RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE On December 20, I attended a seminar by Joseph Currier on Spiritual and Religious Competencies for Mental Health Care. The seminar was put on by Duke University’s Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, under the direction of Dr. Harold Koenig, a leading researcher in the field. Much research […]
Read More...MARJA’S REFLECTIONS ON SCRIPTURE – FREED It’s with great pleasure that I announce the release of 230 Reflections on Scripture. The writing of these devotionals began in 2013 and were emailed to individuals needing their hunger for God filled—those who needed help for their emotional needs and could not make it to meetings of the […]
Read More...January 2018 revised in October 2022 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot […]
Read More...HOPE FOR A LIFE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS Over the last few days my mind went back to Riding the Roller Coaster, a book I had published by Woodlake Publishers in 1999. It wasn’t hard for me to find a publisher at the time because it was one of the first books written by a person […]
Read More...SEEKING JUSTICE It has been seven months since my file was closed. I was cast out of the mental health system, having been a patient for all my adult life–in effect, punished for being too well. Why? Was it because I exercised my rights and tried to explain how a diagnosis I had been given […]
Read More...PSYCHIATRISTS SHOULD LISTEN BEFORE DIAGNOSING I was regularly abused for a year by someone I had least expected. It left me with emotional damage wrongly diagnosed as borderline personality disorder (BPD), the most stigmatized of all mental illnesses. This diagnosis assumed that my reaction to the mistreatment was simply due to over-sensitivity. The psychiatrist did […]
Read More...I DEVELOPED PHYSICAL DISABILITIES In many—if not most—cases, people with mental illness need medication to help them cope with life. That has certainly been the case for me. In 1965 I was diagnosed with schizophrenia because of my struggles with psychosis. That diagnosis stayed with me for twenty years until it was changed to bipolar […]
Read More...When We Lose the One we Depend On As a person with a diagnosis of mental illness, dependent on others for your everyday needs, have you ever wondered what would happen if your husband, wife, or other caregiver were to die? Will your rights be protected? I fear for mine. Were your husband or wife […]
Read More...He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Isaiah 53:3 Good Friday is a time when we remember how Christ suffered and died for us. I hope this […]
Read More...A PLEA TO THE CHURCH Where do you go when you have an illness that medical professionals and counselors don’t want to deal with – treated like an untouchable in a modern world? Have you ever thought what that would feel like? It’s happening all the time to people with BPD. In their book Beyond […]
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