I don’t know why G-d decides to give my cousin a brilliant brain, but the inability to express his thoughts coherently. I don’t know why He chooses to allow some people to be tormented by their own minds. I don’t know why He allows women to be raped, children to be abused, or people to starve. And I often go back and forth between the questions of “Where is G-d?” and more importantly… “Where is humanity?”
Steuss,
Thank you for sharing this. It was very moving. I relate to it strongly, although our paths may diverge. I try to be open about the fact that several of my family members suffer from bipolar disorder, including my intelligent, creative, and determined 20 year old son, because I want to de-stigmatize it, and I want people to know that it is a disease that can be successfully treated. (I’m not insinuating you have bipolar, but this is the disease that has touched my family in particular.) The greatest gift my ex-husband has ever given my son was to see what a life with untreated bipolar looks like, and what it does to the people who love the person suffering from the disease. My son is determined to control his disease (would that there were a cure), and so far has done a tremendous job doing so. You would never suspect he has a serious mental illness, and will have it the rest of his life. He’s like the diabetic who controls his diet and takes his meds – it’s something that has to be dealt with, but is not destroying his life.
Although I have family members that suffer from the illness, I do not have bipolar and do not have a depressive personality in general. But I have been to h*ll and back along with my son, in trying to learn how to control his symptoms and dealing with the fall-out when they were not under control. If I had not already been an atheist, I guarantee watching my son suffer through this torment, and reading about the illness in general, would have made me one – not because of the suffering, per se, but because of what mental illnesses teach us about how the mind works in the first place. A person who suffers from untreated bipolar often engages in behavior that others, and particularly religion, would label as immoral and acts of free will. One example is hyper-sexuality. Although my son was too young to go through that phase, I was on a list with parents of bipolar teens and heard all their stories, and remember my bipolar roommate from college (back before I had ever heard of the disease, but it’s clear, in retrospect, this is what was wrong with her – a stunningly creative and brilliant girl whose life was being ravaged by an undiagnosed mental illness) who would literally have sex with strangers off the street when she was manic. This was not a choice she made with free will or agency. It was a choice that was dictated by the chemical composition of her brain at that moment. Can you imagine if she, later in the throes of the inevitable, mind-dulling, weeks-long depressions, had gone to clergy for help, knowing she had “sinned”? How gladly she would have accepted the fault, the blame, for her current depression.
Other traits manifested by people with bipolar are less extreme, but still the type of behavior that annoys other people, like extreme self-centeredness and grandiosity. Unless it is so extreme as to be obviously delusional, this just looks like bad personality traits that the person just ought to “fix”. But it is out of the person’s control.
Yes, bipolar is a disorder, but it teaches us something about how the brain works in the first place. The lesson that I found clear was that our behavior is often dictated by the chemical composition in our physical brain, and that is out of our control. This made me seriously doubt the idea of “free will” in the first place. (I do believe a form of free will exists within certain parameters set by factors out of our control.)
My ex-husband was diagnosed with bipolar in the last year of our marriage – a marriage that had already been destroyed by his disease (and since he refuses treatment, the disease has almost completely destroyed his relationships with his children, as well, tragically). Of course, when he grew up, child-onset bipolar was unheard of, so who knows how much help he would have gotten. But by the time he was a young adult, he should have been getting professional intervention. But his family didn’t believe in that stuff, and still don’t. They believe in religion and whippings to straighten out the wayward. This still disturbs me, not just because of the inheritance this gives to my children, but due to the fact that ex-husband is a man of considerable charm, intelligence, and talents. His life has been altered forever by an untreated disease. I don’t blame Mormonism alone for this, but the LDS influence in his upbringing was part of the reason his parents never sought help for him when he was young. They just didn’t trust psychiatrists and psychologists, and still don’t.
I do believe the LDS church is making progress, but like with most progress it’s made, it is following the lead set by larger society.