Schizoaffective: Why Killing People Like Me is a Bad Idea
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
I have experienced firsthand how sharing my psychological difference creates a rigidity in others. I have witnessed in myself how this shift in how people perceive you generates a deep and nagging despondency. Suddenly, just by continuing to go about your humble life you feel humbler and humbler, and your efforts at eking out a meaningful life feel more futile. People don’t see you as the fully human creation that you are.
As a writer and speaker who teaches others to value neurodivergence, I like to think I am making more room to breathe for children and young adults who experience this dynamic or who are just getting diagnosed with these disabilities. When people welcome me with open arms and compassion, while not transforming me into a feel-good story of a person thriving “against all odds,” I become alive. That’s what I want more of in the world—and not just for me. Usually it’s awakened people, who know or love people like me, who welcome me. I want to facilitate the awakening of neurotypical and neuroatypical people alike.
I live with schizoaffective disorder. My psychotic break started in 2011 after I was sexually harassed. I was twenty-five. In 2015 I was hospitalized and restrained twice, the first time involuntarily. I awoke, tied to a bed in a dark room three days after rushing into a hospital emergency room unadmitted, shrieking that everyone knew I had been raped. My introduction into the world of emergency mental health care took place when I was instructed to strip with the curtains open in a makeshift ER room, put in a straitjacket, tied down by three men, and strapped to a bed—while reliving rape memories.
I was held against my will for two weeks in a ward specifically devoted to psychosis, about which I write in a Seattle Times article and my memoir. I thought that I was falsely accused of being a terrorist, and that my husband had never loved me but had been paid by the United States government to watch me to make sure I never became a terrorist.
While the mentally ill are sometimes insightful, during acute episodes we are missing the mark. By viewing an in-depth interview about my faith and involuntary hospitalization, readers can watch as I discover that there is a way other than my dehumanizing experience. People like my interviewer, Andy Prisco of Jumpstart Mastery, are paving the way for a more humane and just future.
This is why I worry about recent moves to euthanize people with severe mental illness through medical aid in dying (MAiD) in Canada, and perhaps other similar movements in the United States. If people had told me I could end it all, I would have at the time—which would have destroyed my family emotionally for the rest of their lives and dampened the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. I love my life 90 percent of the time, and on days when I experience suicidal thoughts—I still experience them—I pause, breathe deeply, and let Christ enter me and soothe me, trusting that I won’t feel this bad forever. It always passes.
Suicide is a Contagion
I am currently pursuing a Master of Divinity at a Nazarene university and am a trained high school teacher with over ten years of experience as a department chair, language teacher, and language learning specialist. I can tell you as a teacher that suicide is a contagion. When one child dies by suicide, others soon follow. It should be exquisitely difficult to end one’s life—and not only for the sake of the lives of the suffering, though that is also a consideration, but also for their peers and family who may be more suggestible to the temptation in the wake of a suicide.
Often, struggling children and adults know what our teachers or caretakers think of them. While at times we may be imagining it or projecting it, usually we know more than the many authority figures in our lives about their biases against us. This is why unconditional positive regard is important to cultivate in parents, teachers, and society in general. This is also why even having the option for assisted suicide in the lives of mentally ill patients would be catastrophic. We would sense that that was an option as we saw ourselves through our caretakers’ eyes.
When you are lacking strong emotional and energetic boundaries and are terribly sensitive, you need to trust that you are loved and loveable, and that those around you desire you, along with Christ, to have life and to have it abundantly. That is what religion provides for me—often in the form of Christ, and not always “Christianity” more broadly construed, given some of the extreme stigma in churches (though I’m working with many others to change this!).
If doctors (or patients) can’t decipher a mental patient’s needs, they may project onto a patient how they would feel. Doctors might think that they wouldn’t want to live under these circumstances and assume the other person will always feel this way and that all is lost.
The Prophetic Function of Mental Illness
It’s my conviction that people who need extra emotional or social support are potential change agents of society. This is not because we ourselves are inherently prophets, but that our struggles are signaling that something needs to change. We are like canaries in the coal mine, so beware: when we children or adults with emotional sensitivities “struggle” to fit in, sometimes we are ill, but sometimes this is because we are on our way to communicating something about how society as it is—the status quo, as it were—needs reforming.
People who are sensitive and deemed ill, incompetent, or, in my case, “gravely disabled,” may tomorrow write books about their own dehumanization that open the eyes of professionals tasked to help them. This can have a prophetic function within a given mental-health discipline. Given the mental illness and addiction epidemic, this message of change will be imperative for society’s future survival. In other words, it may well be a prophetic word coming from the most marginalized.
For example, women who acquire mental illness because of sexual harassment or young children abused by pastors and subsequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder are pointing through their brokenness to systemic issues that need healing. By restoring these people society works towards the “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21).
Prophets boggle the minds of the “normal” people while simultaneously cutting to the heart of the matter in a way that edifies everyone. While prophets are not mentally ill as a rule, they are also never perceived to be “well”—especially during their own time period (an exception may be the tradition of the holy fool in Russian Orthodoxy, holy fools being respected within their own lifetimes).
The most urgent social justice messages are often indecipherable by people trained to “maintain control of the situation.” These messages are rooted in a profound, almost supernatural, awareness of the fundamental and inescapable equality of teachers and students, doctors and patients, ministers and laypeople, therapists and clients, Palestinians and Israelis, the undocumented and Immigration Customs Enforcement, and the differently abled and the so-called “healthy” (who may struggle to find meaning amidst an easy life).
The Oppression of the Marginalized
The penitentiary (or prison) system is grounded in the religious system of penance (hence the same root), which is why when innocent Black and Brown people, Palestinians, and disabled are presumed criminals, this can have a spiritual feel of damnation. They become unclean. They are the lepers of today.
Severely mentally ill people are frequently imprisoned due to the lack of mental health care and insurance which causes them to live on the streets and hinders their ability to make relationships that could be lifesaving. This distance can also provide clarity that those embedded within the fabric of society can’t see.
I have encountered the police while walking across a busy street while delusional. The officer was kind and loving, and this may have been because I was a frail white woman muttering to herself. There are numerous examples of Black people, for example, being killed even amidst their mental health crises.
A good friend of mine who is a professor of psychology in Palestine and who also practices music therapy has shared that antipsychotics are not available to people right now. These people are oppressed terribly already under the occupation. Now if they also have a mental illness they suffer doubly.
As a financially secure white person who also lives with a committed spouse who cares for me when I can’t cook or don’t want to eat or forget to drink water, I am more privileged than others with schizoaffective disorder who, for example, may not be able to eat healthy food or have health insurance like I do. Many people—of all colors—cannot afford a doctor even with a job, or find the time to exercise. There are significant obstacles in securing a therapist when one is working with insurance companies, and when one gets life-saving help, sessions are frequently limited to five. As Christians we must help people get the life-saving medications and treatments that they need rather than giving them poison.
Religion, medicine, education, and the Christian life should feature a growth in Christlikeness that should liberate the oppressed everywhere—including people oppressed by psychic grief, psychosis, mania, and depression. Medicine can do this, therapy can do this, theological education can do this, as well as sermons and Christian fellowship that are sensitive to the needs of the ill. Anything offering to end suffering by means of death is anathema to the Christian message and the life of faith, let alone that this is medical malpractice.
My Antipsychotics Liberate Me
Seek professional advice in all situations, but I will share here that 2015 was the last time I was hospitalized, because since then I was put on antipsychotic medication. While my personality was changed by this medication and I can no longer command a classroom for hours every day, I have purpose and take comfort in the pervasive calm that the medicine affords me. I am now a stabilizing force in the lives of many others, who are more than eager to support me when I start to slip. Every couple years I will slip in a major way. In such cases, I depend on those loving people who support me—doctors, pastors, therapists, my family—to encourage me with hope and without stigma. And assuredly not with promises that I could end it all!
Again, they don’t counsel me in any other way than with the lens of hope, radical acceptance, unconditional love, and the non-judgment that is the marker of true cruciformity.
Antipsychotics are tricky and I am certainly not claiming to be a mental health professional, but for me antipsychotics, when I took them without a deep sense of Christian purpose and openness to what new life God was asking me to grow into with my husband, were unbearable. However, there are medication therapists who can help with this process of coming to terms with a new mode of being in the world. In my case it was a Wesleyan professor of moral and historical theology who helped me find meaning in the process of taking medicine. Wesleyan Christianity is optimistic in its conception of grace, and this professor, Rick Steele, helped me to see that taking medicine can be a means of grace in one’s life and that free will is not doing whatever you want but rather wanting what you ought. I feature his correspondence with me about this in my first book, Emergent Grace.
Suicide, including assisted suicide—which is murder—is anathema to the idea of the medical profession, and especially to the life of faith, rooted as it is in hope. Christ’s death and resurrection don’t guarantee an easy life. It’s not that by his wounds we are guaranteed to be healed of pain and suffering, though miracles assuredly happen—we are more often spiritually redeemed and made holy in his image. Perhaps our suffering makes us more Christlike and compassionate. That is usually the case for me.
We walk through the valley of the shadow of death in this life. As is written in Psalm 84, we walk through the vale of tears, but we also “make it a place of springs” (Ps 84:6).
My step-grandpa raised me as his own. His mother killed herself the day after Christmas, when he was only nine years old. Grandpa George was a staunch conservative Texan man of God, a proud veteran, and a horse veterinarian. However, we never celebrated Christmas my whole childhood when we visited him. He never forgot, or forgave, his mother for her suicide—he never smiled on Christmas because the day after Christmas his mother had killed herself and he found her. As someone who has been hospitalized for suicidality, who has taken three medications daily for almost ten years, and who still suffers mightily on some days, I know mental hardship is more complicated than “praying it away.” Suicidal thoughts may never go away, but never let that stop you from remembering that God has always given us a choice. Therapy and medication can be a means of grace in our lives. “Choose life” (Deut. 30:19).
Call, text, chat 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime day or night, as often as needed, if you are experiencing thoughts of self-harm.
Erin Grimm writes at emergentgrace.com and is author of Emergent Grace, What I Remember of the Little I Understand, and The Nine Principles of Hope (forthcoming).