In this post, I’ll be drawing from The Bible and Mental Health Chapter 3.
I’ll start with the premise for the chapter and how it relates to mental health:
“…the assumption that madness and the divine are mutually exclusive. The assumption gains plausibility from two more fundamental theses, the first appealing to the modernist mindset of Lewis’ time, and the second of more contemporary concern. The first thesis is that madness represents irrationality whereas God is rational. The second thesis is that madness represents ill health whereas God is healthy. (…) …uncoupling madness from the concept of irrationality and ill health…” (pg. 34)
Understanding where someone’s mental state is and where it comes from is the first step in helping someone through psychology or psychiatry – or sometimes both. We can explain the human experience through different avenues
- It’s a symptom of something else (you are depressed because this happened to you)
- Your behaviour and thought patterns are a reaction to trauma
- There might be biological or physiological factors affecting your mood
- And more.
The process of understanding isn’t straightforward or “ah this is it”. It is usually a combination of many factors, both physiological, psychological and environmental.
Collicutt makes an important distinction here between description and explanation. We might be able to describe what someone is experiencing or how they are behaving, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we know why it is happening. She points out that different frameworks – ancient, modern and postmodern – might make sense of the same phenomena in different ways (p.43).
When doing psychological work, we are taught that the context – the environment the person is in – can give us important insight into the person’s distress, their shame about it and how they are perceived by their community.
I was working in Guatemala with a low-income group of people with varying degrees of disability, teaching them how to use computer skills to help them find work. One of them was from a very rural community and she said to me “in my community I’m seen as a witch because of how I look”. She had a particular disability that had deformed her face quite a bit, she was really small, and within the beliefs and stereotypes of her community, her appearance could be interpreted as though there were something else wrong with her in a more spiritual sense.
In the place we were working in the city, this wouldn’t have necessarily been the case, though she would’ve stood out anyway because of her facial features. She was much less likely to be interpreted as some sort of witch or a “mad” person simply because of her appearance.
This is why context is important. We can then begin to untangle the causes of distress, the causes of her difficulties and work through them so she could find a job or live the best life she could in spite of her disabilities.
This connects with Collicutt’s point that the framework we use matters. What one community might interpret spiritually, another might understand psychologically, medically or socially. The observation might be similar; the explanation can be very different.
In society, religious people are sometimes seen as “mad” for many reasons. Someone might think “oh they’re crazy, they believe in some entity they can’t see”. Someone else might bring up the fact that a particular church does things in a very legalistic way and that is mad behaviour. Others might just have a different view of the world and experience religion as completely alien to them.
We are not denying the fact here that there are cults and societies that are not within the realm of regular religious beliefs and that might end up harming people. There is plenty of work around that, which falls beyond the scope of this post.
Jesus was described as being “mad” by some of the people around him, and so were the Apostles at different points, which we see in Acts and Paul’s letters.
Collicutt concludes from the New Testament evidence that the Gospels present Jesus as being thought “mad” but also show a debate within the Jewish culture of His time about how that apparent madness should be understood (p.45).
But Jesus wasn’t only described in terms we might associate with “madness”; some people interpreted what he was doing through a spiritual framework and accused him of being possessed by Satan himself (see Mark 3:20–22, John 10:19–21 and John 8:48–52).
Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:13 says something along the lines of “if we are out of our mind, it is for God, if we are in our right mind, it is for you”.
Does this mean that Jesus or the Apostles were actually demon possessed or crazy? Absolutely not. We need to see this in the context of what the religious people of that time were thinking. For many of the religious authorities who rejected Jesus’ claims, it would have been hard to believe that “some man from Nazareth, and a carpenter’s son to boot!” could be who He claimed to be. His claims could be understood as blasphemous or heretical, or simply as the claims of someone who was out of his mind. And yet neither Jesus nor John the Baptist were showing signs of quietly disappearing.
On paper, Jesus looked like he was going against the grain of Jewish beliefs, against the Tanakh and the Torah themselves. And the fact that people were following Him was also seen as madness – the people were also mad because they “fell for it”. In reality, the Bible and Christianity say that Jesus came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets rather than contradict them (See Matthew 5:17) . And this will get us into a whole theological debate of the religious sects of Jesus’ time and whether they were right or wrong to teach what they did, but we won’t do that here.
The problem with interpreting Jesus simply as “mad” is that, according to the Bible and Christianity, He was certainly not mad. He was the Son of God and He came to do what God the Father sent Him to do – to rescue humanity from sin – the Jew first and then the Gentile.
The mad thing might be a question I have asked myself – “if God knew all of this was going to happen, why did He choose to do it this way? It’s a bit, well, “mad”?
Interestingly, Collicutt calls attention to Paul’s language of “foolishness” when talking about the cross. In 1 Corinthians 1:25, Paul writes that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom”, and in verse 27 that God chose what the world considers foolish to shame the wise. Collicutt describes this inversion as “divine folly” (p.47).
And I’m not going to question God because Job did that and look how God responded.
Perhaps this is where discernment becomes important. Collicutt concludes that we should be cautious about the frameworks we use to understand mental suffering and that discernment is crucial, particularly within a faith context (pp.51–52). We don’t have to choose between dismissing mental illness on the one hand or pathologising every unusual experience on the other.
So, in summary, the question I’d like to leave us with today is:
Who gets to decide what “mad” means? What are we actually observing, and through whose framework are we interpreting it?