It might be hard to describe exactly how to explain something that I would call a mental breakdown, but I’ve been reviewed by multiple psychiatrists and they don’t know exactly what happened, other than my brain had a chemical reaction that was abnormal. When I was checked into a mental institution, I was labeled as three things: psychotic and two different cases of bipolar. That’s a longer and different story as to why I was labeled with all three initially, and then later was only diagnosed with one by my psychiatrist, but we’re still evaluating because I don’t have the typical symptoms. I had a mental breakdown in which I just happened to be overly confident and happy.
All of these labels are difficult for me because my mental breakdown had me feeling spiritually inspired. The way I like to describe it was that I felt like I could manifest my own reality, but then I got it wrong some of the time.
I shared the gospel in what felt like the most natural ways I had ever experienced before. I also learned about what I call the dichotomy of humor, of which I’m writing a book about my journey toward mental faith, which I talk about this dichotomy of humor in.
But, ultimately, in my mental breakdown, I felt more empathy toward other people. But at the same time, I had significant amounts of shame, fear, and anger. I was bored and feeling unseen and unheard in my work. I had an inability to capture my thoughts and submit them to the Lord. So, I stewed on them.
I didn’t think these negative thoughts were influencing me to the degree that they were. But I began praying for the Lord to move because I felt that I was not engaged enough in the things that I felt called to do. One being, telling other people about Jesus.
My dad had taught me years before how to share the gospel with tracts. I had used that method off and on over several years. Most everybody has heard of stories about how people drop tracts in random places. My dad did not teach me that. He only gave tracts when he had the opportunity to make a connection with another human being, and he would simply pop the question, “can I ask you personal question? If you were to die today and stand in front of heaven and God was to ask you, why should I let you into heaven? What would you say?” And the rest is pretty self-explanatory. They would respond and he would have a short interaction, followed by him asking if he could share something for them to read when they have time. That it was the most important decision that he had ever made.
This method was doable and in some cases, even impactful. But I felt that there was no room for the Holy Spirit with this method. I wanted to feel God‘s presence.
So I did a little experiment as I got more and more frustrated with my work situation. I also got tired of the lack of desire for men who know Jesus but have a lack of desire to do more than just go through the motions in their relationship with God.I wanted to see transformation by the gospel, not just in their heart, but my heart.
So I started taking walks that became increasingly longer. On those walks, I would pray that the Lord move. And eventually, he did.
I started feeling chest pains on one walk, which led me to a friend who is an unbeliever, and I’ve been asking the Lord to share the gospel more seriously and deeply with them. We had this great conversation that opened up the opportunity to share what I believed. It was a very raw moment With vulnerability. His response, “most Christians are hypocrites. But not you… You’re different.“ I appreciated the compliment, but I still prayed for his heart, and I also prayed for his indigestion to go away.
I saw him about a week after my mental breakdown was over and he said his indigestion stopped. He also said that he had a great conversation with his wife about our about our conversation and then she broke down with gratitude that someone would care so much about him.
If my mental breakdown was only for me to impact this one non-believing family in a way that they felt seen and heard and loved, then it was all worth it.
But that wasn’t the end of my spiritually empowered week. I met about six people in six days that I had the most natural conversations with that led to a short conversation about Jesus. And I didn’t leave them a tract. It’s like I had figured out how to look people in the eyes and see their emotions and feel empathy with them. It transformed the way I communicated with them. I was a much better listener and was much more observant. Most of the time I observed something on an item of clothing or something that they said with a little more emotion and I asked more questions about it. This, in a matter of a minute or less, brought a connection that gravitated to a deeper conversation about what I cared about, which of course was, Jesus.
In and of itself, these type of happenings in my spiritually awakened week probably wouldn’t have been enough to cause my wife concern. It was the presuming upon the future that caused more of the issue.
In one case after I shared the gospel with somebody that was in our home and their daughter was considering suicide, my wife later asked me if I was doing OK. That made me angry.
When I followed my feelings in the conversation with my wife, I opened my email in the middle of the conversation to check my phone and noticed an email from Jon Mark Comer with an invitation that they had 1 spot left for their conference. I was walking in so much self confidence that I offered her a vacation and suggested that they would make room for 2. I immediately replied with the request. They responded quickly with an accommodation. When my wife suggested we couldn’t afford that, I told her we would get it paid for. And I tried again, asking to come for free in exchange for some digital marketing work. To which I got a polite but firm, no. Well, at least I tried!
My increased agitation at my wife’s level of interrogative questioning at my perceived ability to manifest my future at the spur of the moment, became more and more concerning to her and more frustrating to me. She observed different patterns that brought fear in her while all I experienced was elation.
At the end of the week, I sat with a friend for lunch and heard him speaking tongues for the first time ever and immediately felt elated. Without being prompted, I immediately knew what had happened, “Did you just speak in tongues?” He affirmed my suspicions. I was introduced to the demonic world during this lunch also, where I had many outlandish visions and where I literally felt light and darkness in the room and demons and prophets.
You might already think I’m crazy, heck, I often wonder if I was…am. To me the week predominantly felt like an out of body experience in which God moved. But my wife’s perceptions were not so positive. I admit that a small portion of the week I was confused, at best. My wife in particular was worried and grew more so as she heard the parts that were not typical behavior of me. But it was difficult for me was reconciling all the good that happened as well.
The best way that I can explain it is that my mind over time continued to follow, more and more, my stream of consciousness until it practically took over. I wanted more of God and God clearly showed up in some big ways, but it was as if my anger at being unheard and unvalued was taking a toll on my mental state as well. I rushed to conclusions and I was the biggest problem to me.
This whole week long journey had me top it all off with a visit to a mental institution for psychiatric evaluation and therapy and then I was diagnosed as bipolar right before my 40th birthday. After this whirlwind it left me wondering how to really trust God with my thoughts? And it had me questioning my mental state, along with everyone else close to me. But it also took me on a journey to understand better the components of spiritual and emotional and mental health. It also brought me face to face with a medical establishment medicating predominantly for symptoms rather than root causes and backed by a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry.
I’m writing a book about it for my own journey of healing and was opened to an identity crisis that covers the church and the world as I waded through my own struggle between being labeled mentally ill and as my psychiatrist told me “I had no control over my actions in my mania” and on the other hand, my God-given ability to choose my thinking and my actions.
There is a lot of healing that needs to be done in order to become spiritually and emotionally and mentally mature followers of God and to be in identity with God. It requires an attachment love that binds us to God through His son, Jesus, and in His Spirit. The best way I can explain it is to take you along in my journey, after I write the book so you can come with me into my mental insanity and into my spiritual awakening and back to a stronger place of holistic health.
We are holistic beings with many dimensions of humanity and human life “where the notions of maturity and immaturity arise:
- The will (very important);
- The mind, which includes thoughts and feelings;
- The body, which is our little power pack that God has given us to allow us to have a decent kind of life;
- Our social connections (which are essential); and then finally,
- The soul
An identity is made up of who you are and who you are meant to be, and the gap in between. For far too long I thought maturity could be gained through reading the Bible and knowledge of God. But then I encountered a whole other level of my health and condition was happening in my soul and my mind, in my subconscious, that needed attention.
When it comes to identity, who I am, I want to be loved and respected at home, with friends, and in my work. But my work is where I spend most of my time. The stress leading up to my week long experiment, by my own perception, was insurmountable. I had been sucker punched in my own mind time and time again and I could no longer think positively. Negative thoughts of unvalued and unappreciated were my constant companion. I felt trapped and lost by the constant line of dutiful living. I wanted more in life, I was a dreamer of what could be. I wanted God too.
When I hit rock bottom I wanted God and nothing else. And then I found myself in the mental institution, diagnosed as bipolar and on lithium, a brain invasive drug, for a year and a half. And it was if no one could help answer my questions. No one was able to help me with adequate solutions, nothing gave me answers for why. Not until I found emotional coaching.
Actually, emotional coaching found me in my moment of despair. I was introduced to it through a minister at our church when I was dealing with a counselor with little results. I had reached out to get placed with a coach weeks before my week long experiment. But, on my way to the mental institution, at my lowest point, I got a call “Scott, we haven’t been able to place you yet but we are working on it. It should be a week or two longer.” All I could muster was a “thank you”.
The mental facility was just what I had imagined. It was right out of a Hollywood movie. It was, literally, insane. More on that in the book that I’m writing. But what led me to lose my mind and become more like a cabbage, was lithium, what I was prescribed in the mental facility and then prescribed by my psychiatrist after I got out. It probably helped keep my brain safe for a period of time so it didn’t happen as much again. But the reason I’m skeptical is because my diagnosis resulted only from the story of my week. No blood test or brain scan to prove I was mentally ill. Just a story about a chemical imbalance.
To be clear, I think I probably had a chemical imbalance but what should be my ongoing care plan and road to healing? A dependence on drugs that dull my ability to think? This psychiatrist had no vested interest in my well being, he had never met me. He only said that something in my childhood could have triggered emotional trauma and that I had a dormant “bipolar” gene that could have become active anytime. It just so happened that it waited until I was 39 3/4 to appear?
Regardless, he assured us that it did trigger and now I needed medication. But there was no plan for holistic healing. There was only a plan to medicate. That was the only solution presented. I knew there had to be more to the story. I wish I had come across a plan for spiritual and emotional maturity without the label of bipolar, but I don’t know that I would have come to the end of myself enough.
This diagnosis and medication began my road to self exploration and discovery. It led me to re-evaluate what a spiritually and emotionally mature believer looked like. Because, the way that I understood and experienced listening to God during my week long experiment was both magical and at the same time, at times, destructive.
This is not a story for just those labeled mentally ill. It is a process of rediscovering how to renew the mind for the believer. You see, the studies of the brain back up, they reinforce, the Scriptures. And the amount of trauma faced when we are between age one to ten shapes who we are. To be mentally healthy is one aspect of spiritual wholeness and maturity. It helps us to become who we are meant to be. And who we are meant to be is to be confident and clear in what God wants us to do next. By the power of His spirit.
The goal of a well formed disciple is to follow God all of our days, to have identity with God, guided by the Holy Spirit. Let me just say that’s what I believe I was doing when I was told I was mentally ill. But could it be that I was just really angry? And that was enough to cause this snowball effect into the mental institution? I’ll never fully know. What if suppressing fear rather than processing it in a healthy way was the biggest malfunction in my whole being? I feel like one thing I’ve learned is that relationships matter. We are what others see of us. Particularly those that are closest to us. The ones we live with day in a day out know us. And we must lean on others to help us know ourselves.
But alternatively we can be held captive by others when we seek their approval more than God’s. When we are not angry is when we can confidently know who we are and know who we are meant to be. When we receive feedback that is what others want from us rather than what we believe is best for us, when we are aligned with God we can remain calm and not rage. We can learn not to suppress our feelings and equally be emotionally regulated. We can truly know who we are meant to be in God’s eyes. But we must have our mind and we must renew it.
I think we’ve lost some of our mind as a culture. We are taken captive by the identities that we see in our digital devices. We don’t know what faithful community looks like because we are believing we must earn our salvation rather than confidently know that, as Dallas Willard once said, “We don’t try to do those things – we become the kind of person who does those things”.
If you try to put on love and live by trying to do things, it will just kill you. How do I know? Because it began to physical cause me illness, not just mentally.
As Paul says “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances”. This was written from jail. The key point is if you learn to receive love into your life over time out will come the things that 1 Cor 13 will say are true of love. No matter your circumstances, you can be a person of love.
Many of us from an early age have a warped view of love and therefore we have a warped view of how God loves us. You might believe God is predominantly a God of judgment. He is not near, He is not loving. We must earn his favor if we want to be loved. But God doesn’t rule with an iron fist, He is a God of love and he wants relationship and intimacy with you. So much that every thought is held captive by the love of God. So that we can be set free by Him and through Him.
Why should you hear this from a guy diagnosed as bipolar? Why should you continue reading? Because I went to the depths of mental disturbance to return again into God’s love. I believe this is healing me even now. I thought I had it already, but I was mistaken. When I learned to read God’s word for Him and to read it daily, that was one step closer to identity with God but that was not all. I was mistaken. I needed the mental institution and the diagnosis and the mental state of negativity to show me how bad it could get.
I needed to be emotionally restored so my mind could be renewed. Renewed to what? To believe in God’s love. To learn to be positive and thankful rather than think negatively spurred on my a view of God that I could not be myself. I had to be somebody better. That was rooted in my heart even though I played a good game on the surface. It was hidden, even to myself.
It only took a mental diagnosis in the midst of the biggest spiritual high of my life for me to stop trying to be good and to make that my ultimate arrival into complete surrender. I want the heart of God and I thought I knew it. But I didn’t know a damn thing.
So, come with me on this journey to an identity with Christ. Let’s learn together.
Sincerely,
Scott