The vision of World Bipolar Day is to bring world awareness to bipolar disorders and to eliminate social stigma.
World Bipolar Day (WBD) – an initiative of the Asian Network of Bipolar Disorder (ANBD), the International Bipolar Foundation (IBPF), and the International Society for Bipolar Disorder (ISBD).
On March 30th, the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, was posthumously diagnosed as probably having bipolar disorder.
The vision of WBD is to bring world awareness to bipolar disorders and to eliminate social stigma. Through international collaboration the goal of World Bipolar Day is to bring the world population information about bipolar disorders that will educate and improve sensitivity towards the illness.
Bipolar Disorder (also called manic-depressive illness) is a mental illness affecting up to 2% of the population worldwide. It represents a significant challenge to patients, their family members, health care workers, and our communities.
While growing acceptance of bipolar disorder as a medical condition, like diabetes and heart disease, has taken hold in some parts of the world, unfortunately the stigma associated with the illness is a barrier to care and continues to impede recognition and effective treatment.
Despite the alarming number of people affected with a mental illness, statistics show that only one-third of these individuals seek treatment. According to Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the NIMH (USA), psychiatry is the only part of medicine where there is actually greater stigma for receiving treatment for these illnesses than for having them.
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia:
that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.“
2 Corinthians 1:8
“We should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism.”
“But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others’, that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.”
John Piper
It is my deliberateness, and not the impulsiveness that scares me. I know despair. I know what it is like to be ‘backed into a corner’ and then feel a totally empty desperation. But you must understand, there can also be a weird seductiveness to ‘being lost,’ a strange sort of nobility, a twisted kind of weird honor when it comes to despair.
Some people are convinced they are never going to change. They embrace the ‘dark certainties’ of knowing they are profoundly flawed and therefore damned. It’s these dear ones that Jesus especially came for.
Now, this really seems rather bizarre, that people could do this intentionally, deliberately. But I’m afraid to tell you that it happens all the time. Despair is chosen over the option of life. This is the ‘lostness’ of the race of Adam.
Perhaps suicide begins before the action? Perhaps it starts days, weeks or months before we actually do the deed?
Pop culture has given us words, albeit in a rather simplistic form. I just happened to think right now of an old AC/DC song, ‘Highway to Hell‘. The lyrics are pretty basic and very simple, but the lead singer seems to really have a chronically, decided dedication to being one of the irretrievably lost.
The songwriter formats a ‘certain glory’ to being part of the damned. This is a simplistic approach to the next stop– a more advanced case of stark-white despair, suicide. (We can call this ‘spiritual hubris,’ or even, “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.”)
In dealing with sin we can make two mistakes. One is to make light of it. The other is to be overwhelmed, throw up our hands, and surrender.
When we decide to live this kind of living, we’re pulled into a vortex of a black melancholy with a dash of fatalism, which makes it reasonable and weirdly heroic in some perverse way. We love the dark, and we embrace a fatal life–it becomes our identity.
To escape this ‘drowning despair’ we must first dethrone our right to personal sovereignty. And secondly, we need to grab the concept that God’s grace has an ultimate power that supersedes our notions of a ‘deserved’ love. (It’s completely undeserved.)
We must believe that somehow, someway, God chooses us out of a pile–a pile of the worst and ugliest that has ever existed. And somehow, He delights in doing this, and after all, He is the Lord.
We’re meant to be the people of true hope.
Our problems, our addictions, force us to clearly renounce our evil follyof despair. Our issues make us vulnerable. I’ve discovered that there is a seductiveness to giving up and taking up the sin of despair. There can be a ‘weird romance’ that lures those who walk out this living DEATH.
But honestly, is it not even more heroic to live in hope? To live a life full of joy?
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you.”
“All day long my disgrace is before me, and shame has covered my face.”
Psalm 44:15
Some of us truly understand shame. It’s like we have been dipped in it, we have wallowed in it, and awful things are sticking to us. We live out our lives in disgrace and in the sense of nasty embarrassment which we can’t truly resolve. And it effects all that we do, even in those rare moments we are not aware of it.
Sometimes I wish I was teflon.
I would love to have a ‘non-stick’ heart. There is often a constant sense of being totally insufficient as a person. It seems I can develop a deep awareness of being defective and unworthy. Many of us feel this way all the time. It is painfully welded to us, and we keep trying to figure how to break that dark bond that’s on our hearts and minds.
Sometimes mental illness thrives on that blackness.
Depression feeds on that stuff, it seems to cycle through us. Our pasts become its nourishment, and at certain times it flourishes. Sometimes it explodes in our minds.
A psychiatrist once told me that 90% of resident psych patients could go home, if only they knew they were truly forgiven.
Shame is a monster that is constantly tracking us. At times we can put some distance between us. But occasionally it leaps up on our backs and drags us down. We are humiliated with our guilt. That is precisely when we should scream out for help.
There are pastors and psychiatrists, therapists and friends who are most helpful. Practicing prayer and soaking ourselves in worship can drive the monster away. And maybe meds can often provide help. All of these have helped me.
Human beings were never created to bear guilt.
But we really don’t know what to do. Shame is vigorously parasitical and consuming. If it runs amok through your life it can and will destroy you. And it’s caustic, it erodes your relationships with others. It blocks grace.
“You know my reproach, and my shameand my dishonor; my foes are all known to you.” (Psalm 69:19)
“To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him.” (Daniel 9:9)
God has made an incredible effort to remove your guilt. Your sin, though it is crimson red in its intensity and very obvious, becomes as white as snow. Your shame and guilt can be erased.
The blood of Jesus, and the cross, can free the guilty and give us real life.
Please trust Him in this. He wants to do this for you.
“Come now, let’s settle this,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.”
This should give direction and dialogue on the issues faced by every church member. It is a great opportunity we have been given— to minister to every person in the Body of Christ. —Bryan
by Ken Camp, Associated Baptist Press —
Living with depression — or any other form of mental illness — is like viewing life “through a glass darkly,” according to Jessy Grondin, a student in Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School. “It distorts how you see things.”
Like one in four Americans, (25%), wrestles significantly with a mental illness.
Depression is one of the most common types of mental illness, along with bipolar disorder, another mood-altering malady. Other forms of mental illness include schizophrenia and disorders related to anxiety, eating, substance abuse and attention deficit/hyperactivity.
Like many Americans with mental illness, Grondin and her family looked to the church for help. And she found the response generally less-than-helpful. “When I was in the ninth grade and hospitalized for depression, only a couple of people even visited me, and that was kind of awkward. I guess they didn’t know what to say,” said Grondin, who grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Alabama.
Generally, most Christians she knew dealt with her mood disorder by ignoring it, she said. “It was just nonexistent, like it never happened,” she said. “They never acknowledged it.” When she was an adolescent, many church members just thought of her as a troublemaker, not a person dealing with an illness, she recalled.
Mental Illness that affects believers must be accepted by the Church.
A few who acknowledged her diagnosed mood disorder responded with comments Grondin still finds hurtful. “When dealing with people in the church … some see mental illness as a weakness — a sign you don’t have enough faith,” she said. “They said: ‘It’s a problem of the heart. You need to straighten things out with God.’ They make depression out to be a sin, because you don’t have the joy in your life a Christian is supposed to have.”
A Baylor University study revealed that among Christians who approached their local church for help in response to a personal or family member’s diagnosed mental illness, more than 30 percent were told by a minister that they or their loved one did not really have a mental illness. And 57 percent of the Christians who were told by a minister that they were not mentally ill quit taking their medication.
It’s not a sin to be sick.
That troubles neuroscientist Matthew Stanford. “It’s not a sin to be sick,” he insists. Stanford, professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the doctoral program in psychology at Baylor, acknowledges religion’s longstanding tense relationship with behavioral science. And he believes that conflict destroys lives. “Men and women with diagnosed mental illness are told they need to pray more and turn from their sin. Mental illness is equated with demon possession, weak faith and generational sin,”
Stanford writes in his recently released book, Grace for the Afflicted. “The underlying cause of this stain on the church is a lack of knowledge, both of basic brain function and of scriptural truth.” As an evangelical Christian who attends Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas, Stanford understands underlying reasons why many Christians view psychology and psychiatry with suspicion. “When it comes to the behavioral sciences, many of the early fathers were no friends of religion. That’s certainly true of Freud and Jung,” he noted in an interview.
Often sin is not the main issue.
Many conservative Christians also believe the behavioral sciences tend to justify sin, he added, pointing particularly to homosexual behavior. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association famously removed homosexuality from its revised edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As a theologically conservative Christian, Stanford stressed that scripture, not the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, constitutes the highest authority.
But that doesn’t mean the Bible is an encyclopedia of knowledge in all areas, and all people benefit from scientific insights into brain chemistry and the interplay of biological and environmental factors that shape personality. Furthermore, while he does not presume to diagnose with certainty cases of mental illness millennia after the fact, Stanford believes biblical figures — Job, King Saul of Israel and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, among others — demonstrated symptoms of some types of mental illness. “Mental disorders do not discriminate according to faith,” he said.
Regardless of their feelings about some psychological or psychiatric approaches, Christians need to recognize mental illnesses are genuine disorders that originate in faulty biological processes, Stanford insisted. “It’s appropriate for Christians to be careful about approaches to treatment, but they need to understand these are real people dealing with real suffering,” he said. Richard Brake, director of counseling and psychological services for Texas Baptist Child & Family Services, agrees. “The personal connection is important. Church leaders need to be open to the idea that there are some real mental-health issues in their congregation,” Brake said.
Pastors much carefully reach out to the mentally ill.
Ministers often have training in pastoral counseling to help people successfully work through normal grief after a loss, but may lack the expertise to recognize persistent mental-health problems stemming from deeper life issues or biochemical imbalances, he noted. Internet resources are available through national mental-health organizations and associations of Christian mental-health providers. But the best way to learn about available mental health treatment — and to determine whether ministers would be comfortable referring people to them — is through personal contact, Brake and Stanford agreed. “Get to know counselors in the community,” Brake suggested. “Find out how they work, what their belief systems are and how they integrate them into their practices.”
Mental-health providers include school counselors and case managers with state agencies, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists in private practice or associated with secular or faith-related treatment facilities, he noted. Stanford and Brake emphasized the vital importance of making referrals to qualified mental-health professionals, but they also stressed the role of churches in creating a supportive and spiritually nurturing environment for people with mental-health disorders. Mental illness does not illustrate lack of faith, but it does have spiritual effects, they agreed. “Research indicates people with an active faith life who are involved in congregational life get through these problems more smoothly,” Brake said.
You can’t fix the issues, but you can love them.
Churches cannot “fix” people with mental illness, but they can offer support to help them cope. “The church has a tremendous role to play. Research shows the benefits of a religious social support system,” Stanford said. They stressed the importance of creating a climate of unconditional love and acceptance for mentally ill people in church — a need Grondin echoed. “There needs to be an unconditional sense of community and relationships,” she said. She emphasized the importance of establishing relationships that may not be reciprocally satisfying all the time.
People with mental-health issues may not be as responsive or appreciative as some Christians would like them to be, she noted. “Others need to take the initiative and keep the relationship established. People don’t realize how hard it can be (for a person with a mood disorder) to summon the courage just to get out of bed,” Grondin said. Christians who seek to reach out to people with mental illness need to recognize “they are not able to see things clearly, and it’s not their fault,” Grondin added.
Mostly, Christians need to offer acceptance to people with mental illness — even if they don’t fully understand, she insisted. “Just be present. Offer support and love,” Grondin concluded. “You won’t always know what to say. Just speak words of support into a life of serious struggles. That means more than anything.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.)
A great book:
“Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness” [Paperback] can be found at www.Amazon.com, by Matthew S. Stanford Ph.D
*******
For more information: National Alliance on Mental Illness (800) 950-6264 Anxiety Disorders Association of America (240) 485-1001 Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance (800) 826-3632 American Association of Christian Counselors (800) 526-8673 Stephen Ministries (314) 428-2600
Broken Believers 
