The Common (Mental) Cold
I’ve been doing a lot of reading these past few months. I have found a desire and a need to fill my brain with something other than binge watching Netflix. I have read some great novels, listened to audio books and podcasts while in the care, and read some great books about healing our hearts and minds; which leads me to the current page-turner I am on now. Hold On To Hope by Nichole Marbach has been nothing but page after page of screaming “Yes. Yes! YES!” and I’m only halfway through it. But, I have to pause and share something that came to me while reading this book, with the help of the person who referred me to this author as well.
The book, is Nichole’s story of childhood trauma, addiction, and bipolar disorder. So far, it has been filled with very descriptive and real pictures of what it is like living with an addiction and mental illness. Although I cannot account for an addiction to a substance, every explanation of feeling worthless and unloved hit my right in the realness of my own struggles with those same exact thoughts. Nichole depicts several of her stays in psychiatric hospitals that lasted weeks and months and it took me back to my childhood and my mother’s diagnosis of mental illness and bipolar disorder. I can only imagine my mother having the same guilt and shame Nichole expresses in this book while being away from her children trying to ‘heal’ from an incurable disease.
In the account of the hospital stay that I just finished reading, Nichole explains that her husband would not visit her and also would not bring the kids in to see her. She writes, “They thought tough love was the best approach. But it wasn’t a good thing; I felt abandoned in my time of need…I was trying hard to heal and recover, but the abandonment only resurfaced the suicidal thoughts.” After this she explains how her husband told her that she would not be allowed to move back home during the outpatient part of the program either. Again, flashbacks of my childhood filled my head about how mom never ‘came home’ from one of her hospital stays. But Nichole continues, “I knew deep down that [my husband] was only trying his best to protect himself and the kids, but I viewed it as rejection because I was born bipolar. I didn’t ask to have this disease. It wasn’t fair. If I had cancer instead, I’d be welcomed home. People would visit me in the hospital, and I would be treated equally to others.”
Honestly, as I read that last section, I felt anger stirring in my heart. Anger that people still don’t consider mental illness what it is: an ILLNESS. Too many people continue to see it as a CHOICE. I don’t know about you, but I certainly did NOT choose to think I would be better off dead/nonexistent on a regular basis. But, the thing that really angered me was that Nichole was prevented from being able to see her own children; that those closest to her refused to support her in the journey she was trying to take on the way to some type of healing.
As a kid, my mom was hospitalized frequently for her bipolar disorder. She would be fine for a few months and then the enemy would break her down and she would become suicidal and again need hospitalization to help her. But, my dad NEVER kept my brother and I away from her. I understand wanting to protect our kids, but how about we protect them from the stigma that surrounds mental illness instead. By taking me to a hospital as a young child to see my mom, bandaged wrists and all, on a regular basis while she was ‘sick’ helped me to understand that she wasn’t choosing to be away from us, she was SICK and needed a HOSPITAL to make her better. I mean, isn’t that what hospitals do? Treat sick people? So, if we can have church ministry teams set up to visit sick people in hospitals, why does this NOT include those who are seeking healing from mental sicknesses as well? Again, my memories of Sunday afternoons spent playing ping pong at Phil Haven may not be ‘normal’ childhood memories, but honestly, they were happy memories (especially the time we lost all of the balls in the lights…ooops…) of having a chance to spend time with my sick mom who needed people to know they hadn’t given up on her.
Also, I was discussing how much this section of the book hit home for me to the person who referred me to the author and she explained how she has learned so much from taking the time to listen to people in her life who struggle with mental illness. She has even come to realize that we ALL have mental health struggles in one way or another. I agreed, stating that we ARE all impacted by mental health. It is JUST LIKE physical health. You may not be ‘sick’ all the time, but you need to put forth effort to take care of yourself to keep your physical body healthy. And, even when you do everything to try and stay physically healthy, you could still end up getting sick. The same is true for our mental health. Just like our physical bodies get sick now and then, our mental ‘bodies’ can get sick too. Not having a chronic mental health issue doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally get ‘mental colds’ every now and then that knock us out for a little while. When will we stop separating mental health from all the other ‘types’ of health and see it as equally important, impactful, and unprejudiced as the rest of the ‘healths’?
I’m going to step off of my soap box now and close by sharing a few more of Nichole’s words (I hope she doesn’t mind!) that so eloquently put it this way:
“The truth is, Jesus loves all those with mental illness. He has nothing but compassion on the torment they’re experiencing, and He wants to love them into a place of freedom. They’re sick and need Dr. Jesus as much as someone who has a physical illness. They don’t need to be treated as “less than” or be tossed aside. They need stable love from God and others who will love them like Christ! If Jesus were on the earth, He’d be hanging out in psych wards, loving on all the patients.”
Marbach, Nicole. (2018). Hold on to hope: From bipolar and brokenness to healing and wholeness.
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