mental illness

Rigoberto Alpizar was shot about a month ago in a Miami airport after claiming that he had a bomb. It turns out that he didn’t have a bomb and that all he had is a mental illness called bipolar disorder. Passengers said that the couple looked suspicious getting on the plane and that the woman was very agitated. Well, of course she was! Trying to keep someone in a manic phase of bipolar disorder from doing something is difficult! His neighbors were quoted as saying that the description of Rigoberto’s actions didn’t fit their perceptions of who this man is. Of couse not. Because when people who are bipolar take their medication, they can be just like you and me. I know someone that has bipolar disorder and you would NEVER suspect it unless told about it. I guess the story and the tragicness of it all really hit home with me right now, because I just got done doing a six week rotation at a mental hospital last semester. This is a rotation that I was not looking forward to, and I thought that I had no interest in mental illness beforehand. As it turns out, I think that it is extremely important for society to be informed about mental illness. It is not a hopeless situation with a primary support group for the person, but without this support, it does seem like a losing battle with an endless cycle of hospitalizations.

We have a tendency to view mental illness as something people can merely snap out of or as an illness that is the person’s own fault. However, a lot of different factors go into why people become mentally ill (some of which are genetic) and it is a long road to recovery. Some people never fully recover but instead learn to live with the illness and they use medicine to lessen the symptoms. I think we all learned a little about that from the movie, A Beautiful Mind. It seems to me that Christians in particular should be involved with starting community programs for the mentally ill and having buddy systems where you can be paired with someone who is mentally ill. I say this because I think that the mentally ill are the rejects of society today, and aren’t we called as Christians to have compassion on those rejected by everyone else?

Part of the reason we don’t do this is because we don’t know about the mentally ill. I didn’t really know about them until I had to learn about them in school, and then I didn’t REALLY know about them until I had to work with them for six weeks. Second, I think that we are scared of them. Third, I think that we simply don’t know what to do or where to start. I have some vague ideas of stuff we could do, but no real plan to put into action. Plus, tackling an issue like this is a long term endeavor and complicated. We like things that take little commitment. We like to throw out some money and feel warm and fuzzy about it. Don’t get me wrong, giving money is great, but giving time can be equally as valuable, because broken lives are not healed through money alone but also through a personal relationship with God and connections with loving people. Money is needed for resources, but people’s time is needed in order to put those resources to use.

One man I worked with a lot at the hospital is of particular interest to me. He made me wonder how I would react if he showed up at my church tomorrow. How do we react to people that are acting outside of the ranges of “normal”? I think that we avoid them most of the time. Maybe we’re civil towards them if we have to interact with them, but we certainly don’t warmly embrace them and welcome them into our inner circle. That just makes life too difficult, and if we don’t understand why someone is acting how they are, we’re scared.

Since I started learning more about mental illness, I have had to grapple with where this fits within my faith. How can freewill and mental illness coexist? If someone is doomed to be schizophrenic from birth, how can they have free will? Well, people are not necessarily doomed to every mental illness. According to the transactional theory (which is what I tend to agree with) many different factors cause an end result of mental illness, but many times a lot of those factors were elements outside of the person’s realm of control. For instance, the child that is born with a genetic predisposition and has an abusive childhood, resulting in poor coping mechanisms, suffers from some kind of life stressor at age 18 (this stressor can be anything… think about what makes you stress in any given week), if the stressor happens at a time when coping mechanisms are down or nonexistent, a psychotic break results, and once you get schizophrenia, you’re always going to need medicine, and a lot of people still suffer from symptoms of the disease even when they are on the medication. Mental illness is difficult when it comes to understanding it within the confines of my faith because it distorts people’s perceptions of their environment, resulting in actions that would not otherwise occur. Sure, the person has the freewill to react how they please, but when they literally hear a voice that seems real constantly telling them to hurt themselves or hurt someone else or their eyes see someone, when nobody is actually there, how responsible for their actions are they? These people are reacting to false perceptions, so although they are making their own decisions, these decisions are not based on reality. However, some deeply religious and spiritual people are those that have the most severe forms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I suppose that this is proof that free will does still exist within mental illness. These people rely heavily on God to get them through their mental illness, because they understand that God is the ultimate healer and that medical knowledge and medicine can do no more for them. Some would argue that God is doing nothing too, but that is not true. Faith serves as an important coping mechanism and we can really never know how bad the illness would be without it. Also, even if the disease is no better or no worse in this life because of their faith, their faith does give them a reason to have hope and to go on, and that is extremely important for chronic conditions that are severely impairing.