mental illness

How the patron saint of mental illness has shown up in my brother’s life

One person told me, “It’s the first time I’ve been in a church for 30 years, since that day.”

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “bridge.”

He leaned back and sighed. “I think what you need is a spiritual experience.”

Two new books provide a devastating vision of America’s mental health crisis.

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “storm.”

“When the church couldn’t talk about suicide or mental illness, it felt like God couldn’t either.”

Molly McCully Brown recovers the lives of women at an institution notorious for its eugenics program.

I relate to physical sickness more easily than mental illness. So does our culture.

Grant Wacker recommends the best recently published books in his field.

You can never fully know your child’s interior life. You cannot know the measure of sadness or rage that may be unfolding within them.

Dennis Covington is famous for seeking faith in extreme places. Twenty years ago it was the snake-handling, poison-drinking Christians of southern Appa­lachia.

I told her she was upsetting people with her message of accusation and fear. She responded by telling someone nearby that they were going to hell.

Recently my father-in-law's Medicaid plan stopped covering Lexapro—with little notice. By the time he could get authorization for a "preferred" antidepressant, he had quit cold turkey.

Jean sits down with the rest of the committee members, and the meeting gets started. She's in her familiar light blue cashmere cardigan sweater, her reading glasses hanging from a thin black woven cord around her neck, her gray-streaked hair pulled back into an efficient bun. She is as proper as always. But tonight her face is completely blank, as if she doesn’t dare reveal anything. She says nothing. “What’s up with Jean?” I wonder.

In 1992 I had a clinical depression. It was a long time in coming, but in hindsight it was inevitable. I was hunkered down in my study trying to write a sermon on the atonement. Behind the stormy sky in my mind, I saw not a smiling Providence offering a gesture of boundless love in sharing his son Jesus, but a scowling ogre, an angry, petulant father. Whether this torment was a function of the descending depression or a contribution to it, I cannot say, but I called my wife and said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m coming unglued.”