Mental illness for me didn’t degenerate into long term insanity,
violence, or make me join an extremist cult/religion; it led to Truth. I never
planned on being a Christian, so this story includes much of my searching for
spiritual truths in metaphysical, mystical places. Life in my twenties included
a dark journey through mental illness as I acted upon runaway emotions. Leading
up to that time I had no treatment for mental conditions, this coarse and sour ordeal
was so unexpected.
The Bible claims to be God’s very words, an unchanging
absolute Truth upon which all purposes of creation itself is explained to the
extent that God permits. I’ll admit it’s not very popular believing that the
Bible is absolute Truth; However, a claim like that needs to be studied,
explored, and tested prior to rejecting it by anyone on a quest for their own truth.
God has never asked our intellects to take a back seat while faith drives,
instead He invites us to be teachable, investigative, and full of faith. Upon believing
in the Gospel of Jesus Christ I found God’s grace, forgiveness, redemption, transformation,
adoption, and a plan for my life.
Therefore, I will be describing my spiritual journey from a
biblical view because I have read it, tested it, and found the Bible to be
Truth. It is a book that accounts for unseen things, spiritual and supernatural
things depicting them as a battlefield for the souls of mankind. I know
firsthand that the mind is a battleground where spiritual forces contend. Interestingly,
the Bible contains many accounts of demon possessed people. Our time and place
is certainly not any more holy than Bible times, so why have descriptors such
as demon-influenced vanished from our
society? Where have all the demoniacs gone? When did we eradicate demonic
influence?
At 24 years of age I was diagnosed Schizoaffective
(Schizophrenia and bipolar interacting together). Today I cannot trace my Bipolar
1 diagnosis or the remains of a schizophrenia diagnosis. Much of these
diagnoses came as a result of “psychotic episodes”. All Bipolar is a chemical
imbalance in the mind thought to be caused by both nature and nurture. I have a
history of mental illness in my family, perhaps suggesting an origin.
Disillusionment, Footholds, and Strongholds
My first psychotic crisis (or episode) came about through my
thought life without the influence of drugs or alcohol; I did smoke pot regularly
however I was not intoxicated when the psychosis started. Soberly, I mentally
created a fake reality and stepped into that world passionately -like I had a
discovered what was really going on in this world around me- when really, I was
losing footing on reality. During this loss of control, my mind was working
frantically to keep on justifying the events as they unfolded: it all made
sense to me. But I was not in my control of my thoughts, and things were just
going way too fast. I couldn’t sleep or “turn the switch off.” I left reality
for the directives of my mind. I accepted a bombardment of conspiracy theories,
and ultimately, I knew it was all worth it because I was going be elevated as
god or, more accurately, the last reincarnation of the Buddha. My theories culminated with vanishing into Nirvana as I leaped (in full faith) off the Belmont Harbor pier naked, at 3 in the morning.
After three weeks of being in a locked mental ward, the heavy
antipsychotic meds and mood stabilizers started to kill off my imagination and
emotions. But I still had a persistent presence within me keeping the many
theories alive. For many days I was not in control of my words or actions.
My brother Olivier felt that there was a spiritual side to my psychotic episode, not just a nervous breakdown or an episode of intense mania. He prayed much and acted upon some biblical directives. He, his wife and some others came to the mental hospital to pray over me, read the Scriptures to me, asked me to repeat some verses and left a Bible with me.
In light of the Bible, I have found that there are two
spiritual factors that contributed to my psychotic episode aside from the
mania. As a free-willed person I invited demonic influence into my life by
choosing to sin. I loved doing sins and giving into temptations, it was my
ticket to self-discovery. Bit by bit, as years went by, tendencies gave way to
more indulgence; I mocked God and created my own satirical religion. The destroyer
at work in the spirit world Satan, took note of me and the ethical ground I had
surrendered to sinful deeds: I became an opportunity. Ephesians 4:27 says “and
don’t give the Devil a foothold.” Some translations say “give no opportunity to
the Devil”. These footholds are outside
elements I chose to invite into my life, and because of their
qualities/consequences I gave Satan an increased opportunity to mess with me. My
media choices, likeminded friends always repeating the same folly together, and
over indulging my senses were footholds that gave great permission to demonic
exploitation. Footholds often lead to strongholds, the second key factor that
invited demonic influence into my life.
Strongholds devastate because they reside in the inner person. What are the inner lies that I
believed? What fermented into bitterness and caused me to surrender ground over
demons unknowingly? For example, from a very early age, I chose to be bitter about
my father dying in an avalanche. That fueled me to blame God for years, and to
hate the life He gave me. Another stronghold I had involved the concept of
being an artist, a writer. I wrote narratives that always contained themes of
being alone, antagonized, rebellious, and prideful. Much of my art stemmed from
those themes. On some level I was just working at my craft, being transparent
in my writings. But for me those themes took my spirit-life with them. This depreciating
use of my imagination became an all-access pass for Satan to claim more ground
and solidify his lies in my heart. My psychotic episodes seeded and sprouted
from the ground I surrendered in pursuit for my own artistic truth. I was
deceived (as the Bible puts it) on a heart level.
Jesus said of Satan: “He was a murderer from the beginning,
and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he
lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of
lies.” (Jn 8:44) Like angels, Satan and his demon can take up residence in
people for varying amounts of time. Mark
5:2 refers to this as “having an unclean spirit”.
My first psychotic crisis cost me my job, my roommates, my
girlfriend. I moved back in with my mom and a year later experienced renewed
psychotic episodes while on anti-psychotics. This time strongholds of
hopelessness, meaninglessness, numbness, and alcoholism defined the next two
years. I found my way to the mental hospital two other times with further
delusions of complex religious grandeur elevating me. Somewhere between the
objective reality of this world and the subjective reality in my mind existed
an onslaught of emotional waves lapping at my perceived reality straining to
grasp actuality and exchanging it for something suitable with me in the center.
The most effective part of pharmaceutical intervention in my psychoses
my was that the medicine pacified my emotions. The thoughts are still there but
the emotional passivity lets the thinking go by without action. The spirit
world still provoked the emotions to feel, but the medicine helped me become
despondent to provocations. I consider it a mercy that I always took my
medicine during these years and never felt like I didn’t need it. I believe
emotions are patterns that ferment behaviors into addictions and emotions when
given permission to lead a person can mislead greatly. In using biblical
language, I had become demon possessed for a time.
Becoming Unrecognizable
Real, lasting change—eternal change—came on November 10,
2006. Amid the fullness of this dark depression and hopelessness, my car was
stolen. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. This event made me cry
out in prayer, asking for the free gift of salvation only Jesus Christ gives.
To be clear, I cried out not to the Jesus I made up in my head in the mental
hospital, but instead to the historical resurrected Jesus Christ of the Bible.
I believed that Jesus Christ suffered for the things I had done. He was nailed
to the cross, died to take my sins away so that God’s wrath which I deserved would
pass over me. Jesus’ resurrection pleased God and authenticated the righteous
requirements God’s just demands.
This bold certainty
of forgiveness means that I am with God for eternity, starting on that day.
Jesus gave me a perfect, loving, heavenly Father; I am an orphan no longer.
Added to all that, is the Biblical certainty that God now indwells me through
His Holy Spirit taking up residence in me -no longer can any spirit indwell me
because God put a “No Vacancy” sign on my heart. I have the Holy Spirit now.
God has a plan for my life, its underway.
Since that November date, I put my entire broken life on the
table before God. I became willing to quit whatever He asked no matter, because
He was going to do the quitting through me. By His grace, God was living
through me as he enabled me to follow and trust Him at His Word. I prayed for a
steady conversion, because I didn’t want to return to those hyper-religious, dark
days of psychotic episodes. I found that placing my faith and love in Jesus
ahead of doing things “my way” honored by God. I could tell, because He lifted
my worries and showed me a Truth I could stand on. I started to trust the
Bible, and soon found it to be more reliable in good decision-making than even
my best intentions. I asked the Spirit of God to apply biblical truth to my
life, especially when it meant uprooting those strongholds!
Occasionally I am still visited with temptatios of mania, but
the footholds/strongholds are not there, and each manic thought is met by the
Holy Spirit. My composure and countenance are different. I praise God for
taking my psychotic episodes away. The sleepless conspiring and delusions of
grandeur are out of me. I am a vapor, a blade of grass, always in need of
humility: time with God in His Word, in thanksgiving, and in prayer. God’s
Sprit even tells me to calm down at times. I’m not in control, God is. I’m not
out of control either, thanks to Jesus the Rock.
In the early days of my new life as a Christ follower, my
habit of self-medicating with alcohol still held sway. That stronghold was a
tight clamp that I didn’t want to get rid of. I thought it was stronger than
me. So night after night I would show up in the liquor store and view the
selections. No longer was I shopping alone; every time I would have God’s
Spirit nudging me with the thought that in Jesus, I was a new creation, and that
the old self was gone. In times of temptation, He constantly reminded me that I
could talk to God about the temptation rather than just give in to sin.
Healing from Bipolar 1
I take responsibility for my past insanity and fully accept
that demons exploited the mental territory I opened to them. The spirit world
fought many battles in my brain, it’s a rich mercy to state that Jesus won and
established me in my right mind once again.
About 6 years after my illnesses, my pastor in Chicago put me
in touch with a young Psychiatrist who was a professing believer in Jesus. He
was cautious to affirm my understandings but admitted that there was a
spiritual component to some cases of mental illness. I saw him for years for
medication management. He rarely charged me for a session and we always prayed
together before our meetings. God used this man to speak into my disease, to
help me understand that my mental illness was not purely spiritual either therefore
it might not go away completely.
In addition to the meds, he gave me tools to fight my manic
imbalance. He told me that the effects of Bipolar are magnified when certain
choices are made: not taking medication, sleeping less than 8 hours a day,
using addictive substances. He suggested that if I could keep those three
things under control, the mania would recur less, and it would be easier to
deal with.
Next, the doctor and I identified triggers—or “red flags”—of
my persona when in a period of mania. He also identified people close to me
that needed to monitor my bipolar, people who could recognize those times when
I was acting out. These carefully considered tools represented a far deeper
investment in me than any of the past psych docs had provided. I was grateful
for such grace. God used my time with this God-fearing psychiatrist to equip me
for the road ahead.
As God regenerated me, I wanted believe that Jesus had more
freedom, that He had healing for me, a miraculous renewal. I talked with my
psychiatrist about how God could heal me altogether from Bipolar and finally
stop taking Lithium medication. His response was straight forward as he opened
up the Bible. We talked about how Jesus many times just spoke “be healed” and
people were healed supernaturally on the spot (Matthew 8). The doctor did not
dismiss my faith, but he was clear to offer me other Bible passages too like
when God did use things to heal. I was forced to think of my Lithium as that
bronze snake God told Moses to make so that those who looked to it were healed
from the plague (Numbers 21). We also studied King Hezekiah’s illness that was
going to kill him; after appealing to God, the Lord didn’t just heal the king,
but rather instructed him to use a poultice of pressed figs on his wound (2
Kings 20). This insight from the Scriptures gradually, gently changed my mind
about healing from Bipolar as I accepted that I could be on Lithium for the
rest of my life. By the Spirit’s encouraging, I have been loyal in taking my
meds, sleeping 8 hours, staying away from addictive substances, noticing red
flags, and allowing my wife to monitor my mood.
6 years ago, I returned to Colorado. My new medication
manager was shocked that I had been stable for close to ten years. What
surprised her even more was that the level of Lithium in my blood was not
enough to make the drug effective for Bipolar treatment given my weight. I had
been taking an ineffective amount of lithium for an uncertain amount of time.
She gave me the choice of increasing the dose or weening off the drug
completely and be closely monitored while doing so. It is to the glory of God
that I tell you: it has been three years since I last took Lithium. I want to
testify that it is Christ in me that has brought such grace, regeneration to
those afflictions once so completely consuming, whose prognosis was perpetual
mental illness.
I’m still a sinner, but now with a Savior therefore a saint. I
have found that God’s faithfulness in upholding His Word has transformed my
past spiritual strongholds of lies, replacing them with pillars of Truth. As
the book of Colossians says, “He (God) has rescued us (believers in Jesus) from
the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves.
We have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, in Him.”
