Debunking the Myths about Mental Illness

I have recently been doing some volunteer work for the local chapter of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), helping out with the CIT (Crisis Intervention Team), Training course; a course that is designed to educate law enforcement officers, 911-dispatchers and other professionals about how to effectively deal with persons who struggle with a mental disorder, the goal being to get consumers into treatment and not have them unnecessarily incarcerated.


If there is one thing that I have learned from participating in these classes, it is that there is a lot of ignorance when it comes to what exactly it means to struggle with a mental illness. Too often, when you hear the words "mental illness", we think of people who are looking for a crutch to excuse bad behavior, or we think of people who are morally weak and simply just won't "get their act together." Words like "crazy", "lunatic", "retard" etc are thrown out carelessly to describe real people with real medical symptoms. Science has shown that these improper assumptions are not only wrong, but they feed into the stigma that prevents people with these type of disorders from getting the kind of help that they need, and subsequently is the reason why generally speaking, people with a mental illness have a life expectancy significantly shorter than the rest of the population. I will never forget looking at my doctor with a sense of sheer disbelief and horrow several years ago when he suggested a few years ago that I might need to go on an anti-depressant. I kept thinking to myself, "what is he trying to say? That I am not strong enough to handle my own life?"

I was recently reminded of the importance of awareness of the plight of people who struggle with a mental illness after hearing this past week of a friend and former colleague who tried to take his own life in a very gruesome way. Fortunately, he did survive, but has needed intensive care since the incident. He had been suffering in silence through some very turbulent emotional issues and he saw death as the only way out. I wondered to myself, "had he not done this, would we even be cognisant of his pain and sorrow?"

If you go to the NAMI website, you will find this definition and quote about mental illness:

"Mental illnesses are medical conditions that disrupt a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life. Serious mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder. The good news about mental illness is that recovery is possible."

I used to be one of those skeptics that thought that such definitions and claims by people supposedly struggling in this arena were not only bogus, but based on pseudo-science that was aimed to cause people to see themselves as victims. That was until I had to face my own struggles, and also when I objectively looked at the scientific evidence for what it is. Technology is so advanced that we can actually see, for instance, the changes that the brain goes through when a person is chronically addicted to a substance.

Here are some of the myths that must be dispelled if people who struggle with a mental disorder are going to get the help that they need:

1. Mental Illnesses are nothing more than signs of character flaws or signs moral failure. This could not be further from the truth. The fact is that most people who struggle with a mental disorder are acutely aware of their own moral ineptitude, but know that they do not have the power within themselves to overcome in areas where they struggle.
2. Willpower alone is enough to overcome a mental illness. This is as ludicrous as telling a person with diabetes to "will" their sugar levels back to normal.
3. People who struggle with a mental illness are simply looking for a crutch, so as not to work or to take advantage of the system. This is another unfortunate but common assumption that is really related to statement #1 above. The fact, however, is that many people who struggle with a mental illness who have a hard time holding down a steady job are in the catch-22 predicament that often arises when you are unemployed, an unemployed person does not have access to steady health care, and if you don't have access to adequate health care, you often cannot get the treatment that you need, this ends up feeding into the domino effect that spirals out of control in the person's life, making it hard for the person to be steady enough to get the job in the first place and be steady it in. We put the cart before the horse when we think that if they just go out there and "live life" like others, everything would be alright. Mental health treatment must preceed and accompany living life.
4. People who struggle with a mental illness are "crazy" and liable to just go off on you at any moment for no reason: This is another popular assumption, usually fueled by the stereotypes of people we see on TV or in the movies. But it is not based in reality or truth.

The bottom line is that there is very little awareness when it comes to issues of people who have a mental illness. Yes, this is changing, but change often takes time, and it is usually only when a family has become personally affected by the plight of mental illness that they seem to "get it". We all know someone that has struggled or is struggling with a mental illness, the question is, "do they know it and are they getting the help that they need!" Hopefully, with more and more people having the courage to tell their stories of healing and survival, we will enable more and more people to be less shamed of getting the help that they need.

Stephen O. Akinduro

Grace and Politics

Is there room for "God's grace" in politics? I wondered about this a few days ago after getting into a spirited debate about politics with a good friend of mine. He happens to be a die hard Republican, who has no real liking (putting it mildly) for president Obama, and sees fault with practically everything that the current president is doing; I, on the other hand, happen to be a person who voted for Obama, and believe he should at least be given a chance to lead. This is not to say that I agree with everything that the current administration is trying to do, but I understand their sentiment and believe that he (Obama) means well and loves the country no less than those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. He inherited a tough set of challenges and it is going to take a lot of work for him to succeed. Unfortunately, we live in an age of little or no patience, and when people don't see results yesterday, they pile on the blame and ridicule..

But this blog entry is not about political theory or whether you call yourself conservative, liberal, independent or are totally indifferent when it comes to political matters. What really concerns me is the vicious and vindictive tone that our political dialogue has taken. To be fair, when president George W. Bush was in office, he was catching hell from his critics on the Left, especially over the war in Iraq, and it seems like the Right could not wait to pounce on Obama once he won the presidential election last fall. This is, after all, how politics works, you demonize your opponents until they can't take it anymore or until the public gets the impression that your side is always right and their side is always wrong. You ignore the fact that healthy political debate is actually a good thing, realizing that all side do have something good to the table. As a person who believes the message of God's grace, I realize that no label can accurately describe a person, even in the political arena. We are all people of some paradox, there is some liberal in the most conservative of us, and some conservative in the most liberal of us.

The talking points in politics would have us believe that:

• Liberals are people who hate America; they're socialists or communists, abortion-loving heathens, who find fault with everything that America does; their agenda is to take God away from the public discourse and take away guns from even licensed gun carriers. Liberals have no moral compass and simply want to change the constitution to fit their moral lasciviousness.
• Conservatives are war mongering, fascists, self-righteous capitalists, who have no compassion for the poor and favor big corporations and the rich more than the every day working American; they are racists who hate immigrants and other minority groups and have no bigger goal than to preserve the status-quo (meaning, protect the interest of white males).

Of course, we know that these Labels do not fit everyone, and they are gross exaggerations that do not often reflect reality, but because perception is often people's reality, many of these stereotypes end up sticking. but if you really got to know the people who are demonized with these labels, you will realize that they are actually much more complex than these labels suggest. But because we live in such a politicized arena, it is almost impossible to have a substantive dialogue about anything political across the aisle without demonizing others. There are liberals in Red States and conservatives in Blue States, and you will find out that not all liberals agree, and not all conservatives agree. There are people on the "Left" who are very religious and there are people on the "Right" who don't believe in God. I can't tell you how shocked I was watching C-Span the other night when I found out last night that a rising star in the conservative movement, writer S.E. Cupp, is an atheist. Being a conservative and an atheist are two things that just don't go together amongst most conservatives, especially here in the South, (she live in N.Y. though), but that just goes to show that these labels just don't fit everyone, which goes to show why the fact that most African-American Democrats being staunch Christians is often under reported.

I am not writing this to criticize anyone's political views. I just want to emphasize that if we are to look at each other from the standpoint of "grace" and not "self-righteousness", then we would be less likely to demonize each other and more likely to have empathy and compassion for each other. One of the things that makes the Bible such a compelling piece of literature and inspiration is that even in the most admired of Bible characters, their flaws are glaringly obvious for us to see. I often say that most of the people whom we revere in the Bible, could never make it in today's political climate, because we are not kind to those whose fallibility is so obvious. Can you imagine someone like king David or Solomon considering running for office today? They would be run out of town, especially with their known sexual indiscretions obvious for the world to see.

Maybe it is time that we all embrace a little bit more humility when it comes to how we deal with each other, especially in our current contentious political arena.

Stephen Oladotun Akinduro

L.O.V.E.

"if you judge people, you have no time to love them." ~ Mother Teresa

What does it mean to love someone? We use this word "love" so often, from the "love" that we express to our kids, parents, family members, or close friends, to the "love" or affection and romance that we express to a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, or lover; love is such a popular word. Countless songs have been written about it, movies and plays made about it. Love is often called the very essence of life. It has been said that, "it is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all." So it is fair to say that love is one of the great motivators of the human spirit.

We know that when we say that we "love" a family member, we are not necessarily talking about the same thing as when we say that we "love" our favorite entertainer, nor are we talking about the same "love" we have for our spouse. One can argue that love ranges on a scale starting from 'Eros" love, which is more of a kind of lust or desire, to "Agape" or unconditional love, which does not waver based on circumstances. For instance, I may say that I have "fallen in love with a young lady", what is often called "love at first sight", when the real issue is that I am very sexually attracted to her and this attraction clouds my thinking and causes me to say that I "love" her; maybe it should really called "lust at first sight." To be fair, I may come to love her unconditionally, but at that moment, my "love" for her is really based on an ulterior motive, which is a sexual attraction or an attraction based on some quality in her that I admire.

Ultimately, the real goal for all of us is to love unconditionally, or to have the kind of "Agape" love that God has for us. The kind of love implied in Romans 5:8, where it says, "but God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. " in 1 John 4:10, it says further, "This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins." The key issue in these verses is that God was not compelled to love us because of our promises of obedience or even futile attempts to obey Him. His love is what can be called a one-way love, a love that is not predicated on the actions of the person(s) loved. Too often, when we say that we "love" someone, we "love" with strings attached - basically implying, "I love you as long as you behave or act in the way that I like or consider appropriate".

There is a reason why the mother-child relationship is one of the most celebrated ones in our culture, because for the most part, the closest thing that most people experience to unconditional love is the love they get from a parent, usually the mother. This is not to say that there are not dads who don't love like this, but we all know that especially with the high rate of single parenthood in this nation, most children are raised by their mothers and they get their models of love from their mothers alone. Mothers these days carry a huge burden, from parenting, which is a full time job, to nurturing, to even being breadwinners, in many cases the primary breadwinner. To the child, the mother is not only often a model of love, but a sort of super being who does it all.

To love is to be able to look beyond what may be symptoms of a deeper problem - bad behavior, addiction, etc - and realize that a lot of times the habits that we dislike in other people are simply secondary issues to deeper problems. It is easy for me to ask why a person does drugs, is sexually promiscuous, has anger issues etc, but it is tougher for me to actually listen to them and see what has led them down that behavioral path. It does not mean that we justify or sanction bad behavior, but that we realize that our behavior is often symptomatic of deeper needs that are not being met. Too often, we are so busy making rash covert judgments about people, their clothing, their body art, tastes in music, their bad or inappropriate habits and so on, and in doing so, we spend very little time connecting with people and getting to know them and love them..

The essence of loving others stems from the realization that we are who we are as God's children not as a function of our performance for God, but as a result of his one-way love for us. We see glimpses of this love in our society, but for many people, these glimpses are few and far between, and whether we admit it or not, we are all in search of unconditional love, and we will go to great lengths to find it, even if what we find is just an mirage or pseudo form of this love. This is why kids will join a gang if they don't see healthy alternatives in their community, this is why a woman or man may become promiscuous, because they falsely equate sex with love. People will go to great lengths to try and find this love. Some erroneously believe that if they achieve great wealth and or fame they will be loved, only to realize that the "love" that they get is really contingent on their wealth and fame, and is not really unconditional. Sometimes, it takes them losing everything to find out that they had few, if any, real friends.

We are told that as Christians, our love for one another is what is supposed to set us apart. Not our stance on the moral issues. Not the extensive list of things that we do and don't do. But our love for one another. It is not finding this love that leaves many people disillusioned with religion, but to be fair, this love does exists in many spiritual circles. It is my prayer that this kind of love continues to be nurtured within you as it spreads to others around you.

Stephen Oladotun Akinduro