Finding Jesus in the Storm. John Swinton

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СКАЧАТЬ perceived strangeness unsettles people and causes them to react with physical or psychological violence. Above all, the journey is surprising for us and for others. We will need maps, guides, friends, communities, equipment, and, for Christians, ultimately the guidance of God’s Spirit if we are to negotiate our mental health journeys faithfully. But properly equipped, guided, supported, and faithfully accompanied, we can survive even the most powerful and disturbing storms.

      The key thing about a journey is that we are always heading toward somewhere and something, not nowhere and nothing. Destination matters. The destination, like the winter road before us, can be cold and unclear. If it is uncertain or disappears from sight, we find ourselves in a very difficult, lonely, and deeply hopeless situation. But if we know our destination even in the midst of our sense of lostness, then we have hope. And if we can find hope (or if others can hold it for us), then the journey might actually be going somewhere rather than nowhere. Thinking of mental health challenges as a journey reminds us to hold on to the kind of destination we might want to reach. What that journey looks like in the context of severe mental health challenges is what this book is about.

ABOUT THE BOOK AND ITS LANGUAGE

      The core of the book emerges from a series of qualitative research interviews that I carried out over a two-year period with Christians living with major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. I chose to focus on these diagnoses not because they are representative of all mental health challenges but because they are generally acknowledged as particularly problematic and also because they raise important theological and practical issues for individuals, church, and society.

      Through these interviews, I intended the following:

      1 to capture some of the complexities of how people actually experience their mental health instead of how they or others interpret it, given their assumptions of what their diagnosis represents. This is the phenomenological dimension.

      2 to gain insight into the ways in which people’s unconventional mental health experiences affect their faith lives and relationships with God. This is the experience of lived theology.

      3 to try to make sense of this in terms of the theology and practice of the church. This is theological reflection and revised practice.

      Though these three foci formed the basis of our conversations, the richness of our conversations drew us to other interesting and surprising places. As people granted me entry into the intricacies of their mental health experiences, they helped me to recognize and accept profound insights into the ways in which God is present (or sometimes apparently absent) in their mental health experiences. This entry into their interior worlds quickly taught me that their assumed strangeness is not quite as strange as it first appears. People are just people, even in the midst of difficulties.

Much has been written on the relationship between spirituality and mental health.6 Much of it assumes that spirituality is a broad and universal concept comprising a personal search for meaning, purpose, hope, value, and, for some people, God.7 Yet my interviews for this book yielded a quite different understanding of spirituality—that it is not a general search for meaning but something quite specific. The interviewees perceived themselves as disciples of Jesus who were desperately trying to cling to him in the midst of complex and difficult circumstances. Their question was not simply: “Where can I find meaning in the midst of my brokenness?” but much more specifically, “Where and how can I find Jesus and hold on to God in the midst of this experience?” The question is simple; the answer is much more complex.

Some of the people who share their experiences in the following pages find the language of mental illness beneficial and therapeutic and helpful for understanding and future development. Others do not. I believe people should be allowed to name their experiences in the way that is most helpful and pertinent for them. Readers will note that I don’t use the term “mental illness” in this book. This is not because I am in any sense antipsychiatry or don’t believe that people’s suffering is real.8 I know people’s experiences are very real. Yet describing mental health experiences in terms of illness is only one way of naming and responding to such experience, and not necessarily the best way.

      I use the term “mental health challenges” for two reasons. First, it focuses our attention on what enables us to remain healthy in the midst of psychological distress. While mental health challenges can cause great suffering and distress, it is possible to find hope and faith in the midst of the wildest storms. Second, the shift from illness to challenge offers a positive and forward-facing orientation. Whereas illness reminds us of what is wrong with us and narrows our range of options, challenge sees the situation as potentially constructive and leaves the door open for a variety of perspectives, interpretations, and descriptions. How to enable people to take up those challenges and learn to live life fully is a primary task of what is to come.

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations come from the New International Version (2011).

2. For a very helpful overview of Luther’s theology of the cross, see Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

3. Rev. 21:4: “ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Ps. 23:2: “He makes me lie down in green pastures, / he leads me beside quiet waters.”

4. Richard Arrandale, “Madness, Language and Theology,” Theology 102 (May 1, 1999): 195–202.

5. Arrandale, “Madness, Language and Theology,” 197.

6. H. G. Koenig, M. E. McCullough, and D. B. Larson, eds., Handbook of Religion and Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

7. For a critique of this approach to spirituality, see John Swinton and Stephen Pattison, “Moving beyond Clarity: Towards a Thin, Vague, and Useful Understanding of Spirituality in Nursing Care,” Nursing Philosophy 11 (2010): 226–37.

8. The term “antipsychiatry” refers to a movement that adopts the view that psychiatry and psychiatric treatments are more damaging than they are helpful. This movement considers psychiatry to be a coercive instrument of oppression based on unequal power relationships that lead to patients being treated for things the antipsychiatrists assume are problems of living rather than illnesses or diseases. Although I will critique psychiatry and also be quite critical of the idea of mental illness, I value psychiatry and consider it to have a legitimate and significant role in caring for people living with mental health challenges. Readers wishing to read more about antipsychiatry should see T. Szasz, “The Myth of Mental Illness,” American Psychologist 15 (1960): 113–18; D. G. Cooper, Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry (London: Tavistock, 1967); P. Rabinow, ed., “Psychiatric Power,” in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, by M. Foucault (New York: New Press, 1997); and Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991).

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