Most discussions that I’ve seen about mental health and religion typically focus on the most common mental illnesses – depression and anxiety – and acknowledge that these mental health issues block feelings of the spirit. Today, let’s talk about the mental health issues that make the spirit (or something like it) more accessible.
I was a spiritual giant. From my youth, I had well-defined and unmistakable spiritual experiences. I was a bit puzzled by a friend who said she’d never felt the spirit (we were 16) because I felt the spirit all the time. I was also puzzled by people who couldn’t tell the difference between their feelings and the spirit. I didn’t have many feelings (remember that for later), but I sure knew what the spirit felt like! It was a strong sense of profound ideas, accompanied by a compulsion to act on it and the confidence to do things that are a bit out of the norm. It definitely came from outside myself. I also scratched my head about people who said they couldn’t get answers to their prayers, or recognize them. I talked to God and he talked back. Not verbally, of course. But I’d had an active connection to God ever since I was a teen.
I was on the teacher track at Church. At every single ward I’ve ever been in (and I moved around constantly, so that’s a lot of wards), I was a teacher. Not only that, I was frequently the best teacher in the ward, and many people told me I was the best teacher they’ve ever heard. Well duh. I had the spiritual gift of teaching (D&C 46:17-18) and my patriarchal blessing said so. I’m a charismatic speaker. Once, after I spoke at a fireside (I was the five minute “spiritual thought” intro speaker before the main speaker (a man) spoke), I literally got rushed by people wanting my notes. I’d brought several copies because I’d gotten used to people asking me for my talk and lesson notes. This time was unusual because I also got asked for my autograph. At a Church fireside. The main speaker quietly left while I was signing autographs and listening to people gush. I’m not bragging (much) – just giving you a picture of how insightful, compelling and charismatic I could be.
That charisma was a switch I could flip. When I was “on” I was amazing. I typically flipped the switch and turned “on” at Church and school (where I also excelled). First impressions are everything, right? Wow, my first impressions were amazing. It was all very righteous, of course. This was the Spirit that I was channeling, the Holy Ghost, the witness of truth and the Third Member of the Godhead. I burned bright until I flamed out because I couldn’t sustain that first impression. It’s a good thing I moved so often. Why stick around and disappoint people?
Because of my strong connection to Heavenly Father, I was also the target of Satan’s attacks. My mission president explained that connection. At a Zone Conference, he told a story about an experience he’d had with Satan and casting him out. He testified that if we were doing the Lord’s work, we had to be ready for Satan’s attacks. So that’s what I was dealing with! I already identified strongly with Nephi, who saw “many afflictions in the course” of his days, but also “had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God” (1 Nephi 1:1). The way he went from having visions to being cast down in despair was pretty familiar to me. I’d crash after a particularly strong spiritual experience.
Joseph Smith was pretty relatable too. He was nearly destroyed by Satan before he saw God and Christ in the first vision (JSH 1:15-16). Then later, he felt like he wasn’t living up to his potential and got depressed, so he prayed to ask God if about his standing (JSH 1:29), and God sent Moroni to keep him up all night having visions (JSH 1:47). I never had anything anywhere near that intense, but the pattern was familiar to me – spiritual experiences came packaged with some really rough experiences.
On my mission, I found out that not everyone is suicidal. My companion said something after we’d talked to someone who was suicidal. It blew my mind, but I kept my surprise off my face (not showing emotions was a survival skill in my family) and didn’t say anything. But I turned it over in my mind later — some people think suicide is unthinkable. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to die. Was that not typical?
No matter. I had some epic spiritual experiences on my mission which outweighed that odd idea. One experience was about the equality of men and women — it was the first time in my life (but certainly not the last) in which I felt “pure intelligence” flowing into me. That’s how Joseph Smith describes the revelatory process and I knew what it was when I felt it.
Fast forward about ten years — my life had somehow gotten off track. I was still excelling at Church talks and lessons, and my stellar grades led to a stellar degree and job, but I wasn’t married and having children like I was supposed to. In fact, I’d never even dated the same guy more than twice. Even more head scratching, I hadn’t made a single new friend in ten years. I was impressive, no question about that, but you don’t make friends because you’re impressive. You make friends because you connect with them. I didn’t connect.
Slowly, I was beginning to realize that some aspects of my personality were difficult for other people to deal with. Wimps. Nothing could be harder for them than it was for me to deal with my personality. Sometimes I got really sad about the fact that I hadn’t died yet. Wasn’t I good enough to die? Why wouldn’t God take me home to the Celestial Kingdom already? Being alive another day came with a sense of failure. It was just so hard to be alive. Except for when it was totally epic and I had to live long enough to carry out God’s plan for my life.
All right, let’s skip a bunch of stuff and a lot of years and get to my psychological evaluation.
After quitting Church, I noticed that my ups and downs were the same as when I was a faithful Mormon. I’d always thought prayer and righteousness helped keep me from sinking into permanent despair, but it turned out that other non-religious activities were just as good at pulling me out of despair. It’s like … it’s like I wasn’t having spiritual experiences paired with attacks from Satan. It’s like those were just emotional patterns?? What??
Another important development in the years that I’m skipping is that I discovered my emotions again. It turned out that I do have emotions. For the first couple decades of my life, my dominating emotion was the abject terror of my father. Once I processed that, it set my other emotions free and I was gradually learning to understand my feelings and find out what my personality was like when I wasn’t at Level Ten Fear all the time.
So. The pandemic happened and I was fine until I wasn’t. I went to the doctor to ask for a Xanax prescription. I just needed a bit of help once in a while, that’s all. This wasn’t serious, just a touch of anxiety that got a bit worse during the pandemic. I filled out the psych questionnaires, lying to answer all the questions that ask about being suicidal. I always lied in answer to those questions. I didn’t want to be hospitalized. I knew enough to call the Suicide Prevention Hotline when I needed to. Duh. Everyone knows that. Being suicidal was just my baseline emotion, not something to tell a doctor.
The doctor said I had bipolar disorder and I said I wanted a second opinion. Full disclosure: the conversation wasn’t quite that calm, but that’s the essence of it.
The second opinion went like this.
I got a referral to a Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology, nicknamed a Psy.D (pronounced sigh-dee). That’s a very specific degree that makes you an expert in diagnosing mental health conditions. My Psy.D took private clients, but about half his clientele was evaluating prisoners in jail and other people referred to him by a judge. (In the US of A, the way to get mental health treatment if you’re poor and don’t have health insurance is to get arrested.)
I did a one-hour intake interview. To prepare for this, I wrote up a 20-page single spaced summary of every mental health crisis point in my life. Other people don’t do that to prep for a diagnosis, but I’m an overachiever so that’s what I did.
After the intake, I came back for a three-hour appointment to take multiple choice tests and true false tests. The Psy.D picked out which tests, based on what he’d learned from the first interview and my mental health dissertation. I answered about 800+ questions on a tablet. I even answered the questions about being suicidal honestly. I finally wanted to know what was really going on.
Weeks later, I went back to get my diagnosis. The Psy.D gave me a 13-page single spaced report that basically climbed into my mind and read it from the inside. I was extremely rational in the appointment while he went over it with me. I thanked him politely and assured him that I was fine. We chatted and laughed. This behavior is called masking.
I crashed the next day after getting the kids off to school (I could control the timing but not the crash; I knew it was coming and I managed to keep my kids from witnessing it). That report freaked me out so badly that I couldn’t finish reading it. I didn’t want to be known on that level, not even by myself. I spiraled; I bought a bottle of wine and tried to get drunk [fn 1]; I took meds I shouldn’t have taken (nothing lethal); I called the Suicide Prevention Hotline and discovered they have a mental health crisis response team because they dispatched them to my home after a ten minute conversation.
By the next morning, I was perfectly fine again and teleworked a full day and then chatted cheerfully with the therapist from the mental health response team who called me to follow up on my epic meltdown from the day before. Haha! Such an overreaction! I’m just fine. Life’s great, isn’t it? Sorry to have wasted your time!
Mood swings are kinda my thing.
Anyway.
I do not have Bipolar Disorder. I also do not have Borderline Personality Disorder [fn 2]. I also don’t have Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder [fn 3]. Nor do I have Complex PTSD. What I have are tendencies and patterns that, if they were any worse, would put me over the edge and into a diagnosis in at least one of these categories. [fn 4]
My Psy.D diagnosed me with General Anxiety Disorder (fair) and Major Depressive Disorder. (That one confused the Psy.D. “You don’t present like you have depression,” he said. “Weird,” I agreed. I mean, if he didn’t notice that I’d answered every single question about suicide with “yes” then I wasn’t going to bring it up.)
We’ll skip the details of me coming to terms with my psychological evaluation (I can now read the entire thing without freaking out) and starting medication (I’m no longer suicidal) [fn 5] and working my way through Dialectical Behavior Therapy (instructions in how to accept that I am not receiving messages from God or Satan).
I haven’t had a spiritual experience since then. Thank God (thank science).
I’ve seen plenty of blog posts about how depression and anxiety can keep you from feeling the spirit. But what about if you’ve got a mental health issue that makes you TOO sensitive to the spirit? Because I wasn’t hallucinating (all) those spiritual experiences. I’ll share some of them in future posts. I’ve had experiences with spiritual promptings and “pure intelligence” that link into the real world and actual truth. Experiences that, even in hindsight with my psychological evaluation in hand, I cannot explain any other way than to conclude that I connected with some sort of Something Out There.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll post some more thoughts about the intersection of spiritual experiences and the mental health profession.
footnotes:
[fn 1] I drank about one-third of a bottle of cheap wine. I loathed the taste. It gave me an instant headache. I got a little bit dizzy, but it didn’t even take the edge off of my panic. I felt like crap. The next day, I poured the rest of it down the sink. I did not want to sin; I just couldn’t stand my feelings and desperately needed to do something to make my feelings go away. Alcohol didn’t work.
[fn 2] Borderline Personality Disorder is frequently confused with Bipolar Disorder.
[fn 3] Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is different from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. They really should have picked a different name.
[fn 4] I want to be entirely clear that I do not actually have these disorders. I don’t want anyone who reads this post to develop unrealistic expectations for someone they might know who actually does have a diagnosable disorder. “Disorder” means you can’t maintain normal life functioning. If I actually had a disorder, I highly doubt that I would be able to hold down a full-time job, for example. Even just the sub-clinical tendencies that I have are enough to have blown up my life many times. I didn’t achieve the stability that I’m at now until I was in my late 40s.
[fn 5] I was first diagnosed with depression in my early 30s and I took anti-depressants for 18 months. I got self-destructive. I didn’t attempt to die by suicide, but I took some other really unwise risks. I quit meds after 18 months and was afraid to try them again because of what I did while I was taking them. If you’re suicidal, the apathy of depression is a protection. Meds gave me my energy levels back without changing my desires to just stop existing. I understand why some people get more self-destructive once they are being treated.
Questions:
- Did you ever meet somebody who lived on a whole different level of inspiredness than you? What did you think of them?
- Example: the people who insist that they get promptings about what to buy at the store. I got promptings about what to buy when I prayed for them (I was broke, okay? I needed help to stretch my money). I didn’t announce those experiences in fast and testimony meeting, but I had them.
- If any of the Church leaders said they had actually seen and talked to Jesus Christ, would this be a marvelous revelation? Or a psychotic episode? Would you really want to follow someone who genuinely believed he was talking to Jesus?
- Why did some people in the 1800s believe other people could talk to God and have visions or revelations? Because Joseph Smith wasn’t the only one. Several other churches were founded at about the same time Joseph Smith got the LDS Church started. And there were others who claimed profound spiritual experiences who didn’t go on to start a church.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call 988.
Wheat & Tares 