Blog

  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.