Название: Finding Jesus in the Storm
Автор: John Swinton
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9780334059769
isbn:
PART V: REDESCRIBING BIPOLAR DISORDER
The Problem with Neurological Explanations: Moving beyond Neuromania
Chapter 10: Bipolar Disorder and the Nature of Suffering
Epistemic Innocence: Medicating a Prophet
Rethinking Recovery: Creating a Context for Epistemic Justice
Repercussions: The Shadow Side of Spiritual Elation
The Suffering That Emerges from the Ascription of the Demonic
The Suffering That Emerges from Truth Telling
Conclusion: Redescribing Healing
Epistemic Healing and Epistemological Generosity
Appendix: Mental Health Resources
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE I SHOULD THANK IN RELATION TO THIS BOOK. It has been a long time in the making, and it’s been a difficult journey. My family have as always been remarkably supportive and forgiving as I have complained, moaned, and wrestled with this book. They always saw the end point even when I could not. I’d like to thank my friend and colleague Warren Kinghorn for his wisdom and insight, Katie Cross for her thoughtfulness in commenting on a later draft of the book, Joy Allen for her comments on depression, and Hannah Waite for her deep and personal insights into the important issues that this book wrestles with. I am grateful to Uli Guthrie for her guidance and insight, and I am thankful for the skills that Steph Brock brought to the project, and for her husband, Brian, whose constant encouragement has been a blessing on me for many years. Thank you also to the folks at Eerdmans, who have been extremely supportive and have encouraged me in times when I felt like finding something else to do! They have become friends, and I am grateful for all that they do. Thanks must also go to Michael Thomson for taking this project on before he moved on to Wipf and Stock. Thank you to Ronald Otto and the folks at Thresholds in Chicago (https://www.thresholds.org) for their help early on in the project. Most importantly, I want to thank the people who gifted me their life stories. This book is about you and for you, and I am thankful and humbled that you have trusted your stories with me. I only hope I have done your gifts justice. Finally, thank you to God for being gracious and kind and for teaching us that there is nothing in the realm of mental health and ill health or anywhere else that can separate us from God’s love. That is the blessing that keeps us all on track.
INTRODUCTION: LIFE IN ALL ITS FULLNESS
Living Well with Jesus
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
—John 10:101
A FEW YEARS AGO, I ATTENDED A LECTURE ON THE POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS between religion and mental health given by an eminent professor of psychiatry. He opened his lecture with an intriguing, if somewhat disconcerting, statement: “I only have fifteen minutes to see a patient, and I spend the whole of that time looking at the computer screen trying to work out the patient’s blood levels and checking the efficiency of the patient’s meds.” The rest of the lecture was excellent, but I couldn’t get past that opening statement. As a former mental health nurse, I understand the pressures of a busy, understaffed, and often underfunded health-care system. Nevertheless, that the psychiatrist decided to spend all of the paltry fifteen minutes of each patient’s visit looking at a computer screen is telling.
A person’s biological functioning is certainly important. If one assumes that mental health experiences can be primarily or even fully understood and explained in biological terms, then scrutinizing a person’s blood levels for chemical imbalances and checking the impact of medication on blood cell count make sense. However, human beings are not simply a conglomerate of chemical interactions. Humans are persons, living beings who have histories, feelings, experiences, and hopes, and who desire to live well. Living well is not determined СКАЧАТЬ