Mental Illness and Confidence in Restoration: A guest post by Amy Ivey
A scene begins in the movie Saving Mr. Banks with a young P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, telling her father she has toppins. Travers’ father is near death. His body is ravaged from heavy drinking and illness. She asks what he would like her to buy. “Pears,” he weakly replies. When she returns her mother is bent over in the hallway. Her father has died. You can see the girl’s feet running towards the bedroom as green pears scatter across the wooden floor. Still desperate to make things better, she comes to his side and says “I dropped the pears. I’m sorry Daddy.”
I am struck by the power of the scene – of a little girl trying to fix something she has no power to repair. Her attempts are like trying to hold back the tide or swallow the ocean. The scene draws up in me images of another young girl.
She is a small eleven year old with stringy blond hair. Her mother sits in the driver’s seat of a 1974 gold Impala as she sits in the back. They wait in silence in her uncle’s drive way. The girl knows that people, from social services or some place, are coming. Quietly she pushes trash under the car seat. If they see the car is clean, the girl believes those people will not take her away from her mom.
Minutes later she is ushered into a bedroom in her uncle’s house to wait until her mom enters alone. Without tears she tells the girl with stringy hair that she cannot come home with her. “I love you” she says and pulls out the only money she has in her wallet – a five dollar bill – and gives it to her. And then the mom is gone. My mom was gone. I would never live with her again.
Coping with a Parent’s Mental Illness
My mother had paranoid schizophrenia and would spend the rest of her life in and out of mental hospitals. Growing up, to many our family was invisible. To extended family my mother’s illness was the elephant in the room that no one spoke of. Their denial is sad, because so much pain and destruction could have been lessened by someone who would have cared.
I became a Christian as a teen and my way of coping with my mom’s illness was to say “I am a stronger Christian because of her being sick.” At the time it was the best I could do and it made other Christians comfortable. But in honesty I do not want to be stronger on the back of my mom’s struggle. I would rather her to have had freedom from a devastating illness.
I am confident my mom knew Christ. During a stable time I clearly shared with her and believe she had a faith in Jesus. She had trusted Him but also in her life thought her parents were Nazis and that someone spoke to her from the radio. She tried to knife my aunt, run over my brother, starve herself and much more. Her faith in Christ did not stop the incessant delusions and hallucinations. Does that mean her faith was not real? No. I believe it was real.
The medicines when she remained on them would help. Having her hospitalized was incredibly stressful and heartbreaking. Imagine being my brother, a 16 year old boy, watching your mother forcibly carried off in an ambulance yelling she would never forgive you. In the end, she believed she was childless, lived in an unsafe home, refused contact with anyone, starved herself and nearly died alone. I was at her bedside when she died. I held her unconscious body in my arms after they removed life support and whispered “everything will be okay.” She passed then, but she had been dying for years and I had been grieving for years.
Restoring
My mom was not made whole in this life. She is whole now. I cannot see the restoration that God has completed. I “see through a glass dimly.” But as C.S. Lewis said perhaps the best things are that which we understand least. His restoration of me is a process. Yes, I am stronger in some ways but I am also weaker because of the devastation of my mom’s illness. In accepting that truth, freedom and grace are found.
In Saving Mr. Banks, Walt Disney tells P.L. Travers “It is what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again.” Think of Cinderella, Snow White, and other stories Disney propelled. In the end, good and justice prevails. Unlike Disney, I do not have an imaginative story to share that would tell my mother’s suffering and all be made well. I cannot change the story of her life. I know, because for many years I desperately tried.
However, I can write about her, her struggle with mental illness and the pain of growing up with a mentally ill parent. I can encourage believers to no longer let the reality of mental illness be taboo but to speak of and care for the mentally ill like they do a cancer or multiple sclerosis patient. My mother’s illness was chronic, pervasive, and progressive. However, many individuals with mental illness are able to live productive lives with treatment.
Accessing mental health treatment in a timely and consistent manner is crucial to getting well and preventing tragedies like suicide. This is one reason the church can longer be shaming of treatment and medicines by their silence and rejection. Individuals with mental illness are often stigmatized in our culture. The church should offer the opposite – grace.
I hope by telling my mom’s story that the value of her life and the lives of many others with mental illness will be asserted. And that perhaps somewhere because of believers’ care a mentally ill mom and her children will no longer suffer in silence.
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