Quotes from Kathryn Greene-McCreight

I learned that we must always pray, even and especially when we don't feel like it or when it feels compulsory and rote and dry.

The nature of mental illness is to remove one from the normal constraints, perceptions, and understandings of the world around, whatever one's rational self may say. It is not merely a question of feeling but of the world being a different sort of place in all one's perceptions. The struggle this brings, and with the struggle the disassociation from those around one, is profound and utterly overwhelming.

The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off, pull out of it, or slow down mentally.

The three cords to my rope were the religious (worship and prayer), the psychological (psychotherapy), and the physical (medical treatments, hospitalization, and exercise).

The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off, pull out of it, or slow down mentally. While God certainly can pick up the pieces and put them together in a new way, this can happen only if the depressed brain makes it through an episode to see again life among the living.

Sleeping, while I am sleeping, if I can sleep, helps as an escape. Tasks, busyness, gardening, tidying up: distractions. Mustn't think, mustn't be conscious, mustn't reflect. This escape from consciousness is at the heart of suicidal energy. It is not wanting to hurt the self. It is simply wanting not to hurt. When I am depressed, it seems that the only way not to hurt is to cease being a center of consciousness.

Suffering is not eliminated by the resurrection but transformed by it.

It is not like cancer, where there is hope at least of cutting out afflicted parts of the body in hopes of eradicating the disease. In mental illnesses, the symptoms plague the whole body and mind equally. I am not necessarily sad when I am depressed. I am not necessarily "down." Sometimes I just have a gnawing, overwhelming sense of grief, with no identifiable cause. I grieve as though my loved ones were dead. I imagine their funerals. I feel completely alone and isolated.

Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness hurt.

But when one looks at the problem of mental illness from a completely secular perspective, Jamison's implicit thesis (clearly meant to be hopeful and hope-filling) in fact can fill me with more despair than ever.

Yet human love, such as that of my husband, can certainly be a conduit for divine love, even for those who do not recognize love's true source. If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that is promised to pull us through, a love that bears it out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we are, then the statement that love heals depression is in fact the only light that shines in the dark tunnel.

Children need communication at times even as horrible as these, but it must be judicious communication. Do not mention suicidal thoughts or gestures. Just something simple. "Mommy is sick. She is very sad. She needs to go to the hospital. She will get better and be home soon. The doctors will take good care of her." Even telling children that "Mommy has a brain disorder" is better than saying nothing, or than saying that her heart hurts.