reflections on the Guardian Article

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academia, Academics, culture of acceptance, depression, guardian, mental illness, OCD

I have a Doctorate, and I managed to get through it alive. For many this, I suppose, would be a metaphor; for those who do or have done a graduate degree with mental illness, it may be a literal fact – and for some, getting through alive does not happen. Our attention has been brought to this most recently by the recent article in The Guardian examining unhealthy attitudes toward mental illness in the academy, which relates the story of J. To determine the exact cause of a person’s suicide is impossible, but, as the author of this article notes, one of the contributing factors in J’s suicide was an academy that has in places fallen into overlooking mental illness and its complicated intersection with graduate school.

As someone who has OCD and depression, I do know what it is like to go through the academic steps needed to get a PhD as well as grapple with such issues, but I have not hitherto written about the intersections of mental illness and the academy in my life. This in part is because it has been mixed; where I have at times felt aware of a certain systemic coldness toward the issue, I have also managed to find individuals and mentors who care. But it is also because the deepest part of what I need to say concerns those things that can’t be handled systemically, the things that remain silent. They probably come out in public academic and administrative matters as quirks or character traits or peccadillos if one (as one is always inclined to do) can sufficiently mask the icebergs of mental illness lying below the iceberg tips that consist in these only subtle clues. But the icebergs are always below the surface with far more girth than we see.

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that beneath the term mental illness there is a complicated web of things that we don’t fully understand, and that affect us well beyond the surface issues that we are forced to deal with when we can no longer suppress them, and it is these we are unwilling to talk about in the academy – perhaps for good reason – because were we to see them clearly, they would terrify us.

Another way of putting this is that the way we deal with mental illness on campuses is by tricking ourselves into the belief that it is a small thing that can be cured very easily. I can understand this impulse – most of us who have experienced mental illness know viscerally the reasons for such a fear and such measures against it – but this really means we end up with a system that favors “treatable” cases and silently weeds out those affected in the most deep and complex ways, those who may not even know how to look for help. Yes, there are systems in place, but my own experience, when helping a friend once deal with a diversity service office regarding depression, is that such administrative offices want a plan rather than an inexplicable mental illness. They want timelines and charts and goals, exactly the sort of things students can’t do WHEN THEY ARE DEPRESSED. If students could fit neatly into this administrative model, they would not have nearly so much trouble working, which would mean they would not need diversity services in the first place. And then there are the signs. Cartoony signs, advertising that all you need to do is talk to someone and it will be better. It may be. It may not be. Both are possibilities, and because mental illness is as much a mystery as it is something we know about and control, this isn’t a promise one can make. My friend felt as if the signs were mocking her – promising something and then offering help that may be no help at all.

And yes, of course, it is assumed that things like diversity services are not there to take care of the root problem – that’s what doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are for. Except progress with these specialists varies. When we break bones, some breaks are more serious than others, and some require more drastic surgery or long term treatment. Having policies in place that assume someone can just get mental illness “fixed” ignores this fact – that each case, while having a number of general things in common with other cases, will also be unique according to environment, personality type, friendships, and the skill of the doctor etc. To further the comparison, it would be a lie to put up posters saying that, if you suffer from broken bones, all you need to do is see a doctor and that doctor will categorically fix it. It depends on the break. It depends on how much strength you have. It depends on what medicines you may or may not be allergic too. And you may never fully recover. You might get somewhat better, but you might always walk with a limp.

Then what should we do? I suggest we should do what universities have always been good at doing when not infected by utilitarianism, whether modern or ancient – stand in the presence of complexity and allow it to be complex where it is complex, silent where it is silent, simple where it is simple, and articulated where it is articulated. Don’t come up with a theory to try to “contain” the problem. Instead, let the problem be the thing you are looking at. Because this is one thing I have learned – about my own mental illness – from university, that is, from those gracious persons in the midst of a less caring system willing to teach me what academics is really all about. It is not about having all the answers. It is about listening – and listening carefully – to the problems, whether these are pieces of literature, scientific equations, historical data, or – yes – mental illness. The academy has driven home for me the absolute necessity of being quick to listen and slow to speak. It has not “fixed” my mental illnesses, nor is it its business to do so. But it has taught me some things about them. And most curiously, the places I have learned these things are not from promotional posters or services promoting awareness and implemented into the system. Rather, I have learned these things because various people at the university taught me how to listen. I can only – for my own sake and that of fellow sufferers – wish that those in charge of access and diversity etc. would learn a similar lesson. We have become so used to shouting that we have forgotten how to shut up and listen – and when we pause for a brief moment and claim that we have heard everything there is to hear, we overlook things because we have not been patient; we have not given it enough time.

Is it difficult to do academics with a mental illness? Yes. But I suggest the problem isn’t so much academics as what the academy has become – indeed, if there is a place in society where complexity (of mental and other varieties) can and should be acknowledged and not forced into prepackaged boxes, the university is where it should be. But we have lost our sense of mystery, of standing in awful silence before the complexity of the thing, whatever that thing might be – and with it we have lost our sense of compassion and love.

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.

What If The Coin is a Multi-Sided Die, and What If Reactionaries Have Stories Too?

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Anxiety, Catholicism, Dinner Party, G. K. Chesterton, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Orthodoxy, Reactionary, Scrupulosity

I too wish to welcome our new blogger to the table, even if she may insist there is no table because this is not a dinner party. I also think that it is worth noting the personality difference between myself and Chinglican – faith is not woven out of a single personality type – because it helps explain what I am going to say here. Chinglican, I think, is fairly optimistic about things; I am fairly pessimistic. Where Chinglican looks at the gates of the city lifting their heads in joy, I notice how silent the streets of the city lie. Both perspectives are Biblical and reflect reality, and are a matter of emphasis within Christian tradition. But since we have had an appreciation of what has proven to be a very popular post, I would like to add, as irenically as possible, a number of caveats. But first I need to get kind of personal.

I am a stay-at-home father. One of my favorite classes in my undergraduate degree was my feminist literary theory class. And I do a good portion of the cooking in our house, if perhaps not always a good job. Iterating these things is not a matter of boasting – I mean, someone has to do them, and it is no more or less commendable just because it happens to be me. But I do say it because I am attracted to Catholicism, and I hope these instances are enough to demonstrate that some people want to become Catholic for reasons other than that they want their wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

Are some people attracted to Catholicism for this reason? Certainly; I have no doubt about it, just as I have no doubt that some (both male and female) who embrace the kind of open-mindedness-sans-authority proposed in the “Two Sides of the Coin” post do so on account of a non-committal attitude, a desire to run away when it all falls apart rather than go down with the ship. Much can be said about this attitude: extremists will point to it as the attitude their extremism is addressing even while missing its remedy; and modern liberals nurse it in forgetting that it is not commitment in the mind, but commitment in the gut, that at the end of the day determines where our loyalties lie. But in any case, it is not my purpose here to accuse Not A Dinner Party of this attitude – only to note that, for every visceral reaction that can be raised against close-mindedness, I have one that can be raised against the lack of radical loyalty – commitment – in our society.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that neither certainty nor uncertainty has inherent worth; it really all depends what one is being (un)certain about and how this is practiced. Because we are well into postmodernity, the problem most evident to us – and therefore less dangerous than the other – is the problem of a certainty that curtails complexity. This, it seems to me, is the target of Not a Dinner Party’s post. But I think there is also a problem of uncertainty; let me explain, with the aid of G. K. Chesterton and my own experience.

As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have OCD, nicknamed the doubting disease. Basically this means that, whereas others can feel the difference between a reasonable and an unreasonable doubt, there are many areas in which I cannot, at least on the usual internal cognitive basis used by most people. To take a common example, imagine someone who repeatedly checks the door to see if it is locked. What is driving this person is the recurring doubt that, when he checked it last time, he may have missed something. So he doubts; some specialists would say it is because the person with OCD lacks a certain kind of kinetic memory – whereas in others, their body itself would remember performing the action of locking the door or checking or whatever, the person with OCD lacks this capacity. Moreover, the person with OCD cannot tell differences between the magnitude of the matters he is worrying about; whether you tell him the world is about to end or that he may not have locked the car door, it will feel to him much like the same thing, because in fact no one can prove to him with a hundred percent certainty that his failure to lock the door will not in fact lead to the end of the world, or whatever he happens to love most. You see, the person with OCD has a very open mind. He can imagine all sorts of things, and is in many ways the model of what the new atheists seem to think they want to be – a doubter unchecked by any unverifiable boundaries or assumptions. Give him a space of time long enough and he will deconstruct the universe.

What is interesting is that this experience corresponds exactly to what G. K. Chesterton describes in Orthodoxy when he talks about the connection between the rationalism and madness. I know what it is to experience both, and I know the terror involved. And I know the only way out is through trust – of other persons and other institutions, that may perhaps be sane – of course the tricky part is determining who to trust and why. Intriguingly enough, this process – a process involving navigating multiple ways of knowing (such as that of fairyland) – is in some ways quite postmodern, and it attempts to evaluate truth via multiple means beyond a simple modernity-driven reason. So we actually have a paradox here – a desire for certainty that in fact invites us to broaden our definitions of what certainty might look like, or at the very least our understanding of the horizons to which we might look.

But, you will say, this is all well and good when you are talking about OCD, but what about “real life?” Not everyone (thank God) has OCD. True. But because I don’t think that anything evil can exist without being parasitic on something good, I would suggest this: mental illness is a parasitic totalization of a particular human trait removed from its proper context. Moreover, I would suggest that there is a delicate balance between biological determinism and free will. God help us if we ever forget the biological side, as so many Christians do when they tell their brothers and sisters to just “get over it.” Yet context, environment, and habit also have their place, and I do think it almost possible to diagnose entire societal aurae with these categories as well as single people. I wonder in fact if it is not possible that postmodern society itself has a bit of a case of OCD, with its stubborn insistence on an unachievable level of certainty that it must obtain before making any kind of commitment – which ends in apathy or anxious inaction.

If this is the case, it means that the desire for certainty so heavily critiqued in Not A Dinner Party’s piece is a pathology sprung from starvation. Always only offered the choice between a shiny liberal ideology and a basic human desire for trust fetishized as absolute certainty, people usually choose the former, but there is still an innate human hunger for trust and commitment that goes far beyond the Enlightenment fetishization, and when that part of the human is starved for too long, humans become ready to devour anything to get it, most prominently other humans. A starving person may raid a dumpster to try to fill his stomach. No, this is not the most sensible of behavior, and yes, it is reactionary and not the kind of thing one would contemplate in a comfortable middle class armchair. But simply calling the behavior reactionary seems to me to miss the point a bit. It would be better to offer a meal. But it is easier for us to live with our consciences if we reduce these people to mere “reactionaries” such that we don’t actually have to deal with them.

Of course, the analogue breaks down at various points, and I would suggest that the person stumbling upon Catholicism in this way is rather like the hungry person going off on his own, half crazed, and finding a feast in an abandoned warehouse that everyone mistakenly thought was inhabited by thieves. One hopes that, as he eats and drinks, his behavior might become somewhat less desperate and crazed, but this takes time – the day he found the feast that saved his life is kind of important, even if he sometimes gets carried away in being zealous about it, and maybe for a long time emphasizes the wrong parts of it. But calling him a reactionary is a sure way to kill any potential discussion.

You see, for all I have said about being unlike such reactionaries in my attraction to Catholicism, there is a part of me that wants to stand with them – not to condone categorically their perspectives, but because few other people will, and because I have to acknowledge Christian brothers and sisters even when they are still working things out. I know what it is to be on the other side of the “reactionary” charge. I am a fairly conservative Christian myself. I come from the Prairie provinces of Canada, and know what it is to have bishops come from Toronto to fix the non-progressive “backwardness” of prairie folk. When I first entered my Doctoral program at UBC, I think the leader of our cohort’s Intro to the Doctoral Program nearly fell out of his chair when I said that I had at one point wanted to be a medical missionary. And to put icing on the cake, I was home-schooled. From Kindergarten through Grade 12. The target I have painted on my back should be fairly clear by now.

And what I always wanted to say about these things – particularly about being home-schooled – is that there may be more to me than you think. But if there is, it is certainly a part of me you are not going to get to know (let alone advise) because your first step has been to provoke my defenses. If all I am to you is a backward, conservative, homeschooled Christian, that is how you have decided to see me, and I am not going to expend energy to disabuse you of that, because one has to pick one’s battles, and frankly, it is exhausting. So I know what it is to be thought of as the resident reactionary – what’s more, in some of the things I have said in this post, I have probably done little more than bolster these assumptions. But if you hear one thing, hear this: what the reactionary you so despise needs is not more arguments. What he or she needs is to see you love him or her as a Christian, as a human – such people need to see that your degree of love outweighs all your spite. A tall order, yes, and one which I myself don’t live up to. But I do think it is a Christian Thing. Something about loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you – even when they also happen to be fellow Christians.

Once More With(out) Feeling: OCD as an Amplifying Factor in Thinking About Matters of Faith

Tags

Anxiety, Catholic, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Faith, God, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

Today I want to talk about the elephant in the room. That would be OCD. It plays a factor in all of what I’ve said, and it is only fair to address this. The factor it plays works in multiple ways.

First, the doubt and fear I have felt recently is something I haven’t felt quite so strongly since high-school, when I went through a very severe period of OCD, severely doubting simultaneously (it will sound odd) whether Christianity was true and whether I had in fact done the right things (e. g. prayed the proper prayer, been devoted enough etc.) to be a Christian. As with most OCD fears, my experience was based on fears that are in some situations valid, but that were amplified and made ubiquitous by OCD. It is, for instance, not an unusual thing for those who grow up in a Christian context to have doubts about their faith at some point, and about whether they are in fact Christian because they believe it or are just going along with their family. Usual, yes, but as I pointed out to a psychiatrist once when he asked how I knew it was OCD, it is not usual to be so caught up in one’s mind that one can’t even participate in regular conversation. It is not usual to hole oneself up in one’s room to replay a loop – an unanswerable loop that will in fact find chinks in any and every potential answer to all questions, no matter how absurd. It is to be afflicted with doubting for its own sake (it is not for no reason they call it the doubting disease), rather than in fact looking for something. They say that at the root of OCD is an inability to live with uncertainty, that is, to proceed (as most people do without realizing it) taking a certain amount of things for granted and being okay going what seems most plausible rather than waiting for 100% certainty to act (compulsions are attempts to neutralize and gain control over the uncertainty). People don’t realize how much trust and faith they exercise daily in living their everyday lives, how much they take for granted. And it is right that they should. But when you have OCD, you can’t. Every moment and every site is an instance whereupon the world hangs. And theologically speaking it may be so. But those without OCD are able to blessedly let God or fate or whatever they believe in worry about that for them. With OCD, the fate of everything rests on one’s shoulders. And that is presumably why, in the prior posts, the question has emerged so urgently, and why it has been the thing I obsess about day and night, often to the detriment of things I ought to pay attention to. This, I want to be clear, is not a function of the validity of the question or the matters I am dealing with (I have written an entire doctoral dissertation haunted by the OC mentality, and it does not I think invalidate what I have argued – just makes it much harder to know the difference between real, valid criticisms and that of my fiercest and most false critic, my mind). For those staunch supporters of the Reformation who want to simply explain away what I have said on grounds of madness, I will here note that Luther, an instrumental figure in the Reformation, very probably had OCD. So it cuts both ways. I will not explain the Reformation away as merely a function of OCD if you will do me the favor of not explaining me away.

The OCD amplifying factor is perhaps most relevant in understanding my first post on these matters. OCD makes it hard for me to tell the difference between the Evangelical church as it exists and the Evangelical theology my OCD latched onto and warped into tyrannical torture. Was I so very attacked, or was my brain attacking me? And if my brain was attacking me, was it doing so on its own, or simply amplifying a real fear or danger in Evangelical culture? To make the converse of the Luther parallel again, the number of hits on that post do suggest that writing it was a little like climbing a blind staircase and reaching out to a rope for support, and finding that the rope rang a bell that everyone recognized. OCD or not, I seem to have hit on something.

But there are also other factors of OCD involved, and this is where I do think one can identify more of a problem in Evangelical theology. It has taken a long while for me to be able to articulate this, but part of my brand of OCD involves a fear of emotional/spiritual contamination. One knows the horrors in one’s own head – particularly when one suffers from intrusive thoughts – and one knows the potential for perverted intentions and manipulation – and one knows that even the best of us may fall prey to these. And so, from childhood onward, one of the deepest things I have wrestled with is how to relate to others. More typical contamination fear in OCD involves fear of spreading germs and diseases to others – the compulsion that follows the obsession usually involves a ridiculous standard of cleanliness and an avoidance of others (if you avoid others you cannot make them sick – at least until OCD dissolves even this certainty). This is me, but on an emotional and spiritual level. As a human being I have, like all others, an innate desire to connect with people, in friendship and in love. And in my worst OCD moments I refrain as far as possible because I do not want to ruin it. I do not want to ruin the people I love around me. I do not want to manipulate or use them. I do not want to think of them in improper ways. And so I avoid. There is a sense in which I can in fact be physically present with people and emotionally/spiritually absent, or as absent as is possible, my mind clenched in a tight little ball of control.

And this, I suppose, is where I will take Evangelicalism to task, and this for its individualism. From what I can tell in my experience of it, community is allowed and encouraged for those who have a taste for it, those who are extroverted or make friends easily. But it is not enough of a tenet of faith to be enforced. That is, there is not a spiritual duty to seek out those on the sidelines, who are isolated, and ensure they are participating in the community of the church. Faith, for Evangelicals, at the end of the day depends on one’s personal – where personal is understood as individual – relationship with God, and, at the end of the day, community is not part of salvation economy – we are left alone with God on our knees, and expected to do anything – whether the community agrees or not – that we feel God wants us to do (and if you protest that we are not left quite alone – we have the Bible – well, OCD unguided by tradition can do very funny things with that as well). And very often these things we feel God wants us to do – crazy from all normal perspectives – belong in fact to the voice of OCD in our heads. The person with OCD is left alone before a God he or she can’t see clearly, and out of respect for personal piety, no one will pry into them and help them to be real Christians, to experience real grace.

And this is where I see, at least in its ideal form (practical may be a different matter), the Catholic church being an improvement. Christ’s grace is mediated through the Church, and this, far from being a dilution of faith, is a way of supplanting that other mediator – our personal spirituality, our minds, our OCD – and making sure we are actually Christian. You will understand how desperate I am for such salvation if you consider my position; take whatever passion, reason, and imagination you may find in my writing, amp it up about ten times, and then imagine it fueled by a boundless ferocity and viciousness toward a particularly unfortunate target. Now imagine that you are that target, and how that might feel. And now realize that I, in fact, become such a target daily, a target of my own most deadly weaponry. Let me introduce my traveling companion, OCD. Please to meet him; can you guess his name?

There are two relevant Chesterton quotes that I have been particularly thinking about lately. One is from the biography of Thomas, where he suggests that the beauty of Thomas’s incarnational theology is that it saves people from their own spirituality. I understand this, and it is in fact a very important aspect of the Church even before Aquinas – part of the Church’s uneasiness about eremitic monasticism emerged from this very problem – crazy people like me going off into the desert for reasons only masquerading as God-inspired, and unguided by the tempering factor of community.

The other Chesterton quote I am reminded of is his observation that the Church is like a detective that hunts down people and finds out their sins, not to condemn them, but to forgive them. This is what I need. I need a church that is a hunter, relentless as a hound, that will pursue me to the utter reaches of hell and batter my heart till the fortress falls. And I’m not sure how many ecclesiologies are strong enough to do this. Certainly, a church is weakened in this regard just to degree that it is not bound to the heavy and ponderous battering ram of tradition with Scripture glowing at its core. And though I am still having trouble explaining to others this next matter on anything other than grounds of desperate hunger, I want a church with the full package. Seven sacraments. A Mary blessed among women and called blessed by all generations (an assertion strangely not accepted by most alleged Biblical “literalists”). A full set of the communion of saints. And a real presence in the Eucharist (this IS my body) that I can not only appreciate in the experience of communion, but that I can also adore. Because the gates of hell are strong gates indeed, and they are very deeply embedded in me, and salvation can be nothing less than a full assault on these gates with all the forces available – material, spiritual, and otherwise – in heaven and on earth. Indeed, I even imagine that many Evangelicals and Protestants reading this are right now agreeing with me and wondering why I would have to be Catholic to think this. I may not, but I am not sure that it can come out of any other imaginative matrix than Catholic tradition infused to saturation with Scripture.

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

Tags

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.

Ecclesiastes, OCD, and the Horror of Infinite Possibility

Tags

dissertation, Ecclesiastes, editing, Education, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

“Imagine infinite possibility.” The phrase reads like an advertising slogan. But as with many such phrases, people should be careful what they wish for. As someone with OCD I can and do imagine infinite possibility – and it is terrifying. A normally functioning brain sorts for us which possibilities we should pay attention to and which to ignore. The OCD brain doesn’t. For instance, when one locks a door, the normally functioning brain assumes it will stay locked. But the brain with OCD has an uncensored imagination. What if I accidentally bumped it and it came unlocked? Maybe I forgot to check to make sure it was locked for real? I heard a sound and maybe it was the cat brushing against the door which would have jiggled the door loose. And why does it matter? Because if the door is unlocked and someone breaks into the house you are responsible for what happened, and so if you don’t check – again and again and again – you are irresponsible and don’t care about the people around you. Infinite possibility is a little like the island of dreams in Lewis’s Dawn Treader. It seems like a good idea until you remember that you have nightmares. And when the nightmares, even the most implausible of them, feel as possible as the far fetched rituals that one imagines to deal with them, then any situation becomes a potential source of terror – it is disconcerting to, for instance, be slicing an onion and suddenly be afraid of poking someone’s eyes out. Imagine the infinite possibilities of things you can do with a knife. And if you imagine feeling like you are as liable to do one as the other, you will know what OCD feels like. Removing the trigger (in this case, a knife) is no good. Were we bound in a nutshell, that nutshell would simply become fodder for our bad dreams. Where there is consciousness, there is always room for the malignant creativity of OCD.

But all this is preamble to what I really wanted to talk about today. In part I want to talk about it because it has come to my attention that some of the things I have said here about ocd have been helpful to others. Also, there is the more selfish part of me that hopes writing it out will somehow break its spell over me. What I want to write about is the process of writing and editing a dissertation.

Because, you see, in every sentence and every paragraph there is infinite possibility. To put something one way is to not put it any number of other ways, and what if one if those other ways is a more perfect way to put it? And then there are sources. Titles and databases take one a certain distance. But what about those misleadingly titled papers that seemingly have nothing to do with one’s paper, but by happenstance contain a golden paragraph that you could not find except by following up the vaguest of possible references? One’s bibliography gets filled up with these and becomes useless because one can’t distinguish the wheat from the chaff. The ever looming possibility that one might find something of use in the most unlikely places places on one the infinite burden of being aware of everything, so that one throws up one’s hands in despair and wishes to be aware of nothing. This to be sure is not something I feel with all writing; unofficial writing (like this blog) or drafts are fine. But the closer I come to finality (in this case, my finished dissertation) the more terror I feel at the prospect of choosing final words that I commit to stand by.

The psychologically proper thing to do, of course, is to identify experiences of OCD and do what a hypothetically “reasonable man” would do, but it remains hard to question my work enough to edit properly without overdoing it and questioning everything entirely. And I wish I could better grasp the point of Ecclesiastes.

The latter statement might sound odd, but I often like to imagine that the Ecclesiast had something like OCD. What is lacking cannot be numbered. The frustration of eternity – infinite possibility – is set in our hearts so that we are boggled even by the smallest of things. The mundane becomes terrifying: men start at the sound of a bird. There is no end of toil. The books to read are endless and much study is a weariness of the flesh. And the Ecclesiast can’t even come up with something final to say – there are positions to be clarified and caveats to be made. In fact, someone else must step in and finish the book for him, for his thoughts are cyclical and as endless as the rivers that flow into the sea. This of course may be a highly implausible and fantastic interpretation, but I keep wondering if there might not be something to it. It would after all be a great relief to find that all was vanity – in the sense discovered by Anne Bradstreet – and that one could treat a final draft with as cavelier an attitude as this blog post. It might, in fact, even look a little like grace.

Fear in a Handful of Dust: Christianity and OCD

Tags

Anxiety, Christian, Christianity, God, Jonah, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Phillip Cary

I have in the past written articles and blog posts about mental illness in general and depression in particular. Though some have thanked me for my courage, I have in these instances very often chosen the easy route, by only talking about depression. For, though depression is often debilitating, misunderstood, and stigmatized, it is in my experience often the “easy” mental illness to talk about. I say “in my experience” because I don’t want to make presumptions about other people’s experiences talking about depression, nor do I want to create the impression that there is something inferior in what they say. I do know, though, that I somehow feel like I can talk fairly openly about depression with people and still feel normal in a way I can’t as much with my OCD.

For those who are not familiar with it, the best way of describing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is that it is like a malfunctioning fire alarm – instead of going off when there is a fire, it goes off in response to all kinds of things – and every time it goes off, the same level of panic and anxiety is caused that non-OCD people would experience upon hearing a real fire alarm. So, in the most stereotypical instance of OCD, the person washing his/her hands over and over is receiving a signal like that of someone who has in fact handled dangerous materials, or who washes his/her hands in preparation for an operation. Of course, there is much more to OCD than this stereotype; often sufferers can get similar messages fearing that they will hurt a loved one, either physically or sexually; often they can develop rituals for dealing with these fears that even they know make no sense even as they find themselves repeating them over and over again.

In any case, this is something I have had since I was a child, and what I would like to begin to do is talk about it from a Christian perspective, since little has been done in this area – though I expect talking about it from a Christian perspective must begin with simply learning to talk about it. In my childhood, I experienced all kinds of obsessions and compulsions, which often changed and migrated as I grew up. I did go through a period of hand washing, but I would like to talk about some of the lesser known symptoms. I would, for instance, have a deep fear of having accidentally glared at someone. You might wonder why this would be a problem. It was a problem because I was a good Christian. You see, I was supposed to be a good witness for Christ. And if I glared at someone, they might not like it and might not become a Christian and then they would go to hell and it would be my fault. Bad theology, yes. Bad logic, yes. And I knew it, at least in part – I wasn’t dumb. But the curse of OCD is that even if you can’t explain the obsession and compulsion reasonably to someone else, it is the other person who doesn’t understand. The OCD person knows in his heart that every inch of the universe is laced with hidden traps set for those who do not take care – and OCD makes you take care, over and over and over again. There can even be fear in a handful of dust.

There were of course other things. Fear of committing the unforgivable sin. The need to repeat every word in my head slowly when I read silently – otherwise I would be lying if I told someone I had read the book in its entirety. Intrusive sexual and violent thoughts that conjured up whatever was most abhorrent to me and flashed it across my brain. The inability to look at people directly for fear of looking at them sexually.

The difficult thing of course was that the Christian culture I was in played right into the hands of my OCD. I was praised for having a sensitive conscience, and when people are dealing with children and teens, the least of their concerns are those who behave extra well – why question it when I was clearly (from the outside) a model child, student, and Christian.

And then there were the issues made particularly bad by two aspects of the Evangelical culture I was in. The first was the expectation that God works in unexpected and bizarre – often arbitrary – ways. I was used to testimonies of people who would do something very crazy-sounding and it would somehow end up being a way of sharing the gospel or something like that. Such stories gave infinite license to my OCD – sure my compulsion didn’t sound reasonable, but what if the impulse was from God working in a very mysterious dose of the wisdom of God which is foolishness to the world?

The second issue was the push to “find God’s will for your life.” Phillip Cary has recently addressed the problems with Evangelical treatment of this issue in his recent Good News for Anxious Christians – you can read about it here or at the blog of my good friend Captain Thin. However, Phillip Cary had not written his book when I was growing up and my OCD might have mistrusted it anyway. In any case, there was always the sense that one was supposed to find God’s will for one’s life – not generally in terms of actually living what the Bible and Church say, but something very specific and particular. Of course, for me with my OCD, my fear was always that I would blink and miss God’s will for my life and then find myself accidentally running away from God like Jonah. And when you put this together with the prior problem, you will see that my conception of God was of someone completely unpredictable who would torment me with his will in undertones so puzzling that if I didn’t pay very close attention, I might miss them – and even if I did I might miss them. This was – and is to a certain extent now – my condition. Medication helps, as has counseling, but the OCD still pops up here and there, in the ceaseless editing of papers and the skin-picking that comes from nervousness.

Though I do not here want to propose a full answer (what answer is there short of heaven?), I do want to offer some preliminary thoughts regarding things I have learned as I journey on with God in the midst of OCD. First, it is not God and it is not faith that is the problem. OCD will latch onto whatever it can get its talons into. If a person is religious, the OCD will take that shape, but it can just as easily manifest in things like the fear of germs – here, one of the deepest fears of modernity replaces the religious fears. My point though is that a Christian with OCD should no more blame Christianity or God for his/her illness than someone afraid of germs should blame the scientist who studies them. The person frightened of germs may not be able to interact with germs as the scientist does, even as the Christian may have to learn creative ways of interacting with God – what is a spiritual solace for some can become a tormenting hell for those with OCD.

And these are a few of the things I have learned as I go along, and I impart them in the hope of helping other Christians who have OCD. Christian tradition and the communion of saints are your best friends. You see, when your smoke alarm – your conscience and sensitivity – is broken, you will feel guilty about doing anything other than crawling under a rock and dying, though you’d feel bad about that too because it would be suicide. So you need to look at people whose consciences and spiritual sensitivities are working and learn from them. Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (and this verse incidentally is quoted as a prefatory to the great cloud of witnesses), so where we cannot see with our own hearts – where our own hearts will only tell us tormenting lies – we need to act in faith and model ourselves after Christ’s body as encounter it in the institution of the church. The fleshiness and embodiedness of the church is very important here, because it is less subject to the abstractions favored by OCD. One of the best pieces of advice one of my priests gave me was to pray the prayer book aloud with no repeating regardless of what happens. The church is that scary place where we speak – and speak to God even – without rehearsing; the liturgy is not a staged show we rehearse for, but a participation – no room for edits.

Second, God is not the niggling voice in your head. I learned this after a long time of hearing others talk about God and reading the Bible and reading Christian literature. God is not an arbitrary trickster waiting for you to make the wrong move. Sometimes it feels like that, as it did to Job. But our knowledge of Christ, the self revelation of God, shows Job’s experience to be an encounter with only the fringes of God. At his very heart God is love, and not the merciless voice I hear in my head. God is reasonable. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, we offer ourselves to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice. By suggesting that God is reasonable we do not mean that he is respectable or not surprising or containable in the little box of human reason. Rather, what we mean is that God is trustworthy in the same way that the created world is trustworthy. If I drop something on the ground and then pick it up, I am generally in the habit of trusting that, were I to drop it again, it would fall to the ground rather than float into the sky. In the same way, I can trust the love of God to be the same yesterday, today, and forever, and can trust that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is also the God I worship. I can learn to trust God in the same way I learn to trust the rules that govern a reasonable world made by him, and I can rely on this trust conveyed by others when my own reason goes haywire. Perhaps this is why I find comfort in documents like Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, which opens with the bold statement: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”