Troubled Minds

Mental Illness and the Church's Mission

Amy Simpson

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830884322
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity Today Book Award WinnerLeadership Journal Book AwardMental illness is the sort of thing we don't like to talk about. It doesn't reduce nicely to simple solutions and happy outcomes. So instead, too often we reduce people who are mentally ill to caricatures and ghosts, and simply pretend they don't exist. They do exist, however—statistics suggest that one in four people suffer from some kind of mental illness. And then there's their friends and family members, who bear their own scars and anxious thoughts, and who see no safe place to talk about the impact of mental illness on their lives and their loved ones. Many of these people are sitting in churches week after week, suffering in stigmatized silence.In Troubled Minds Amy Simpson, whose family knows the trauma and bewilderment of mental illness, reminds us that people with mental illness are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters in Christ, and she shows us the path to loving them well and becoming a church that loves God with whole hearts and whole souls, with the strength we have and with minds that are whole as well as minds that are troubled.

1

A Family Story

My story begins as many do—quietly, and with only a hint of what is coming.

I grew up in the Midwest, one of four kids in a loving family. Dad was a pastor for ten years, serving two small rural churches. Mom was a homemaker. Our family loved to go camping, and all of my best memories of family life have the six of us crammed into a pop-up camper, swimming in a lake somewhere or sweating together with the wind thrashing our hair, three in the front and three in the back of our sedan.

My parents have adventurous spirits and great passion for serving Jesus. Before I was born, they decided to become missionaries to Africa and worked their way through the process of approval and fundraising in their pursuit of this plan. When I was a toddler, Mom and Dad packed all our belongings in barrels for shipment overseas and moved the family to Lausanne, Switzerland. We spent a year there while my parents did intensive study of the French language.

The plan was to go to Africa after that year and to join the missionary work underway in what was then Zaire. When the time came, however, political tensions prevented our going. We went back to the United States, and Dad decided to pursue pastoral ministry instead. I’ve often wondered what our lives would have been like if I had grown up in Africa. And I’ve wondered what would have happened if the life that unfolded had instead unfolded in a missionary outpost half the world away.

My mom is a gentle person, creative, funny, resourceful and very smart. She always encouraged my creative development, indulged my love for reading, taught me to clean the house like I meant it, sparked my love of a good pun and showed me how to get organized. Mom is also the person who led me to faith in Christ when I was only four years old.

Yet there’s more to our story. Mom has suffered tremendously and has been the source of much of my own suffering. Ours is a very complicated relationship—as all her relationships are. While I didn’t know enough to question the normalcy of our family life when I was a child, I knew something was wrong. This undefined knowledge nagged at my family as we did our best to ignore it. As it became harder to ignore, we started looking for help—and came up short. When I was a teenager, on the day I waited at school for someone to pick me up and no one came, it became obvious.

My brother, who had stopped at home on a break between college classes, had found Mom in the kitchen, completely unable to function. She went to the hospital. When I called home from a pay phone to find out when someone would pick me up from school, a neighbor answered and said Mom had had “a stroke or something.” I walked the two miles home from school, praying and worrying about what this “stroke or something” would mean. Was she going to be okay? Was she dying? Would I lose my mom? Would our family be the same?

It wouldn’t be the same. Life changed after that. And yes, I did lose my mom—over and over again.

It was no stroke that had indelibly altered Mom and our family. That was the day she had her first full-on, debilitating, confusing, terrifying, mind-bending, truth-twisting, hospital-worthy psychotic break. And it was a long time before I understood what had happened.

My family hiccupped through this episode but kept going; when we got Mom back, we did our best to live as if what had happened was no big deal. Mom started seeing a Christian counselor and said she was struggling with depression. Meanwhile, she moved around the house like a zombie, her functioning almost completely suppressed by the powerful antipsychotics she got at the hospital. My younger sister and I picked up the slack and tiptoed around Mom as if she were a sleeping ghost. When she was hospitalized again (and again and again) we adopted Unspoken Rules 1, 2 and 3 by consensus: Don’t talk about it. Everything is fine. No one outside this family will understand.

A Public Crisis

When I was fifteen, Mom picked me up at school to take me to a dental appointment. I could tell immediately that she wasn’t functioning normally; I recognized warning signs that she was headed for another “episode.” She drove nervously, as if struggling to be fully aware of her surroundings, or perhaps imagining surroundings that weren’t there. She was silent except when I forced conversation, and when she did speak, her speech was slow and seemed to require deliberation. Her interaction with me was indirect and stiff, as if she were not fully aware that I was there. She seemed to be fading, as if half of her had already shrunk into an unknown place and the other half was not sure whether to follow or to maintain its grip on the reality of a daughter and a trip to the dentist.

I remember thanking God that I could legally take over driving if I needed to and asking Mom if she had taken her medication that day. Her answer was not straightforward, but it was clear she was not fully medicated and stable. So, with one part of my brain, I prayed for a safe trip to the dentist. With another part, I employed a technique used by many people who feel powerless in the face of an unnamed threat: I soothed myself by acting as if nothing were wrong.

We did make our way safely to the dental office, and we sat down to wait. When my name was called, I left my mother in the waiting room and went back for my appointment. I also stepped out of my anxiety about her for the moment, as I did when I was away from her—part of my strategy for coping with a devastating stress I didn’t understand.

After half an hour or so with the dentist, I returned to the waiting room and approached my mom, who didn’t look at me. “Mom, it’s time to go,” I said. “I’m finished.” No response of any kind. Suddenly I realized my instincts had been right, and my earlier fear was realized: something indeed was wrong with Mom . . . again. And it was up to me to help her. I touched her arm and gently tried to shake her back to awareness, with no results. She was rigidly catatonic, immovable, staring into space and clutching her purse in her lap with clenched hands—in a waiting room full of strangers.

After a couple of quiet attempts to rouse her, I began to attract attention. People sat and stared at me, wide-eyed, as I tried to get her to respond. If I could just get her to the car, I thought, I could take her home or to the hospital or wherever. I have to get her out of here. But when she wouldn’t move or even respond to me, I realized I wouldn’t be able to get her to the car; I would have to call Dad at work for help.

With everyone in the room continuing to stare, I walked over to the reception desk and asked the woman behind the counter—who was also staring—if I could use the phone. “No, there’s a pay phone around the corner.” When I explained that I needed to call my dad for help, I didn’t have change for the phone, and it would be a local call, she still refused and pointed to the pay phone. So I went back to my mom and wrestled with her rigid arms, pulling them aside enough to get into her purse and get the quarter I needed for the phone. I went back to the receptionist to ask if she could keep an eye on my mom while I went to use the pay phone. She shrank back in horror and asked, “Is she dangerous?”

After assuring the receptionist that my absolutely motionless mother was not about to attack her, I called my dad and then returned to sit next to Mom and wait for him to arrive. The receptionist and the people in the waiting room took turns staring at her, glancing at me and studying the floor. And not one person asked me—a completely rational and nonthreatening fifteen-year-old kid—if I needed help.

While Dad was on his way, one of the dentists became aware of what was happening and did what she could to help get Mom to the car. Dad and I took her to the hospital for another of her psychiatric stays and restabilization on medication. After she had received some medication and was waiting for a more intensive evaluation and admission, she became somewhat responsive. I could tell she was terrified of something, and I talked with her, trying to help her with words of reassurance and trying to understand why she was scared. While still not speaking, she began responding to me through hand gestures, nods and shakes of her head. Someone was trying to hurt her, she thought. Someone was trying to hurt us all.

What she was communicating didn’t make sense, but I tried to understand it anyway. I really wanted to help her, but I didn’t understand the nature of psychosis—let alone that my mom was psychotic and our communication was badly distorted. I hoped that by communicating with her and soothing her fears, I could “fix” her. As she gestured to me and I responded gently, tears rolled freely down her face, and my heart broke. I kept telling her she was going to be okay; she kept shaking her head and crying. Then they admitted her and took her away, and I went home with Dad and back to “regular” life. I never talked to anyone about what I had experienced.

Life Goes On

Although I didn’t know this at the time of the incident in the dental office, my mother has schizophrenia, a chronic, seriously disruptive and potentially devastating biologically and environmentally based mental illness. As often happens with people who have schizophrenia, at that time she had not been faithfully taking her antipsychotic drugs and had lost touch with reality. She would be stabilized in the hospital and sent home—once again to make her way in a world that despised and misunderstood mental illness, alongside a family who loved her but couldn’t make her better.

During those high school years and the following decades, Mom’s illness profoundly affected our family life. My older sister went to college nearby and spent a lot of herself trying to make sure my younger sister and I were okay—but we never talked about what was wrong with Mom. We were all trying to cope, and we lacked the language and strength to drag it out into the open.

So my younger sister and I hung laundry out on a clothesline in the middle of the city because Mom believed our clothes dryer was possessed by demons. We watched Mom wander the house in a drugged-up haze, sewed our own clothes, cooked for the family, went camping by ourselves, visited Mom in the hospital and kept an eye on her handwriting—because she wrote with her left hand when her symptoms were stronger. I tucked her in at night with my favorite childhood stuffed animal and constantly watched for signs that the cycle of breakdown and hospitalization was starting again.

Mom made her way dreamily through my high school graduation. When it came time for me to select a college, I was determined to put some distance between me and my home. I struggled and stressed over all the information I’d gathered and couldn’t make a decision. When my parents offered to help, I realized I was so independent, it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask them to participate in the decision.

At college, I opened my campus mailbox to “letters” from Mom—actually colored pictures from coloring books. And when she and Dad came to my college graduation, my husband and I woke the next morning to find her catatonic on the floor in our apartment.

The journey hasn’t ended with independent adulthood. Every year has brought its own adventure and every visit a new kind of heartbreak. I have lost sleep before visits to my parents’ house, wondering what we would find when we arrived. I have wistfully met my friends’ moms at their baby showers, wondering what it would be like to have a relationship like that. I have hungered for older women to serve as mentors to me, unsure how to find what I’m longing for. I have cringed my way through Mother’s Day sermons and through movies that portray people with schizophrenia as raging monsters, subhuman sources of amusement or sage prophets. I have lived in fear of other people finding out the truth about my family and rejecting me, of hearing that my mom had fallen victim to something horrible, of losing my own mental stability.

Several years ago, when Mom was not properly medicated, she began to believe she was receiving hidden meanings behind what she heard at church. She eventually believed these spiritual delusions were true and sought more insights through studying the occult. After a while, she rejected her Christian beliefs and fully embraced occult practices and fellowship. Our family was heartbroken. We agonized our way through many conversations with her about the truth she had spent her life believing, but she was firmly committed to her new way of life. She was also irrational and confused, and we knew she was not medicated as she should have been. But we could not force her to get the treatment she needed.

One day I received a call at work, telling me Mom had disappeared. She had left home with no indication of where she was going, and no one we knew had heard from her. I agonized and tried to help my sister—who lives close to my parents—look for her. Months later when, by God’s grace, we found her living in a homeless shelter, my sister tried to coax her out of the shelter, whose staff had already coaxed her off the streets. She was so psychotic, she barely recognized my sister and had almost no awareness of her family.

Working with the shelter staff, we were able to get her into a hospital program and get her back on the proper medication, but the damage had been done. A few months later she was arrested for a crime she had been accused of while living in shelters, and eventually she was convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison.

One of the worst days of my life was the day I saw Mom’s mug shot on the website for the state penitentiary. One of the hardest things I’ve done is take my children to visit their grandma in a state hospital, where she was incarcerated for ten months after she was released from prison. I’ve explained to my children that Grandma loves them but her brain doesn’t work the way ours do, so sometimes she says and does unexpected things because she is sick and her medication doesn’t always work right. At times I’ve kept my children far away from her. And all along I’ve tried to understand who Mom is apart from schizophrenia, partly so I can understand and accept who I am—especially the parts of me that are so much like her.

And so our family’s journey continues—a winding, rocky and stumbling journey with an illness that in many ways has defined us and that has shocked us again and again with its ugliness as it has developed in stages over time.

The Church

Throughout this journey, we have been in the church. The church has been, for the most part, either oblivious or a silent observer, solidly placed in the part of our lives where people don’t understand and where we pretend everything is fine.

In my years since the lonely incident in the dental office, I’ve often thought back to it as a reference point for attitudes toward the mentally ill and their families. The way people in that waiting room responded to my family’s public crisis is the way I’ve seen people in general—including in the church—respond to serious mental illness. To them, my mother was to be feared and I was somehow infected by my association with her. The people around me felt helpless and fearful, and they did nothing to help.

I think we can do better. I think we can be more like the church we were made to be.

The church is the body of Christ—the physical manifestation of Jesus’ presence on earth. “It is made full and complete by Christ, who fills all things everywhere with himself” (Eph 1:23). We play host to the Holy Spirit of God, represent and reflect the God of the universe to the world around us and represent that same God to each other. We are the bride of Christ, beautiful and radiant and waiting eagerly for that walk down the aisle to eternity.

We are also deeply wounded and flawed. We are imperfect as a body and imperfect as individual bodies. We are wrecked by sin and its consequences, fully as wrecked and disfigured as those around us. No one is left untouched by life in a world like ours, where

all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. (Rom 8:19-23)

Yes, someday God will recreate our bodies, and all our suffering will end. This includes the suffering of our minds when our brains are sick or malfunctioning. For centuries, the church has been inspired by this promise: “We are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives. And we are eagerly waiting for him to return as our Savior. He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power with which he will bring everything under his control” (Phil 3:20-21). We hold to this promise—cling to it desperately at times—and look forward to a glorious and awakened life in a world we can’t even imagine.

Unfortunately, we grow impatient and lose sight of the eternal perspective the Holy Spirit nurtures within us. As the Lord and his glorious grace grow strangely dim in our minds, we focus more and more on the here and now. We feel our aches and pains, anxieties and restlessness, and we think, This...