Diagnosis of Mental Illness
“There is beauty in the struggle.”
—Brandi Carlisle
Our Universalist tradition teaches that we are all children of God, regardless of the particulars of our human condition. The love of the divine—or the acceptance of the universe, if you prefer—comes to us unconditionally, for better and worse, in strength and in weakness, in health and in illness.
In our theological landscape, illness, including mental illness, is nothing for which an individual should be blamed or shamed. No blame or shame for our human condition. There is great assurance and comfort in that.
But doesn’t our theology hold a fuller revelation?
Does being children of God simply mean that we are acceptable, that, in ethical rather than theological terms, we have worth and dignity?
Or does it mean that as soulful beings, we all share the possibility of living out the beauty and wonder of the world in spite of the struggles given to us by birth or circumstance?
Personal Story
These questions sound abstract, but they took on a concrete reality early in my daughter’s sophomore year of college. As a child she had been born very prematurely, and at a young age was diagnosed as having ADHD, with all its attendant problems: difficulty concentrating, frustration, irritability.
From the first moments of existence, however, she also proved to have great determination and imagination. In spite of the challenges, she succeeded in school and found her passion and a certain degree of redemption in the theater.
When it comes to the stage, the letters of her label either disappear or become an asset. Attention deficit? She’s the first to know her lines. Hyperactivity? Channeled, it reveals itself as charisma and presence. Disorder? Not so much.
There were costs along the way, too, and in her first year of college, she hit a wall, not academically, but emotionally. That story is hers to tell, not mine, but she easily shares with everyone that she experienced days of being unable to sleep and times of wrenching depression.
By early in her sophomore year, she was diagnosed with a new set of letters that carry more societal stigma: Bipolar Disorder (BPD), what many people know as “manic depression.”
It’s much too complicated to lay out in detail here, but individuals with BPD are subject to the hyper-excited states as well as depression. The greatest challenge is to live in the middle. In most cases doing so requires medication, therapy, and keen self-awareness.
I can only try to imagine the internal agony of BPD, but I don’t have to imagine what it’s like, as a parent, for your child to receive the diagnosis.
There was, first of all, plain denial. It can’t be. I don’t believe it. It’s just the ADHD. It’s just college. It’s just growing up. The response that comes with time is simple: It can be. You have to believe it. You must accept it.
There was also irrational guilt. Did her father and I do something to cause this? Although years ago her pre-maturity had resulted from unpredictable illness, I felt the same way the first time I saw my daughter weighing one pound and three ounces and fighting for life: What have I done to you?
Eventually, I learned that what I’d done was give her a precious life, but the weight of responsibility and guilt for parents is often irrational. Most of all, I now felt guilty that we hadn’t detected the BPD over the years.
It was my daughter herself who reassured me, “Mom, it often goes hand in hand with ADHD and isn’t diagnosed because of the ADHD. My doctor says you and Dad did all you could.”
The most intense feeling was that of loss and subsequent grief. I grieved my dogged belief that life would become easier for my daughter as she grew up. I grieved my expectation that once out of academia, she would feel less frustrated. I grieved everything her life might have been without this obstacle, and I assumed that it meant she could not be a functioning, competent adult in charge of her own living.
I know people for whom loved ones’ BPD has led to tragedy and heartbreak, and so I hated the letters “BPD;” I hated the diagnosis; I was scared.
Then I began to realize. My daughter had known something was wrong on her own. She had sought medical help on her own. She had educated herself about the condition, and now she was educating us, explaining the disease and giving us books to read. On her own she had located psychiatrists and therapists and found ways to get from her college residence to see them. She managed taking her medications and informing friends and teachers and deans. It’s not that everything was easy, or ever will be, but she took on the biggest challenge of her adult life on her own.
My daughter is so much more than a diagnosis, so much more than a set of letters.
No diagnosis can compromise the intense imagination she tapped when, in early years, she and her friend re-created the National Air and Space Museum in our yard, with cardboard planes hanging from the trees, or when they wrote and produced satiric videos.
No set of letters could remove the sensitivity to life’s rhythms evident in the memorial ritual she created and observed on the anniversary of Mozart’s death.
No moods, however distressing, can negate her surprising ability, at times, to hammer out a solution to a problem and negotiate it with all the parties. Some of those creative elements may even be tied to her disorder.
It was an important realization, for me, religiously: being a child of God means you cannot be reduced to one aspect of your being, that you are allowed to participate in the fullness of life.
Apparently, she was coming to the same realization. During one of our early conversations, she said she had told her therapist that she wanted to focus on the creative element that so many people with BPD have and how she can tap its energy. She does not want, she told the doctor, to become her diagnosis. She knows that she is so much more.
Hang on to that, my child, you child of the universe, you child of God. Hang on.
A Prayer
Eternal God,
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we know
that we are everything
we have ever been,
and done,
everything we have dreamed of
and reached for.
Remind us that
no matter what happens,
we will never be less,
and never incomplete,
but that, as we live our lives,
we will surely become more.
We are precious;
we are accepted;
and we are loved.
Amen.
A Spiritual Practice
Mediate or journal on: What does God love in me?
“We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.”
—Sara Campbell
- Facing Fear - November 11, 2011
- Diagnosis of Mental Illness - November 11, 2011
Thank you. I suffer from depression and anxiety. I am having one of my very bad days. And, I do reduce myself to just my depression. As I am really drowning today, the prayer was very helpful.