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  People who live with the difficulties created by Bipolar Disorder have to confront some of the most demanding and harrowing of human experiences, and absorb into their being the pain and desolation it can cause. Describing or explaining to others such complex and disruptive symptoms can be helpfully negotiated in some of those very helpful practical books aimed at helping sufferers or carers to cope. Then there are the more objective and descriptive accounts, packed with information and practical advice. But then there are the biographies and autobiographies which become significant personal testimony, brought back from those dark and dangerous territories of psychological and psychic disturbance, and which deserve our compassion, our admiration and not a milligramme of patronising critique.

It may be that in understanding such a difficult and complex illness we need all three style of writing- ‘the how to cope with’, ‘the how to understand the nature of’ and ‘the what it feels like from the inside’. This book is a bit of each, but its importance is in the autobiographical narrative within which the personal impact of severe mental ill health is described, its personal implications thought through from a theological and pastoral perspective, and clear advice given as to how to support, accompany and care for the person suffering from Bipolar Disorder.

Kathryn Greene McCreight is unflinching in her steady gaze at the multi-faceted reality of her condition. Depression as mental illness – yes. Mania as euphoric loss of control and accountability, yes. Feelings of suicide and fear of life yes. Anxiety about possible treatments, and long terms effects, yes. Dependence on the love, reliability and sheer dogged love of those closest, yes indeed. A lifetime of medication, therapy and lifestyle changes, yes, that too.

  But also she faces the pain of theological probing. What is the connection between her mental suffering and God? What is a human being, a human mind, the nature of that deepest core of the self we call the soul and how does mental illness cut so deeply into a person’s sense of self, and self worth? What is God up to? And what about suffering and sin? Is there any way of understanding how various forms of human brokenness fit together? Other thoughts are shared about despair, the dark night of the soul, the hiddenness of God – these aren’t dealt with at length, or in theological depth; which isn’t to say they aren’t dealt with in a deep way. because this is theological autobiography by a woman who has taken her illness, her faith and God with total seriousness and has clarified the hardest questions even if she hasn’t always found the clearest answers. How could she? There are mysteries and enough in a human life, which are in some ways multiplied and  intensified by mental ill health.

Here is one extract amongst many, that is both poignant and important:

I thought I knew who Jesus was. I thought I could sense his presence. But in mental illness, I weep like Mary, "They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him." My presuppositions about the love of the Lord have been turned upside down. my brain, my cognition and my memory can’t find Jesus. Only my soul itself is safe in the Lord, without my awareness. (page 111)

The last section of the book is required reading for those who want to be of help, and avoid venturing uninformed advice or offering theological superficialities. Staying too long on a hospital visit, the importance of Scripture and a Daily Office, the difficult human hermeneutical task of interpreting other people’s tears and responding non-invasively to what may be a cry of the heart, choosing the right therapy – all are discussed, matter of factly, by one who knows both sides. And a final, and fine chapter on ‘Why and How I use Scripture.’ Tucked away as an appendix, it is a gem of hermeneutical common sense.

This is a good book in several sense of the word. It is well written, honest and drawn like water from a deep well of experience. It is theologically informed and spiritually reflective, allowing the writer to explore the spirituality of her suffering. It is a book that will do good for those who struggle with the ravages of mental illness, and reassures by showing that no human being is defined or devalued by their suffering.

For sixteen pages Kathryn Greene Mccreight writes a first chapter entitled simply, and bleakly, ‘Darkness’. She attempts to describe the inner world of mental ill health, the deprivations that afflict emotional responsiveness, self-confidence, physical appetites, essential relationships. She walks the narrow path between self-pity and understatement of just how bewildering and  threatening depression can be. Throughout her illness she has struggled to ‘make sense of my pain with regard to my life before the triune God..and the apparent incongruity of that pain with the Christian life’.

Sometimes distraction helps, but to constantly know you need to constantly distract yourself is itself both tiring and subversive of the process, because you always remember what it is you have to distract yourself from. And then there is the loneliness. ‘Human love can seem particularly unreliable and fleeting. At times it is unattainable, at others inexpressible, and usually for the depressed human love is unsensed, and indeed nonsense’. Yet she persists against all the emotional and inner sense of love’s absence, to argue at the theological level that the love of God in Christ remains a fact even if all that is experienced is absence.

‘If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that is promised to pull us through, a love that bears out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we, then the statement that love heals depression is in fact the only light that exists in the dark tunnel.’ (page 24)

That is not trite optimism – that is a theologically grounded conviction that acts as a sub-structure to a faith at times searingly tested. And the darkness isn’t only the inner emptiness of a heart scooped clean of hope. There is the mania, the euphoria that threatens to push life beyond control by overspending, dancing wherever, singing loudly whenever. And deciding to be disciplined doesn’t help, ‘mania is almost defined by lack of discipline’.

And so Kathryn tells the story of an illness, which is also her story, and though she would not allow herself to be defined by her illness, there is no doubt that life has had to be lived through it, around it, with it. And that is the truth that Christians need to get clear. Mental ill health is a form of suffering and anguish that requires levels of courage, endurance and sheer resilience often as demanding as, at times more demanding than, many more visible physical conditions with their accompanying pain. What makes this book an important gift to the church is the honesty, courage and theological integrity of the author, whose faith is strong enough to bear the weight of her hardest questions. This is pastoral theology from the edge, the theology of a pastor who is familiar with the edge, and has looked over it, and has come back to speak of what is there with a hopefulness that is theological rather than emotional, and a realism that is both pastorally and personally informed.

Darkness is My Only Companion, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, (Grand Rapids: Brazos press), 176 pages, (Currently £7.91 from Amazon) – review copy courtesy of Brazos Press, for which thanks.

When Martin Luther said ‘Affliction is the best book in my library’, he wasn’t suggesting it was the most enjoyable book to read, but that it was the one from which he learned most. The word ‘affliction’ is now a bit old fashioned, and perhaps not even politically correct as a description of the conditions many people have to learn to live with. That Kathryn Greene-McCreight begins her story with Psalm 88, a Psalm of Lament, she acknowledges, that the condition with which she struggles, bipolar disorder, is an affliction. The title of her book is directly taken from Psalm 88, Darkness is My Only Companion. Throughout the book these words are a recurring motif as she reflects theologically and courageously on the kaleidoscope of dark and glittering colours that have made up her inner life and determined the quality and direction of her outer life.

Bipolar affective disorder, formerly called manic depressive syndrome, is not simply the swing between chronic sadness and temporary elation. It is a profoundly complex mental illness in which several factors are implicated, including neurobiology, chemical imbalance and genetic considerations. Those who live with this condition and those who care for them are aware of how far this condition reaches into the deepest places of human personality, often with disruptive and anguished consequences. That is what makes this book such an important contribution to pastoral theology. This is an honest report from someone whose illness has taken them to those darker more distant corners of human experience, when the impact of the condition seriously challenges those powerful instincts for life, security and the daylight of ‘normality’. And it is written by an Episcopal priest who is a scholar theologian with a PhD from Yale, married, a theological educator, a mother, and thus self-evidently able to include in her life much that would be expected in those without such a serious illness.

But the book is written as a Christian response to mental illness, and as a description of the realities and consequences of such a potentially disruptive condition. She takes on the glib irresponsible (and pastorally insensitive) affirmation of the perennially cheery Christian. And when various well meaning studies on how spirituality reduces the incidence of depression are published by a church seizing on apologetic ammunition because ‘religious people are less depressed, less anxious, and less suicidal than nonreligious people’, she becomes rightly angry and impatient. But her annoyance is channelled again and again in this book into constructive reflection on what it is like to have a mental illness, and also be a person of faith. Here is her own starting point for going public on what it is like to cling to faith in the loving reality of God when her inner world is filled with emotional forces that threaten her very sense of being?

Often those Christians who are  depressed or otherwise mentally ill…feel guilty on top of being depressed, because they understand their depression, their lack of thankfulness, their desperation, to be a betrayal of God. For mentally ill Christians belief in God is no longer objective but becomes subjective, interiorised, and thereby drawn  into the circle of doubt.

And the questions that arise from that circle of doubt are theological, personal, pastoral, and above all crucial, because in seeking to answer them, she is seeking an understanding of God, her faith, her illness and herself that will be to the benefit of the Body of Christ – within which all sorts and conditions of people are to be held, in a love that holds on even when we feel ourselves falling.