Spirituality, Mental Illness, and the Wellness Paradigm

Spirituality has a troubled place in the psychiatrist's office. A recent PsychiatricTimes.com article explores the complex reasons. The discomfort starts in "the traditional psychoanalytic view of religion being almost a culturally sanctioned form of neurosis" and continues through the modern diagnostic schema, "it is not uncommon to have delusions with religious or spiritual elements." While the DSM, the manual that guides diagnosis of psychiatric ailments takes care not to label as delusional any thought that is part of the cultural framework of the patient, this fig leaf seems to beg the question - is the patient's culture built on delusion?

Neurotic or delusional - which would you rather?

Honor the physician

The issue is made thornier by the recent development in Christianity that pits faith against science. And I cannot stress enough - this is a recent (also North American) development. Alas, what was once a minority voice within American Christianity has gained political and cultural power and, in this country at least, threatens to drown out the traditional Jewish and Christian view, as expressed in the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

Honor the physician with the honor due him, according to your need of him, for the Lord created him; for healing comes from the Most High, and he will receive a gift from the king. The skill of the physician lifts up his head, and in the presence of great men he is admired. The Lord created medicines from the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them.

Again alas, not a lot of sensible around these days. I don't even want to give you the link to the page that headlines, Psychiatry is a vicious enemy of Christianity and the Bible. In bold type, no less. One can hardly blame doctors for suspecting those who make them choose between religion and the gifts that God gave them.

Now there are plenty of psychiatrists who recognize this choice to be nonsense, among them one of the psychiatrists interviewed in the article above. While president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, Paul Summergrad "convened a gathering of clergy, other faith leaders, patients, and patient advocates with a group of distinguished psychiatric leaders. [Their] first goal... was to establish a dialogue and recognize common goals. [Their] work group developed a guide for faith-based leaders, which can be found and downloaded... from the APA website. "

A Guide for Faith-based Leaders

This guide has good stuff in it, and I commend it to faith leaders. But there is something about it that bugs me. It bugs me in most stuff that I have read written by people who approach spirituality from a scientific point of view. It is found in their description of wellness.

Wellness means overall well-being. For people with mental health and substance use conditions, wellness is not simply the absence of disease, illness, or stress, but the presence of purpose in life, active involvement in satisfying work and play, joyful. relationships, a healthy body and living environment, and happiness. It incorporates the mental, emotional, physical, occupational, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of a person's life. Each aspect of wellness can affect overall quality of life.

There is a graphic that demonstrates each of these aspects as separate items, presumably of equal weight, with Wellness at the center.

Well, what's wrong with that? I am just not sure that spirituality can be turned into an item among others. I am a priest. Spirituality is my life. But I can't figure out how to use it to promote my wellness. God uses me. I have no idea how to use God. And frankly, I suspect those who do.

Wellness vs. Wholeness

What would that graphic look like if theologians created it? For one, at least for this one, Wellness would not hold central position. Wholeness would. Not exactly the same thing. Wholeness is how to describe spiritual health. It is a translation of the Hebrew shalom or Arabic salaam. It means the kind of peace that comes from completeness and includes the completeness or justice of the community. It does not depend on financial, environmental, nor physical health. How one addresses either presence or lack of financial, environmental, and physical health is a measure of spiritual health.

Doctors are about the business of maximizing wellness. That is their job and, from a spiritual perspective, their calling. That's fine, and this wellness paradigm is fine. Except for the spirituality part. Spirituality is a different paradigm.

Well, I have only stated my starting point here. Perhaps this sounds like nonsense to you? Spirituality is peddled today as something to make you feel good. Okay, let me put it out there. Feeling good, as a life goal, is the goal of a spiritual peanut.

This blogpost will just have to become a book. I would like your help. What are the questions you would like to explore about spirituality and mental illness? Like, can you be whole and mentally ill? Does prayer really work, and how? Does it make a difference what you believe? Add a comment. Thanks.

cartoon from @lectrr

photo of St. Luke (patron of doctors) window by author

shalom graphic from http://theapopkavoice.com/there-is-a-time-to-pray-and-a-time-to-act/

Mental Health First Aid - So You Can Help, That's Why

Mental Health First Aid is to mental illness as CPR is to heart attack.  I discussed mental health first aid in a post a few years ago, and was pleased that a clergy colleague took the training in Iowa, to his great benefit, according to his report.  The training describes major serious mental illnesses and gives strategies for evaluating and responding to crisis situations.  It does not train people to be counselors.  It equips the general public, nonprofessionals to provide emergency assistance, in advance of professional help.

Question: Who Benefits From Mental Health First Aid

This week I attended a NAMI meeting that introduced the training to Central Oregon.  The trainer asked us, Why would somebody want to take MHFA training?  One person said he needs more tools to deal with his family member.  I said it reduces anxiety in a crisis if you know what to do.

My wife later noted our curious perspective.  We described the benefit to those who would take the course.  She countered, the reason to get the training is the same as the reason to get CPR training -- if you know what to do, you can help somebody.  The benefit is to the person who needs your help.

Loneliness is Lethal -- Ayn Rand is Wrong

This I've got mine; screw you thing we have going on in the US today is bad for our health.  John Cacioppo tells the story at a recent TED event in Des Moines, Iowa.

Here is the short version, with direct quotes in italics:

The human species is social.  We are just wired that way.

Michael Hill and Antoinette Tuff: Lesson in Crisis Intervention

On August 20, 2013, at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Georgia
                       -- nobody died.

Tuesday, the first school shooting of the new school year

                       -- didn't happen.

It started the way these things start.  A disturbed young man went off his meds.  He decided he would die that day.  He did what others have done who wanted to die.

Suicide By Cop

Empathy in Health Care

Medical schools are using this video in training. Watch it once just to take it in.

Watch it again.  Which one has schizophrenia?  Which one has bipolar? Which one has PTSD?  Which three are on antidepressants?

Which ones are normal?

Hearts Beat As One

It is common knowledge that we can slow our heart rate by slowing our breathing. Breathe is arguably the most important tool in the whole recovery toolbox for relieving stress and staying in the here and now. The folks in Sweden have taken this data a step further, into building community for common action.

Having taken a leave of absence just as DSM-5 was published, I have a backlog of posts on diagnosis to write. But let's break it up, shall we? This one gets filed under both recovery and political action.

It would take researchers from outside of the United States to think of examining the physiology of a group activity. Swedes, with their solid background in hymn singing, did just that, using group singing as a stand-in for group action.

Silence Kills - The Stigma of Mental Illness

I don't use the s-word.  I hate this title.  I use it only because people who need this post will use it when they google.

I don't use the s-word.  But here it is.

First from Google:

Definition of STIGMA

Noun A mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person: <the stigma of mental disorder>.

Why the Poor Give More

The article that inspired this post is titled Why the Rich Don't Give to Charity.  But I figure, language has power, and why reinforce behavior that I would rather see changed?

Before you go off in a huff, let me tip my hand -- I acknowledge and will discuss both the exceptions and free will.

The short answer to any of these questions, why the poor give more, why the rich don't give, and why some rich do is -- mirror neurons.  Three weeks ago I reported on these in Mirror Neurons - They Change Everything, along with a youtube featuring V.S. Ramachandran.  Here is the promised expansion on the theme.

Statistics on Giving

Ken Stern reports in The Atlantic Magazine that the top 20% of Americans donate 1.3% of their income.  The bottom 20% donate 3.2%.  He asks, What's up with that?

Paul Piff - Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior

We Are On Our Own

Last week I was part of a group that was confronted with a psychiatric crisis in a visitor.  This group had never been called upon in this way.  But among our ranks we had enough experience of psychiatric crisis that:


1) We were determined we would help a stranger; and
2) We knew how to do it.

Part of the story was that inevitable series of telephone calls to offices in 24 hour institutions that were closed.  When flesh and blood was finally located, the response was rude, ineffective and dismissive.

When I debriefed with my therapist, she expected my frustration at calls for help that did not yield help.  That is one of my therapy themes -- a cognitive schema, as a former cognitive therapist called it.  I surprised my new therapist and surprised myself with my response.  No, I didn't expect help.  We are on our own.

Elections and Mental Health

Full disclosure: I am a Christian.  Every baptism I attend, I renew my vow to follow and obey Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.  When I was ordained a priest, I made another vow, to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ.  So that I don't just make it up as I go along, I also vowed to be diligent in the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures.

I'm telling you -- I'm serious about this.

Just so you understand -- that means I am a Christian first, an American second.

When I vote, my faith determines my vote.

In my reading of the Holy Scriptures -- and I read it a lot, and I read the whole thing, and keep reading it to catch things I missed the first and second and twentieth time round -- it is very clear.  According to Jesus and the prophets, a nation will be judged not by the private morality of its citizens, but on how the nation itself treats the most vulnerable in its midst.

When I vote, I am voting for policies that determine how my nation will be judged, because I believe this nation will be judged.  Since this is a democracy, as a citizen, I also bear some responsibility for what happens in this nation, and expect to share in its judgment.  So I am voting for people whose first priorities will be the hungry, thirsty, alien, poor, sick and those in prison.  Because those are the priorities on which we will be judged.  Matthew 25.  Got that?

So I am voting for mental health.  We throw around a lot of words, but behind these words are real people.  I know some of them.  Even if I didn't. I am commanded, by somebody I have vowed to obey, to do for them what I would have done for me.

Medicaid, veterans, parity, research, access to health care, including sufficient professionals to provide mental health services -- there is a lot at stake in this election.  Follow the link to NAMI's What's at Stake in the 2012 elections? for the details.  Then decide who you think has the same priorities as Jesus and the prophets.  I am not assuming anything here, just telling you where I stand.  Maybe you share these priorities, maybe you don't.  But figure it out.

And be honest about it.

Then go vote yourself.

clip art from Microsoft.com

icon of Christ Pantokrator, 6th c. St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, in public domain

Hope for a Cure? Or Not?

But we have to keep hoping for a cure, don't we?

I spent six months preparing a power point presentation on stages of recovery and fifty minutes delivering it.  My co-presenters and I described the misery of the Chemistry Experiment, and the hope offered by other interventions that harness the brain's capacity to heal itself.  Medicine is a piece of the answer, but just not inadequate to carry the whole load of healing.

But DNA operates even deeper in an organization than in an individual.  NAMI was born out of the medical model, when parents who had been wrongly accused of causing their children's illness pushed back and insisted on their innocence.  Mental illness is not caused by distant fathers and overprotective mothers.  Mental illness is a physical illness.

Yes it is.  Whether it arises from chemistry, wiring or structure, it is an illness in the brain, a physical organ, inside a body.

Well, it was a short jump from that insight to the search for a cure, a medical cure.  Because that is what medicine does, it cures physical illness, right?

So there was that question, the NAMI parent's quest for a cure, in response to all our elegant talk about Recovery, the NAMI peer's quest for a life worth living.  Forget Recovery. Don't we have to keep hoping for a cure?

The Garden of Your Mind

Mr. Rogers does with the mind what last week's post with Carl Sagan, Jill Bolte Taylor, et al did with the brain...

Those Who Have Eyes, Let Them See

Yes, I said I was on sabbatical.  But I do have to write.  Like, I do have to breathe.  My facebook page this morning, somebody posted an Ernest Hemingway quote, There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.  I have learned there is more than one way to bleed.  Teresa of Avila's stigmata, by the way, were interior.  Mine (writing) seems better than other alternatives.

So yes, I am on sabbatical.  That means I don't have to post.  I might anyway.  Oh well.

NAMI National Convention 2012

It started with Shepherd.  He stood straight tall.  Life has taken a lot out of him, including a lot of teeth.  But he stood straight tall.  I remember him as a black man, with piercing light blue eyes.  I know that's possible, a black man with blue eyes.  Maybe it isn't true in this case.  My brain really isn't that dependable anymore.  But the piercing part is the most important.  I am so glad I wasn't afraid to look in his eyes.

NAMI Camino - BDNF Meets 5K

Exercise and learning new things -- two of the most powerful tools in the Recovery Toolbox.  They came together in my NAMI Camino, April 28, 2012.

NAMI Walk/NAMI Camino gave you the set up.  NAMI Johnson County held its annual walk/fund-raiser last week, when I was in Costa Rica.  It would be my fourth and last time participating.  But I would be in Costa Rica!  Inspired by the San Diego Walk in 2010, when a battalion in Iraq ran while San Diego walked, I decided to do Johnson County's Walk long distance -- though I would not be running in full battle armor and in the heat of the day.  My extra effort was confined to carrying a laptop to record the event.

With the following results:

So what follows is a series of installments, stopping at each kilometer marker.  This series shows you what you can do with Photo Booth, Youtube, not much skill, and a willingness to experiment.  Everything is reversed, left and right, which won't confuse you unless you are trying to read t-shirts or street signs.

Real Mental Health Advocacy - We Have Begun

Okay, so I just blew away this week's post.  Sigh.

Instead, I will honor the people in Chicago, who have tried every form of education, conversation and persuasion they could devise to convince Mayor Rahm Emanuel not to close six of the city's twelve mental health centers.  Finally, they staged an occupation.  For seven hours, they held the Woodlawn Mental Health Center, while Occupy Chicago gave support from outside the clinic.

They are my heroes.

Read the remarkable details here.  The videos seem to be missing from the text.  Here is the link to the story as recorded in stages on youtube.

NAMI Walk/NAMI Camino

I started a new project today, researching the route for my NAMI Camino.

I Walk For The Mind Of America

April 28 will be my fourth Walk to raise funds for NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).  I have been most gratified by the support from friends who help me give back to this organization that has made such a difference in my life, and hundreds of thousands of others.

History Of NAMI

Since its founding in 1979, by a bunch of uppity Wisconsin women who said There is no such thing as a schizophrenic family; we did NOT cause our children to have this devastating BIOLOGICAL disease, NAMI has been a beacon of light, education, advocacy, and support first to families and then to persons living with mental illness.

My History With NAMI

In my case, Peer to Peer, a 10 week class helped me to understand, come to accept, and learn skills to live with my illness, whatever they think it is this week.

In Memoriam - Mary Kirigin

This is one of my favorite photos of my mother, standing next to my sister Mary.  That smiling mouth agape, as if to say, Can you believe what I get to do now!

I am writing on Monday, in the few minutes before I head over to the Pato Loco for the memorial service, to be followed later by a funeral in Utah.  Not sure about my publication schedule for the next few weeks, and taking personal privilege with the topic.  It's your blog, my doc once said.  So it is.

Mama was a survivor, in the real world, not reality TV world sense of the word.  She was also a public person, and I learned from her how to set a public face, mostly a competent face.  Privately it was more often harried, the face I see in the mirror, more every day.

The thing therapists think you are supposed to say to survivors is Wow!  You are so strong!  Me, I don't care for that line.

God, Tebow and the Problem of Suffering

You know, they could be right.  Maybe God is responsible for Tim Tebow's astounding success.

First, the one take away from this article:  It's not magic-thinking.  It is pattern-seeking, hard-wired into our brains, one of the things our brains are built to do.

I Am A Professional -- Do Not Try This At Home

A whole world of football fans are suddenly theologians, explaining the ways of God.  And how silly for me to caution non-professionals from this endeavor.  Everybody with a frontal cortex is a theologian.  Our brains are built to ask Why?  Everybody with an anterior cingulate cortex looks for patterns that make sense of the events of the world.  That is what the anterior cingulate cortex does.

How is this for a pattern -- A new quarterback about whose talents many have doubts delivers a win.  Somebody sticks a microphone in his face.  He gives glory to God.  Next week, he wins again.  Again he gives glory to God.  Again he wins.  Again he gives glory to God...

And what is with that 316 yards thing?

If this were a baseball player on a streak, it would be the same socks he wears each game.  It's the God-thing that makes people twitchy.  More than that.  If it were basketball, he'd be crossing himself at the free-throw line, and nobody would miss a beat.  But it's the politics of the God-thing that have raised the stakes.

Suddenly people who should know better are doing bad theology.  And people who do know better let their chains get jerked.  I don't except myself here.  Twice a day I write something snarky on Facebook, and have to delete before I post.  (It's a thing I have about public discourse on Facebook.  I try to save my snarkiness for my blog.)

At Prozac Monologues my readers can expect more than snarkiness.  I have to bend the topic a bit.  So here we go.

God Improves Athletic Performance

Really, I'm serious.

Well, in a particular way.  Anybody else have a hometown team whose weekly police report is longer than its injury report?  And the results -- Hawkeyes went where this year?  The Earwax Bowl?

These days a little clean living gives an incredible advantage in the world of collegiate and professional sports.

Now this is not about Tim Tebow.  I don't know anything about his private life.  I do know a lot of athletes flame out on dissolute living, leaving behind only fumes of what had been promising careers.

I also know that some people find their way back.

The Twelve Steps

• We admitted we were powerless over [our addiction] - that our lives had become unmanageable.

• We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

• We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

There are more steps.  These are a start, the part that matters to a mental health blog.

However and why ever they do it, and how seriously they need to work on it, a lot of athletes and a lot of the rest of us could improve our lives by acknowledging a Higher Power.  It's a bottom line sanity issue.  People who think they are the center of the universe have their own DSM code.  It's 301.81.  But they aren't in therapy.  Those closest to them are.

No, you don't have to be a Christian, religious, not even spiritual but not religious to work the Steps.  I heard somebody used gravity for his Higher Power.  Like I said -- I am not the center of the universe is a bottom line sanity issue.

Tim Tebow's Higher Power

Again, I know nothing about the man's private life, and less than nothing about his heart.  But to the extent that his publicly professed Christianity conforms to orthodox Christianity, and by that I mean not making it up as we go along, I do believe the claim that his athletic prowess comes from God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth who delights in creation and said of it, It is good.  We have something in common here, Tim Tebow and me.  We each believe that God delights in us.  Well, I am willing to be a little less specific about the details.

If nothing else, think of this also as a comparative claim.  If he thought it was all about him, he would be at greater risk to flame out, and thereby not be able to complete as many passes as he does manage to complete.

Of course, there has to be somebody to catch those passes.  Writing now as a one-time Bronco fan, I wish I heard him say more about his receivers and his left guard.  He might make a better spokesperson for the Lord if it didn't seem like his personal miracle.

Alert: Rocky Shoals Of God-Talk Ahead

So far, I have been in the realm of orthodox theology, not making it up as I go along.

Everybody is a theologian.  The advantage of professional status is that you recognize the potential shipwreck before you get there.

Oops.  Too late.

A status update from a Facebook friend Sunday night: This is what happens when God is in charge!

Pastor Wayne Hanson, Summit Church, Castle Rock Colorado said, It's not luck.  Luck isn't winning 6 games in a row.  It's favor, God's favor... God has blessed his hard work.

So... how about 19 games in a row?  Was that luck?  What happens if the Broncos make it through this weekend and next, and Tim Tebow comes up against Aaron Rodgers, who also happens to be a stand-up kinda guy?  Not to mention one hell of a quarterback.  Will that be about God's favor?

The Problem of Suffering

I think what really drives people nuts, including a lot of Christians of the orthodox/not making it up as we go along variety, is this:

While God was blessing Tim Tebow's hard work on Sunday afternoon, 720 children around the world died of hunger.  270 people committed suicide.  Two of them, by the way, were veterans of the United States Armed Forces.

That was before overtime.  Good thing overtime was short, huh?

So on Monday morning, nearly 1000 mothers were asking, If God could help Tim complete that pass, couldn't he have paid some attention to my child?  Billions still listen for their answer.

This is not a question to be answered blithely.  We have to put football, even America to the side.

See, we have been here before, trying to find the pattern.  That is what our brains do, search for patterns, notice anomalies, then respond to new information.

There is one pattern we really, really want to find, that good is rewarded and evil is punished.  For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.

That's from Psalms.  And to some extent, we do find evidence to confirm the claim.  Usually people who treat their spouses right have happy marriages.  Or at least happier than their marriages would be if they were out running around at night, coming home drunk and violent.

This pattern gives us a way to arrange our own behavior to get outcomes we desire, which is a good thing, and the evolutionary purpose of the development of this capacity.

This is from Psalms, too: I have been young and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging for bread.

720 mothers whose children died of hunger while the Broncos pulled out that squeaker against the Steelers would beg to differ.  All you have to do is turn the channel to CNN to find that pattern disrupted.

The Bible Knows Better

Well, if you actually read the whole Book, and read it several times, over different times in your life, so you have a wider experience that helps you catch things you missed the first time round, you discover that the Bible says some other things about the ways of the righteous and the ways of the wicked.  Read Jeremiah.  Read Job.  Read the rest of the Book of Psalms.  Go do relief work in Haiti or Sudan and read them again.

The Bible records how a whole community of faith over centuries has struggled with this issue.  Sometimes the Psalm begins, O LORD, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.  And at the end, it still says, Darkness is my only companion.

The Psalms of Lament speak the truth of people who do love the LORD, who are faithful.  From Jeremiah thrown down a well to Paul shipwrecked on Malta to Mother Teresa struggling her whole life with severe depression a couple millennia later, faith does not turn out to be bankable.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Maybe the Psalms can give voice to your own experience.

Creativity and the Absurd

The ancient Israelites were sure of the pattern, that they held God's favor.  They lived in the Promised Land, after all.  Then something else happened, off pattern.  A new super power came on the scene, destroyed their temple and threw them into exile.  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion... How can we sing the Lord's song upon an alien soil?

When faced with the unpredicted, the absurd, the anterior cingulate cortex shifts into high gear.  Its job is to modulate emotional response, to manage the panic.  It does so by reasserting sense.

Sense can be found in two ways.

The first is to revert to the familiar.  When the brain is overwhelmed by stress, it becomes more efficient.  It shuts down brain-derived neurotrophic factor, stops learning and concentrates on what it already knows, or what it is habituated to trust.  It was the forces of evil (gays, the First Amendment...)  We are being tested, we have to believe harder...  People confronted by the absurd sometimes cling to habit, reject the unfamiliar (immigrants, head scarves).  After 9/11 there was a spike in sales of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.  That is the anterior cingulate cortex at work, modulating emotional response.

The second way is to ramp up the pattern seeking by noticing connections that had been overlooked.

The second way is the way of creativity.  For the Israelites, the Babylonian Exile resulted in an explosion of creativity, poetry, philosophy, history, new forms of worship, the legal code, and the development of a religion that was larger than their prior notions of land=success=God's favor.  They came up with a religion that could handle exile, handle loss.  It could travel and face the future.

Their brains found new patterns.  They recognized a kinship and developed compassion, even obligation toward others who were immigrants or poor or who had lost.

America At A Spiritual Crossroads

I was approached once to be a supply preacher at a Unitarian Universalist Church during an interim.  I realized I had no idea how to do that, how to preach, if not the Gospel.  So perhaps it is inevitable that I fail my nonChristian readers at this point.

But I will do my best.

The 20th century witnessed horrors when people responded to their suffering by pulling away, by blaming others and cutting off connections, dividing nations into smaller and smaller subgroups to despise.  The brain that does that eventually goes senile.

A lot of us have lost a lot since the start of the 21st century.  And the rules have been rewritten, so we can expect more of the same.  This would be a good time to seek deeper than the theological optimism that cheered us when there was still a frontier and we could always walk away from our failures.  This is not the time to place our hopes for spiritual vindication on the thin reed of an untried and immature quarterback and Christian.  Give the kid a break.  And, by the way, give the people who are rooting for him a break, as well.  They are having a hard time, too.

The good news is that there are other patterns to be found.

The brain that remains open to new experiences, that searches for common ground, grows, creates, delights, has fun!  Ditto the nation.  Ditto the world.

Imagine that.  We are hard-wired for compassion.  And for fun.

Go Cheeseheads!

photo of Tin Tebow from tempecarnivore.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-time-tebow-here-are-10-sports.html

Hawkeye and AA logos in public domain

Creation of Adam by Michelangelo,  1510 in public domain
The Shipwreck by Claude Joseph Vernet, 1772, in public domain
photo of Haiti earthquake victim by Lohan  Abassi, used under the Creative Commons Attribution License  
photo of UA 175 striking World Trade Center in public domain

Hey, Jesus - Happy Hanukkah!

I must be one of ten people with mental illness in the United States of America who does NOT have holiday trauma issues.  My personal desperate darkness starts each year in late July and breaks some time in late October, with mild depression fading out through November.

Thanksgiving to New Year's is pretty much my best time of year.

Nevertheless, this year I have been sad, not depressed really, just sad, as I read on Facebook the hostility that has come to be the litmus test of Christian fervor.  Evidently inspired by Fox News, Merry Christmas is no longer an expression of joy and good cheer, but a battle cry against the First Amendment and the great American experiment of freedom and tolerance of difference.

Irony abounds here.  One of my own ancestors came over on the Mayflower, as a matter of fact.  The Puritans wanted freedom to practice their religion, not anybody else's, just their own, including a prohibition against Christmas, which they outlawed in 1659.  They knew their religious history, that the holiday originated as a pagan festival, full of excess of every sort, with the thinnest wash of Christian appropriation added later to assure pagans they could still celebrate the Winter Solstice after they got baptized.

The Puritans had mellowed by 1712, when Cotton Mather, whose credentials are as Christian as you get, preached tolerance for other Christians who did want to celebrate the baby's birthday.  I do not now dispute whether People do well to Observe such an Uninstituted Festival at all, or no, he said.

He went on to encourage a Romans 14 attitude: Good Men may love one another, and may treat one another with a most Candid Charity, while he that Regardeth a Day, Regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that Regardeth not the Day, also shows his Regard unto the Lord, in his not Regarding of it...

According to Cotton Mather, he believed in "political correctness", because he found it in the Bible, in Paul. 

The Brain And Christmas, Or At Least Something, Anything

Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, Druid, "spiritual but not religious," and plain old capitalists, as the days get shorter, our pineal glands go into overdrive, pumping out all that melatonin that makes us want to hibernate.  Our brains cry out for relief.  Push back the darkness!  Light a candle!  Light a bonfire!  Wait a minute -- just a log.  Nothing in the brain requires that anybody get burned at the stake.

Regular readers know that, while Prozac Monologues is not for the purposes of evangelism, I make no secret of my Christian faith, and even defend religion and the disciplines of church membership as resources for mental health.

But not any religion.  Not what passes for Christianity but looks suspiciously like, well -- fascism.  There, I have said the word.  When the cross gets wrapped in the flag, no matter whose flag, you know that the frontal cortex is offline, the lizard brain is in charge, and somebody is about to get crucified.

Which is so not what Jesus would want for his birthday present.

I mean, the first guests invited by heaven to his party were the scruffiest low lifes of the neighborhood, who had probably been passing the bottle to keep warm that night, and some foreign fire-worshipers, for crying out loud!

Theology Alert

He came as a baby.  He came vulnerable.  He came helpless.  In the core and mystery of what Christians call Incarnation, God-in-flesh, that very vulnerability is how God tells us how much God loves us, that the great Almighty would set almighty aside in order to pitch his tent among us.

That God desires to be with us, and will pay whatever price that requires, and would indeed require, is the core of the Gospel, all we need to know that we are beloved.  We are worthy.  Knowing that, then we can exercise the courage it takes to treat others as beloved and worthy.

We can even say, to show our rejoicing for the worth that God gives us and our rejoicing for the worth that God gives our neighbors, Happy Holidays!

These days are holy, they are graced by God's presence among us, whatever days you keep.  That is what I believe.  And I hope for you that these days are happy.

Research on Vulnerability

So here is where the deep truth about God-With-Us and mental health research come together: Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work on The Power of Vulnerability.




That baby who slept in the cold and all the babies who tonight sleep in the cold call us to look deep, deep into our hearts, the hearts of our neighbors, the heart of the world, the heart of God.

Happy holidays.

painting of Announcement to Shepherds by Gaddi Taddeo, c. 1327, in public domain

mezzotint portrait of Cotton Mather by Peter Pelham, 1700, in public domain

photo of Luminaria at Lake Washington from Seattle Municipal Archives, used under the Creative Commons license

painting of Madonna and Child with Cherries by Jan Gossaert, c. 1520, in public domain

Mental Health Day -- The Funner Version of Advocacy

Last week it was Mental Illness Awareness Week, according to NAMI.  So today it's World Mental Health Day, according to WHO.  The World Health Organization, that's WHO.

That's a week for mental illness, a day for mental health.  Whoever organizes these things must be reading my mood chart.

I cycle within cycles.  In the larger circle, I have been able to maintain a stable state for a while now -- the state of jaded, that is.  So I take up this week where I left off last week, continuing the repost of a series on the sorry state of mental health advocacy.  This second post takes a glass-half-full approach.

Not exactly mental health, but at least the upside of mentally interesting.  I mean, we got these diseases for life.  We might as well learn to make them work for us.