Do I, or Anyone I Know, Have a Mental Illness?

By amazon Wednesday, November 20, 2019 Comment Edit

My hope is that we in the church can understand wounds of the soul well enough that we move beyond the stigma we have associated with “mental” illness.

“I have a mental illness.”

This statement is at the same time true and misleading, helpful and unhelpful.

It is a statement that evokes feelings of discomfort for those who say it and for those who hear it.

And it is a statement that often raises many questions that are not easy to ask, and sometimes very difficult to answer.

I am a college professor, a clinical psychologist, and I have served as a minister in the church; and “I struggle with mental illness.” As you may have just noticed, I changed the words I used from “have” to “struggle with.”

The reason is that words matter. They matter because they reveal how we understand extremely complex realities like the ones we call “mental illness.”

To say “I have” suggests that I possess something or that something that wasn’t mine is now mine. This is a helpful word to use when we think of many medical conditions that involve an invasion of the body by something foreign. For example, I might say “I have the flu” in which case I mean that my body has been invaded by a virus that wasn’t there and is now there—something I “caught” from someone else.

This is not the case with the conditions we call mental illness. I cannot “catch” them from someone else, and they do not describe a virus or bacteria that has invaded my body.

Rather, mental illnesses are names we give to clusters of symptoms that seem common to people in certain circumstances. Some of those circumstances are linked more to a person’s genetic inheritance and some to their environment and life story; however, most often they involve a combination of multiple factors.

That is why it is much more ...