I've spent quite a bit of time with a woman who, until recently, lived in DA. I mentioned her briefly in a post a couple weeks ago -- she's the one who gets messages from God and knows the second coming of Christ will be in the springtime on a Thursday. Anyway, recently she has been moved out of D Building and into E Building. Normally this would be a good thing because E Building has a lot more freedom as in the women are allowed to come out of their rooms and go to group meetings and the cafeteria (called the chow hall, if I hadn't mentioned that yet).
The thing about E Building is that it's the building primarily for those who have high mental health levels. Each range has an office for the mental health counselor (in buildings F, G, H and J, there's just one regular counselor for the entire building). There are more restrictions than living in the other buildings (besides D, of course), but it is a lot better than being in D in lockdown.
So when I saw this woman outside of D Building, I was happy for her and asked where she was now living. She said she was now in E, and that she didn't belong there because that's the mental health building and she hasn't been mentally ill a day in her life. I've heard her say that phrase nearly every time I visit her: "I haven't been mentally ill a day in my life." This woman is convinced she was set up and is completely innocent of her committed crime. She has gone into great detail in describing everything leading up to her multiple arrests and how she's a hostage being held against her will in prison. On top of all of this, she is very confident in knowing she receives messages from God, and she feels she must let others know these messages.
Now, whether or not this woman is guilty of her charges or not, who knows? I doubt she would be placed in E Building if there was nothing saying she was mentally ill. But it does make me wonder about the mentally ill. My fellow chaplain intern who is assigned to E Building has shared multiple stories of the women there who talk to God or believe they are Jesus' sister or who rebuke the devil in front of him, etc. It has always interested me how those who are mentally unstable are most commonly those who feel close connections with God and spirits.
I think about the prophets back in the bible days, and I wonder if some of them might not also have been just a bit mentally unstable. Not to say they weren't real prophets, but back then there weren't the technical terms to label them as mentally ill. I guess what I'm saying is, if a prophet from back then were to be alive here and now, wouldn't we just assume that person to be crazy? What if some of these women really are getting messages from God? Maybe some of those we're so quick to label as crazy really aren't so crazy after all. Now I'm not saying all the people with mental health issues are just fine and are all getting true messages from God. What I guess what I'm wondering is if in this day and age we are sometimes too quick to paste labels on people and things that are abnormal to us and make us uncomfortable. It's certainly a loaded topic to consider. What do you think?
2 comments:
I think that, for the most part, people as a whole like to put labels on things and tuck them away in little niches because it's more comfortable to them. For instance, I think when people start talking about receiving messages from God, the public generally is not comfortable with this and so they immediately say, "oh, that person must be mentally ill, there's no way they could be having a real connection with God" and send them off to an asylum and then go back to living their comfortable lives. I'm not saying everyone is like that but in general, much of the population seems to act this way, in my opinion.
You have to consider that, at the time, many prophets were considered to be ill/blasphemous/etc. by the common religious figures of the day, more or less. Jeshua himself was considered ill among the Jews before his crucifixion. After all, who in their right mind would "cleanse" the temple of the merchants, when it was tradition of the day?
The more interesting thing to consider is the potential for a causal link between delusion and religious experience. Is "insanity" requisite for religious experience? Should it be considered a negative thing?
I frequently question the notion of "mental illness," "insanity" (Latin, meaning "not clean"), and "disabled," as they all carry extremely negative connotations. What if "normal" human experience is really the disability? What if the non-material realms of perception are reality and the inability (or lack of desire) to perceive them is really less fulfilling for an individual? Does the inability of the majority to understand these phenomena make them any less legitimate? These are very important questions to those of us who follow a mystic's path.
The best answer that I can come up with for the sum total is that one cannot effectively use the greater/lesser or good/bad dichotomies to describe the experience difference. To me, the world is alight with swirls of energy, a pulsating river of life whose eddies and flows bear subtle messages of things that are seen and unseen, things that are, have been, or will be soon.
To put it from a different perspective, many other witches tend to look down on the majority, who have either cut themselves off or have never felt this flow. Again, I ask if either is really greater than the other. I will definitely say that neither side has a monopoly on truth, however. It's not nearly as cut and dried as most would hope.
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