I have mental illness.
I’ve battled it fiercely for more than half my life.
Over two decades ago, I began to realize I was different from many people (or at least I thought I was). I knew that that there was a despair that should come as a natural response when we experience trauma; when tragedy visits us or when we lose someone we love—when bad things happen.
I also knew that I was feeling something far more than this normal and momentary sadness. I had an emotional cloud that lingered, one that did not require evidence or some identifiable cause to show up. I knew that often, I could feel complete dread when all the objective data told me that I should be happy. I’d have those dark nights of the soul, where I became my own prosecuting attorney—brilliantly making the iron clad case for why my hopelessness was justified.
And as a Christian, I experienced the shame the church unknowingly pilled upon me; the suggestion that if my prayer and faith were earnest enough, I’d feel better. I heard Christians talk about suicide victims as “only needing Jesus.” The more I became aware of their ignorance and exposed to their insensitivity—the more closed off I became about the pain I was living with.
I also began to feel the isolation that mental illness generally brings, because unlike any other sickness, like a brain tumor or a physical disability or cancer where sympathy is often people’s response—depression brings a stigma of judgment, an attitude of callousness.
I began to do what so many people with mental illness do: I hid my hurt and pretended and I suffered in silence.
Many times I was so exhausted that I didn’t have a desire to keep living—and no one knew. I was that good at faking it. If I’d have succumbed to my illness people would have been shocked; they would have never have known how far deep in the hole I was and they would have looked back for outward signs and have found little if any.
Most of the time when a severely depressed person dies from suicide: a musician or an actor, or a writer, people express their disbelief—except those of us who have mental illness. We totally get it.
One of the things you learn when you live with severe depression, is that everyone has a capacity for compassion, and even the most long-suffering people usually reach theirs well before you stop hurting. At some point your pain eclipses their ability to carry it and you realize that your despair is a problem—for them.
This is where the performance begins.
Because you don’t particularly enjoy being you, you can empathize with those who seem to grow weary of being around you. You learn to read people’s body language, to recognize their ambivalence, to sense their impatience, and you endeavor to play the part of someone else: someone who isn’t depressed.
And when you do, you don’t even need to be all that convincing to sell it. People are usually more than happy to suspend disbelief in order to keep you in character. They’ll play along because that storyline is far preferable to the one where someone around them is perpetually miserable without good reason.
Mental illness is not dependent on circumstances or objective data or an identifiable source. It is chemical it is wiring, and so it is not something we can be pep talked out of. A sad person can be cheered up. You can help them see reality, you can give them data, you can help them to put things correctly in perspective. When difficult seasons pass their sadness often does too. A depressed person can’t be cheered up—they can only be temporarily distracted from their default despair.
Lately, I’ve seen people in the highest levels of leadership in our Government and our churches, recklessly invoke mental illness when talking about unfathomably brutal mass murders. I doubt these people realize what they’re doing, the way they are further pushing already suffering people into the shadow places of shame and isolation, exponentially enlarging their fears, giving strength to their personal demons. I doubt they understand the wounds they are inflicting, or at least I hope they don’t.
I and millions of people in America struggle with mental illness and have for years, sometimes decades—and we’d never consider violence toward anyone (perhaps except ourselves) and we’d certainly never walk into a mall or a church or a school and gun down strangers. To suggest a natural tether between depression and anxiety—and the violent execution of human beings, is to further ostracize and isolate people whose greatest enemy is their own heads, it is to ratify every fear they have about their own self-worth. All this irresponsible talk does is to forcing them further into the shadow places of their minds, and some may not make it out.
Using mentally ill people as a cheap scapegoat for senseless acts of violence or to wield it recklessly for political gain is ignorant and it’s dangerous and it can be deadly—not to anyone else but the person who is already pressed up hard against despair.
It’s time we called out and condemned politicians and preachers when they expose already vulnerable people to further damage, simply because they refuse to face their own culpability and their own failures, in creating a culture of irrational hatred and increasing gun violence.
We need to treat mentally ill people with the same compassion and decency that we offer any person afflicted with a sickness that they did not invite and could not prevent.
If not, that will be on our collective hands.
Note: If you have mental illness or you love or live with someone who does—you’re not alone. Your sickness does not define you any more than cancer or heart disease defines someone afflicted by those things. Do not suffer in silence, and do not be ashamed of your injuries. Find people you can trust, people who understand, people who will help you get well. Be encouraged.
