Following Jesus in the Desert of Mental Illness

John Andrew Bryant's "A Quiet Mind to Suffer With"

This is entry #2 for our summer reading club. You can find the first entry, on Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World, here.

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I’m not certain, but I’m fairly confident that I had never spoken to another Christian about their mental health until I was almost graduated from college. Whether this was due to better mental health back then, a stigma about discussing it, or my ignorance, I don’t know. What I do know is that in the last decade I’ve heard more discussion of mental disorders among believers than I had heard in my entire life previously. It runs the gamut: ADHD, depression, trauma, therapy, anxiety, self-care. These are Christian conversations now.

I assume I’m not the only one who thinks this has happened very fast—in fact, perhaps too fast. I wonder a lot these days whether Christian appropriation of the mental health concepts and vocabulary dominant in the academy and upper middle class has outpaced our ability to think clearly about it. Of course, the thing with mental disorder and trauma is that in most cases, it’s not an abstract “thing” that people are interested in analyzing; it’s a distress, a feeling, a crises of thinking or relationship or even basic bodily function. How do the propositional truth claims of the Christian gospel even begin to touch the incoherent emergency that is the damaged mind?

John Andrew Bryant’s A Quiet Mind to Suffer With is the first book I’ve ever read that tries to answer that question from the inside. Bryant’s experience with OCD, hospitalization, and a lifetime of horribly intrusive thoughts is harrowing enough. What sets his particular work apart is the way he invites the reader into these experience with prose that tries to simulate, if any prose could, the turmoil of mental disorder. But then Bryant does something remarkable. He narrates his own discovery of how the gospel anchors him in the midst of (though it does not protect from) mental illness. The insights that follow are all the more powerful because they are so dearly bought.

I’ll highlight three themes that stuck out to me in the book:

The gospel gives meaning to suffering, but it does not protect from it or even lessen it.

Bryant’s story forces the reader to confront the fact that Christians can suffer in ways they cannot control. His mental disorder, and the immense suffering it has caused, are not failures of wise living or obvious consequences of sin. Even appealing to the fall as the cause of all suffering fails to grapple with the fact that the fall’s effects are not distributed evenly. Most people do not have OCD and do not require hospitalization. Bryant, a Christian, does and did.

He writes:

We cannot answer Suffering, and especially not our own Suffering. Suffering that has left us too confused and wounded. It is too close to us.

And yet Suffering demands an answer.

Otherwise our Suffering will become an intolerable bully, joining hands with such terrible things as fear, shame, dread, and the Hardness of the Heart. An answer to Suffering must be made. Otherwise the world will be rendered meaningless and intolerable. Otherwise, History and Affliction will reveal this world to be a total loss.

I have to think of Christ's own relationship to History and Affliction. That the worst thing that could happen to a person happened to Christ. The worst things a person could be made to see and feel were seen and felt by Christ. Everything that could be taken from a person was taken from Christ.

And the worst that could happen, and the worst that could be seen and felt, and everything that could be taken, all came to a point in the nails driven into His hands and is now a Word mentioned forever in His own body. And now all that Suffering means something else. Every good and bad thing has been changed, not by having got better or worse, but by Christ's proximity to it. History and Affliction have become His body, and made holy by His body.

Bryant recounts how his mental illness has clarified the nature of Christ’s mercy. It is not instant physical healing in this life. It is not the removal of suffering. It is the removal of despair. Within the suffering, Bryant finds Christ to be a sufficient hope, as Christ’s promise of his presence, mercy, friendship, and rescue stabilizes him.

The trauma of self hatred demands something more than positivity or self-care. It demands total dependence on Jesus.

One of Bryant’s most powerful points is how deeply Christ calls us into total dependence on him. “Total dependence” is not hyperbole. Jesus will do what it takes for his children to realize that without him they can do nothing, even if what it takes is psychological illness.

This is hard truth. It’s also incredibly contra-cultural. The self-care regime of popular therapeutic culture is predicated on the idea that if you prioritize yourself, you will be independent, strong, and happy. Dependence is weakness. Dependence is confession of failure, and such confession is not allowed in worldview of self-esteem. You are “enough,” because the alternative is unthinkable.

The alternative is precisely what Christ calls us to. And as we lay aside dependence on self, we find Christ to be a better caretaker for our hearts than we ever could. He writes:

This is a strange thing, and something I’ve never understood but that has been my own experience: that we depend on ourselves by hating ourselves. It is my suspicion that what we are trying to do by hating ourselves is to clothe our shame and make things right. There is no burden heavier than trying to make things right by hating ourselves. By hating ourselves, we try to make ourselves gods by making ourselves Strangers, and so we are torn in two…It is something only a dependence on Christ can gradually heal us of.

Our disappointments and shattered dreams are not evidence that we need to save ourselves, but that we need a Savior who can.

Bryant writes that a breakthrough for him came when he realized that Christ had not committed himself to Bryant’s plans, but to Bryant himself. Once the life that Bryant had planned for himself disintegrated, he was left with deeply painful questions about whether Jesus had stopped loving him. But eventually he realized that Christ wanted something more for Bryant than his own (good) desires. He wanted Christ for him. He wanted dependence on the cross.

In thinking about therapy culture and the questions that so many are asking of their lives and emotions, this point seems impossible to avoid. So much of contemporary therapy culture seems dedicated to helping people obtain what they want but can’t seem to get. My generation and younger, the Millennial generation and Gen-Z, seem paralyzed by our own unmet expectations. Our trauma is the life we wanted and didn’t get, the relationships we pined for that never happened, the fun and friendships and jobs and popularity we coveted and that slipped away from us precisely as we thought we were getting old enough to claim it all. We wake up one day and discover that nobody has committed themselves to our plans.

I don’t know how many readers will resonate with John Andrew Bryant’s mental illness narrative. But I know that many will resonate with his discovery, through tears, that life’s best isn’t good enough. That our happiness is fragile and our suffering much stronger. There is no instant fix coming. Instead, our Creator and Redeemer offers something more than the life we wanted. He offers himself.

What themes or passages in this book did you resonate with? What about Bryant’s story did you find compelling? Leave your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!