Mental Illness Destroys
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit. – Psalm 34:18
The tears came down. He was in a church, surrounded by
family and friends who’d come to support him as deep grief laid her ugly hand
on him. He wasn’t there for a funeral service. He was there to hold a news
conference about his wife’s death.
Suicide is such an ugly thing. We don’t want to talk
about it. We want to focus on the life of the person we’ve lost and forget that
she chose to leave us. But did she? Mental illness is a disease. It’s not a
choice.
Mental illness is something that is so misunderstood.
We want to believe that because we can’t “see” it, maybe it doesn’t really
exist. That’s especially true when the sick person appears healthy and normal
to most of us. Masks can hide pain but the pain is still real.
It’s hard for some to accept that. They get angry and
remind us of all those who fought hard to live. Those that died from cancer and
ALS and heart failure and so many other diseases. They wanted desperately to
live and yet here is a person who made a choice to die.
But did she? Is suicide ever really a choice when the
person is mentally ill? Perhaps the choice comes when someone is terminally ill
and chooses to end their life rather than suffer to the end. But not someone who
is mentally ill. They aren’t capable of making that choice.
We ask how they could possibly commit suicide when so many
people love them. Someone who is mentally ill doesn’t see it that way. They are
tired, weary of the struggle, convinced that those who love them would be
better off without them.
There’s a part of me that hopes you can’t understand.
That dark hole is unforgiving. It sucks the very life from your soul. I wouldn’t
wish it on anyone.
There are many ways to commit suicide. None of them
are pretty. All of them come with a high cost. We can ignore that cost or we
can turn it to good. We can use it to teach others, to hold them close, to show
them a different way.
I am alive today because of Jesus. I could talk about
medicine and therapy and so many other things that are good and helpful. But I
learned to keep going through the hopelessness because I learned to lean
heavily on my Savior.
I am not here to judge anyone. None of us truly know
the inner workings of another’s mind and heart. But I do know that hope, true
hope, comes in knowing deep inside that you are not alone. There is someone
greater than all of us that carries us when we just can’t face the hours in the
day.
My heart breaks for Alabama Attorney General Steve
Marshall, his daughter and their family. Nothing can take away their grief and
the questions that will forever haunt them. But we can support them and others
who walk this path. We can seek to understand his wife’s illness. And we can be
kind to those around us. We never really know what they are going through until
it’s too late to make a difference.
