What is your most important label? Episode 28
Listen to Episode 28 here or scroll down for a transcript
Welcome to Jen’s New Song. My name is Jennifer Holmes and I’m so glad you’re here. This is a podcast for the broken, the weary, the hurting, and the suffering. Here we have honest conversations about mental health issues and we look at them all through the lens of God’s word. A lot of people don’t realize the vastness of what the Bible has to say about depression, anxiety, doubt, fear, or relational issues. The Bible is full of comfort and guidance for all of life’s problems, including the struggles of our minds and emotions.
Each episode will have a short encouragement from me as we study God’s Word together, drawing on my own experience with mental illness and my continuing education in counselling, or we will have honest conversations with a guest.
Whether it’s you who struggle, or you want to better understand how to minister to others, thank you for joining me today.
Today is October 9th, 2020 and it is currently mental health awareness week. You would think that since I write and podcast about mental health I would be more on top of these things and be prepared for them, but I’m usually not and this week was no exception. I realized on Sunday that the next day started mental health awareness week, but as the Lord would have it, He organized me a little bit ahead of time. Last week I was invited to my kids small Christian school to speak to the high schoolers taking Psychology.
Of course I said yes since mental health and teenagers are a few of my favourite things! Their teacher asked me to talk about facing mental illness stigma both in general and in the church. I loved our time together and since it’s mental health awareness week, I thought I would share a bit from our class together here on the podcast.
We as people love labels. For ourselves and others. We figure out how to view people, how to place them in boxes or groups by their label, or we can even rank people by their labels. I’ve thought about labels a lot in the past few years as I’ve been writing and speaking for other people because often I have to send them a bio. Depending on where I’m writing or speaking, I include things like, Christian, wife, mom, Christian school music teacher, writer, podcaster, speaker, biblical counselling student, and bipolar II disorder. I tailor my bio to the audience and to what they think is relevant information. If I’m writing primarily to moms, I might expand the label mom to include the names and ages of my three kids. If I’m writing in a Biblical counselling context, I’ll include the name of my school to prove I know what I’m talking about. If I’m writing about mental health, I’ll often include the fact that I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder because then the audience knows I have personal experience. I even have one place where I purposely leave that label out because the woman who runs that blog knows that her conservative christian audience isn’t ready to handle that label.
If we think through the labels that we all have, we often let them define us. We introduce ourselves certain ways in different situations, and avoid labels in others. Maybe we avoid certain labels because they are painful or because we are worried that people will see us only in the context of that label. Think of people who hide their mental illness diagnosis from everyone, not wanting to be put into a category of crazy or unstable. Or maybe an abuse survivor who doesn’t want to be constantly viewed through that lens, or a woman who has decided not to have children and wants to just be seen as herself and not that decision, or any number of cases when we’re worried people will see us as just one label instead of a whole person.
And there’s good reason for that - we often define ourselves through our labels, we have been defined by others by our labels, and we have defined other people through their labels.
The church is no different. We often ask the question of ourselves and others, what kind of Christian are you, and then we define that by a certain set of parameters depending on what church we go to. We like to put people into boxes and tie them up with a bow so that we can understand them.
And the reason we like these boxes is because we fear that we do not understand. This is where the stigma comes in. People who are never anxious don’t understand people who have a panic attack every time they walk into a crowd. Or who have panic attacks for no obvious reason. And so they try to reason it out and come to the conclusion that either those people don’t trust Jesus enough or they are crazy. Unspiritual or insane. Those are the two options.
People who see the glass as always half full don’t understand those people who are so depressed they literally can’t get out of bed. They search for easy answers to their misunderstanding and so they think memorizing verses is the answer, or those people should just be put into the camp of incapable. Unspiritual or insane. Again with the labels.
People really don’t know what to do with a label like bipolar II. When I told my email list about it a year and a half ago, I immediately lost half of my subscribers. People don’t know what to do with that label, especially those who had known me - I wrote Bible studies and was on staff at a church, so they couldn’t just label me unspiritual. But also, I seemed to live a pretty normal life, so insane wasn’t an easy label either. So they just left because it’s not easily understood. I definitely felt the sting of stigma at that point.
And what about those people who have been hospitalized, whether for short or long periods of time? What do we label those people? When I was a teenager, I befriended a girl who had to be admitted to the mental health floor. Visiting her on that floor was scary for me at first, but wow was it a needed education. There I was, seventeen, meeting people who were basically like me and just needed some extra help for a while. I started learning at that young age to see past mental illness to this girl who just wanted a friend and to talk and wanted to talk about a lot of the same things I did. I learned to get past some of the fear of the unknown in those visits. But if you never get to know a person with mental illness, it’s going to be hard to see past the label of Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar or Schizophrenia.
And so we continue to look at people through the lens of their biggest label. Or what we think is their biggest label. But we’ll get back to that in a minute. Here’s the problem with labels. They change or fade in importance or they’re just not good enough to see the whole person. I’m a wife - that is a huge part of who I am and how I live my life - but it might not be forever. That label could change tomorrow. I’m a mom and right now that takes up a huge amount of my time, but even though that label probably won’t go away, the time it takes up in my life will change. I have bipolar II, but I won’t always. Some day I’ll be in heaven with a brain that is perfect and no longer affected by the fall and that label will mean nothing, even though it means a lot right now.
So here we are, labeling ourselves and others by what we think is their biggest label, fearing those things that we don’t understand, putting people into neat and tidy boxes and my premise is that this all leads to stigma. You’re either unspiritual or insane. Neither are good boxes to be put in by someone else. Or by your own self.
But here’s the thing. I wonder if this could all be done away with if we were just to remember the most important label of all. Or I should say, the only label that really defines us completely.
That label is Imago Dei. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Latin term that comes from Genesis 1:27 where the Bible tells us that we are all created in the image of God.
All of us.
Believers and unbelievers. Men and women. Rich and poor. White and Black and Brown. People without mental illness and people with mental illness.
Every single person on this earth is created in the image of God. Every single person on this earth is also affected by the fall, by sin and suffering. And it affects each one of us differently. As a result of that fall, some of us have mental illnesses. It shouldn’t be scary or a reason to ostracize someone. How could we really, if someone was made in the very image of God?
Once you fully grasp this concept that every single person was made in the image of God, that they are loved and adored by the God who made them, that the person who can’t get out of bed is just as valued as you are, that the person who panics or sees things that aren’t really there, or dies by suicide is a beloved image of God, it changes everything. There can no longer be stigma because there is no longer fear. Only love and compassion. We begin to weep with those who weep and bear one another’s burdens. We start to resist the urge to put them in boxes that we can understand and instead just see them as someone whom Jesus died for. Those other Christians we might see as a weak or feeble part of the church, we realize are valuable and even necessary as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 12.
Talk about taking away stigma. Paul doesn’t mince words. He tells the Corinthians that their thinking is completely backwards. That we label people as feeble when really we should be seeing them as necessary. That’s strong language. The church can’t really be the church if they push to the side all the necessary parts.
People with a mental illness diagnosis are as much imago dei as anyone else, whether believers or not. But those that are believers are a necessary part of the church and should be welcomed with open arms are wrapped up in that one necessary label - Imago Dei.
What about you, the one who has the mental illness diagnosis? I know it can be scary for us too! I was terrified when I first got my diagnosis because I didn’t understand it. But once I did, I realized that it wasn’t the most important thing about me. Some days it might feel that way, but it’s not. The fact that I am created in the image of God is. And on the dark days, when I’m tired of my illness, when my mind lies to me, when I feel like I’ve probably turned every one away, when I feel like I’m that feeble part of the body of Christ, it’s then that I turn to the truth.
Imago Dei. Someone made in the image of God. Someone that Jesus died for. A necessary part of the church. And someone who will not wear the label of Bipolar II forever.
So on this mental health awareness week, I want to erase some of the stigma by challenging to think of the mental illness diagnosis less actually, and instead focus on who these people really are. To see them the way God sees them. To remember the Imago Dei.
Thank you for joining me here today. If you would like to learn more about what the Bible has to say about mental illness and God’s response to it, please visit my website at jensnewsong.com and sign up for the Elijah mini course. It’s free and just might open your eyes to the way God sees and cares for us. As always, you can follow me on facebook or instagram at jensnewsong for more conversation about mental health and faith. On this mental health awareness week, would you do me a favour and share this episode with a friend? Let’s work together to end the stigma in the church. Thanks for listening.