It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything. Read More
Showing all posts in Depression
Bits of Conference That Might Be Harmful to Mental Health
Like I said in my review a few weeks ago, I really appreciated Erich W. Kopischke’s talk “Addressing Mental Health” this last General Conference. The motivator for him to give the talk was that his son who went on a mission suffered from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and suicidality, and as a result, returned home after being out for four weeks. Elder Kopischke talked about the need for people who are supporting their loved ones who are facing mental health issues to learn more and to judge less:
Learning will lead to more understanding, more acceptance, more compassion, more love. It can lessen tragedy while helping us develop and manage healthy expectations and healthy interactions.
What struck me, though, thinking about his message was how many other messages in that very Conference were probably contributing to people’s mental health struggles. I realize it’s way beyond what one talk could accomplish, but there is so much preaching of perfectionism and black-and-white thinking that really needs to be toned down if GAs want to be serious about helping improve members’ mental health.
Here’s a list of some of the bits of Conference that I thought were possibly harmful to mental health. Of course, I’m no mental health expert. I’m just a run-of-the-mill neurotic Mormon, prone to depression and anxiety, so those are the types of issues I’ll focus most on. Also, note that I’m doing my church experience on the easiest setting, as a straight, white, married, cisgender man. There are plenty of messages in a typical Conference that are hard on single people, or LGBT people, or childless people, that really don’t strike me because I’m not their target. So what I’m struck by is probably a lower bound estimate for the total number of potentially harmful messages.
Going to the Edge
CW: Suicidality
To start with, it was my birthday, and even in good years I don’t like my birthday. It comes just after New Year’s, after everyone is burned out on holidays and get-togethers and eating too much rich food, and has moved on to New Year’s resolutions about healthier living. It’s only two weeks after the winter solstice, and the light is barely making any headway against the still-dominant darkness that somehow seeps into everything. And by that point I am usually tired of people and celebrations, and feel cranky and just want to hide. In bad years, I am also deeply upset about being alive, and the anniversary of my birth feels like a bleak thing to be noticing, let alone pretending to be happy about. Read More
A Look at Crisis Text Line Data on LGBT Issues and Suicidality
Crisis Text Line is a support service for people in crisis. It’s like a suicide hotline, but more general in that the service has crisis counselors trained to respond to a broad range of crises. Also unlike a traditional suicide hotline, it’s reached by text rather than by voice. As a result of this, according to a New Yorker story from 2015 about the service, most who use it are teenagers.
Of particular interest to me, the organization also publishes aggregate data about what types of crises its clients contact them about, and from what states, as well as trends by day of the week, time of day, and across historical time (since 2015). I thought it would be interesting to look at these data to see if there were evidence of the particular stress that LGBT people are put under in Mormonism, particularly after the November 2015 exclusion policy came to light.
Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the Crisis Text Line data doesn’t include information about clients’ religious affiliation, so I’ll just use the rough approximation of using Utah data as a proxy for Mormon experience. On the up side, though, a big advantage of these data is that they summarize reports of clients’ crises by type–where I’ll just be looking at LGBT-related and suicidal thinking–rather than having only completed suicide counts to go on. Distress over one’s sexual orientation or gender identity and suicidal thinking are surely far more common than suicide itself, so these data are potentially richer than data on completed suicides alone.
Here’s a map that shows US states ranked by frequency of clients texting about issues of gender or sexual identity as a percentage of all texts received from the state. Utah ranks number seven.
Abandoning the Quest for a Positive Attitude: Thoughts on Hope
At the residential crisis place where I landed a few weeks ago, we had occasional groups. One day, we did some basic mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is very trendy right now, but I’ve found it to be useful, and don’t mind (see what I did there) going over the basics again. As part of the exercise, they had us look out the window and just observe something for a little while. We then reported back on the experience. I was fascinated to note that everyone in the group except for me, with no prompting to do this, didn’t only talk about the experiencing of observing; they turned it into an inspirational message. For example, they saw the dead leaves on the trees, but realized that there was new life underneath. Or they noticed how a tree continued to grow despite obstacles. I found myself wondering—are people in other cultures this well-trained to relentlessly find inspiration in everything?
In most of the psych wards I’ve been in, they have you rate your mood every day on a scale of 1 to 10. I struggle with the quantification aspect of this, but usually do my best to accurately assess how I’m doing. One day I looked around at the papers of the people sitting around me, and saw that they’d all marked 10. I was mystified. I mean, you don’t get into a psych ward without being in fairly significant distress. Such a rating might have made sense if a person had been hospitalized during a manic episode, but that was clearly not the case for any of the people there that day. My guess was that they were reporting high numbers in an attempt to get released, which is usually the primary goal of people who are locked in a psych ward, but I also wondered whether it was connected to cultural expectations about making the best of everything and having a positive outlook. There’s a certain virtue in circling that 10. Sure you might be having a complete psychological breakdown, but you wouldn’t want to not be positive about the situation. In another group in the residential place I mentioned above, I listened to a fellow patient share that he knew that he could accomplish anything if he would just put his mind to it. The group leader enthusiastically agreed. I realize I’m probably overly cynical—it’s taken me much of my life to realize that it’s not necessarily delusional to try to stay generally upbeat, and that relentlessly negative people can actually be pretty exhausting—but it’s hard for me not see this sort of thinking as problematic. Because the dark side of the equation is that if you haven’t accomplished something, no matter how unlikely that thing may be, it’s because you just didn’t put your mind to it. Read More
Evensong
When I was in the hospital a few months ago, I missed church on Sunday. Obviously I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter; I have yet to see a psych ward that would let you out for a few hours to catch a church service. (They’d probably be especially nervous about Episcopal services, come to think of it, with all those candles.) But I was a little surprised at how sad I was to miss even one week. Since I’d walked into my local parish in February 2017, thinking at the time it was just for a temporary change of pace, I had not gone a single Sunday without attending Episcopal church somewhere. Even when I turned into a somewhat manic church-hopper later that year, and tried to visit at least one new church every Sunday, the possibility of skipping Episcopal services was simply never even on the table. It had become too much an essential part of the rhythm of my life.
That Sunday in the hospital, I tried to look on the bright side—I’d been wanting to see a religious service in the psych ward, and indeed I got to go to one. It was very low key. A chaplain came and had a small group of us read a few things, and then talk about them. The predictable result was that we spent a lot of time listening to the not always coherent thoughts of two patients who always had a lot to say. I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to the chaplain more; she was warm and thoughtful, and seemed like an interesting person. I definitely appreciated her efforts. But I also thought about how only a mile away, my parish was holding its usual Sunday services. It was a blunt reminder of how much you’re cut off from the rest of the world in a place like that. The next Sunday, when I walked into church, being in the familiar building again actually made me emotional.
Writing in Crayon: A Night in the ER
I’m in a hospital room with almost nothing in it. A bed, with a single blanket and pillow. A chair. One of those narrow little tables you can pull over the bed, where they put meals. They let me keep two paperback books, and my notebook. I’m glad I remembered to get a notebook before we went to the ER. I asked my brother if he happened to have anything around without any wires, and he found me an old green composition book. 100 pages, college-ruled. That should last me, I hope.
I ask if I can have something to write with. Sometimes they let you have plastic pen-like things. I saw a box of them once, and it said that they were for maximum security prisons. Sometimes instead they offer pencils. In one hospital I was in, I got frustrated with the regular pencils, which were those tiny golf-sized ones, and started writing in colored pencil instead. One of the other patients got mad when she saw me doing it, because she felt that the colored pencils should only be used for coloring. She took coloring very seriously.
The nurse says that he can get me a crayon. This is new; I’ve never been to a place that didn’t allow either pencils or pens. I say, okay. He asks what color, and I say that black would be best, but I’ll take whatever they have. He comes back with a black crayon. It’s at least new and sharp, though of course the sharpness doesn’t last long. After a while it breaks in half, making it even more difficult to use it for writing. It’s slow, and tedious. For a person used to typing, which I imagine is pretty much all of us these days, any kind of writing by hand can feel slow, but doing it in crayon is definitely an extra challenge. I find myself only writing on every other line in the notebook, because I can’t write very small. It’s easy to smear the letters, so I have to not rush, and take my time with each letter. But for all that, it’s good to be able to write. No matter how bad it gets, I’ve learned over the years, it helps me deal if I can just put it into words somewhere. Read More
When Good Spiritual Practice Goes Bad: Prayer, Rumination, and Revelations of Damnation
CW: brief mention of self-injury
I still have vivid memories of a particular day in December over a decade ago. I was in my second year of doctoral work at the time, and I spent an evening talking with some of my fellow students. We found ourselves disagreeing about a number of theological questions, including the topic of whether God’s justice would allow for universal salvation. I was the only LDS student in the group (in fact, I was the only LDS student in the doctoral program); the other participants represented a variety of religious backgrounds and theological outlooks. My memory is that people were trying to be respectful, but there was an undercurrent of tension, and I left feeling a little unsettled.
A Hunger for the Word
Many years ago, I wrote about my experience of depression: “I often feel a profound hunger for language, for something that will honestly speak to the realities of my experience. But it is not easy to find words that speak to this hunger. I sometimes go to bookstores or libraries and hunt with a sense that I am falling off a cliff and I need words, I desperately need them, and I can’t find them anywhere.” I often reflected on this passage in Amos:
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and not find it.'”1
- Amos 8:11-12 [↩]
“The Hardest Thing There Is”: Turning to Christ in the Midst of Sin
In his writings, the great reformer Martin Luther, who turned the theological world of the sixteenth century upside down, returned again and again to a very basic problem: how do you believe in the atonement, or grace, or the saving work of Christ, on a personal level? How do you really take in that those things apply to not just humanity in general, and more to the point, not to some category of “good people,” but to a sinner like yourself? “I have often experienced,” he wrote, “and still do every day, how difficult it is to believe, especially amid struggles of conscience, that Christ was given, not for the holy, righteous, and deserving, or for those who were His friends, but for the godless, sinful, and undeserving, for those who were His enemies, who deserved the wrath of God and eternal death.”1 Luther noted that when he found himself consumed by the forces of sin, it was nearly impossible to turn to Christ for rescue and forgiveness. He attributed this at least partly to the work of the devil, whose voice constantly whispered in his ear, reminded him of his unworthiness, and informed him that Christ would surely damn him. He described his experience of being frightened of Christ: “even at the mention of the name of Christ,” he recounted, “I would be terrified and grow pale, because I was persuaded that He was a judge.”2 Luther also observed the inexorable and unforgiving logic of the conscience: “You have sinned; therefore God is angry with you. If He is angry, He will kill you and damn you eternally.” He went on to even suggest that as a result, “many who cannot endure the wrath and judgment of God commit suicide by hanging or drowning.”3
The only way to quiet these condemning voices is, of course, to throw yourself utterly on the mercy of the Savior. But Luther was well aware that this is much easier said than done. To turn to Christ, to look for grace, while being assailed by the forces of judgment and condemnation, he observed, was enormously challenging: “to do this in the midst of struggle is the hardest thing there is. I am speaking from experience, for I am acquainted with the devil’s craftiness . . .”4
The Mental Health System Strikes Back
I’m sitting in a small room on the fifth floor of the local hospital. I’ve had to change from street clothes to scrubs, and my possessions are being examined to see what I can keep. I didn’t bring in much; I turned most of it over to my sister Melyngoch when she left me in the ER. A nurse is sitting at a computer, answering question after question. I haven’t been in this particular hospital before, but I’ve been in enough similar places that the drill is familiar.
I’m reading the questions over the nurse’s shoulder. She has to check boxes about my attitude. Am I hostile? Aggressive? Withdrawn? I can’t help but notice that all of the options are negative. She checks “other,” and writes, “overly polite and helpful.” I can’t help sighing a little—it’s a reminder that whatever I do, however I act, it’s going to be seen through the lens of dysfunction. She asks my name, to find out if I know who I am, and I answer her. She asks if I know where I am. In the psych ward, I say. She corrects me, explaining that this is actually the “stress care unit.” I just smile. I know perfectly well where I am, regardless of what they’ve decided to call it.
The Confessions of Saint Andrew
This guest post is brought to us by my brother, Andrew C.
I tell a story about my grandparents that may be completely made up.
They were looking forward to a fireside about marriage, and the morning before the presentation, their bishop told everyone in the congregation that, if they didn’t have a perfect marriage, he wanted them to attend.
Grandma and Grandpa looked at each other, and they didn’t go.
I saw Grandma after Grandpa died. “Getting old is not for wimps,” she said, and she looked very sad, gray hair, gray skin, a droop to her like she couldn’t think of a reason to sit up straight. Half of her was missing, and because I saw my grandma in that state, I think the story I just told you might actually be true. It is possible that it could be.
I desperately want it to be. Read More
Impressions of a Girl Lost at Sea
This guest post is brought to us by my daughter, the crooked girl. Recently I wrote a post on my perspective of her depression, and I invited her to write her own experience. This is what she wrote:
——————————–
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
–Stevie Smith
——————————–
I learned recently that a large number of deaths in the water take place within mere feet of the victims’ companions. Mario Vittone writes in a post on aquatic safety that “drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect…drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event.” Most people have not been trained to recognize the signs. This description struck a chord with me because, although I have never experienced such physical danger, my struggles with mental illness feel like a different sort of drowning.
Sometimes I Dream
Sometimes I dream that I’m watching a girl drown. The water is deep and dark, the current is strong yet gentle, almost caressing her. It seems to be a slow-motion drowning, lacking in drama and velocity. And I’m standing right there on the shore, waving my arms ineffectually as I look on in despair. I am useless. Sometimes it seems that she isn’t even trying to swim, and I become frustrated as she stops stroking and kicking, apparently consigned to letting the waves calmly wash over her and carry her out to sea. Read More
Aurora Shooting-We need to talk about better identification and treatment for mental illness
Although this post is a bit off topic for a Mormon/feminist blog, I feel that it is important enough to discuss that I am including it here. As most people are likely aware, on July 20th a 24-year-old man came through the exit door of a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and opened fire on the audience. Twelve people have been confirmed dead from the shooting, and 58 people were injured. Read More
Mood Disorders and the Spirit
I was inspired to write and make this post because of the series over at By Common Consent on Mormons and Mental Illness.
I’m a graduate student in my late 20s who’s suffered from bipolar disorder since my early 20s. I have no formal training in psychology, but one of my academic interests is psychology and emotion in 20th century American culture (one of my specializations is cultural studies). Typically I look at mood disorders and emotions as cultural and social phenomena (as was perhaps evidenced by my last post on this blog), but I thought I’d temporarily suspend that avenue of thought and explore some thoughts on mood disorders and spirituality that stem from my own experiences. Read More