The blessing if you will, of mental and personality disorder.
All too rarely, do I happen upon an article that reaches for, and teases out, the positive in mental illness.
Mental illness is of course debilitating and devastating in so many ways, and yet there are blessings in the curse. There is gold to be panned in the river of mental and personality disorders.
There is no doubt in my mind that some of our greatest Christian thinkers, visionaries and artists, were touched with extreme and recurring mental and emotional distress.
Think Scripture if you will.
We have the weeping prophet, the addicted strong man, the bipolar king, the suicidal Qoheleth, the depressed Psalmist, the intensely grieved, and the self-harmer.
This is the very wonder of God, in that He works through and uses our brokenness. Indeed, even powerfully so.
He will not cast asunder the mentally and personality disordered, in fact, he will pursue with relentless abounding passion, that precious jewel He has hidden inside the very disorder that so pervades, and even cultivates who we are as children of God.
Anyway, here is an unusual article from Psychology Today, that seeks for the “blessings in the trial” of bipolarity.
Tags: Christian Life
July 19th, 2011 at 12:38 pm
[...] I blogged recently on the more positive aspects of mental illness. [...]