I doubt you hear voices telling you to kill yourself, or are so despondent you can’t even get out of bed in the morning and cry for no good reason. I doubt you are so terrified over nothing that you sweat profusely and feel your heart pounding like it’s going to pop out of your chest.

This is nothing but a lot of fancy talk for ‘blame the mentally ill person because they’ve sinned.’

It’s impossible for me to accept such articles of faith any more.

My dad had bipolar disorder. In my early years he was a pastor for a while, until he couldn’t do it any longer.

My dad suffered a great deal, but the thing is, he had a heart for the downtrodden. I can’t help but believe his condition gave him love and patience for alcoholics, drug addicts and ex-cons. I have a letter from one of these that he wrote to my dad thanking him for his love and support. It kills me every time I read it. This man had found out that my dad was in the black hole again.

When I was in elementary school there was a man who would come to our home for Thanksgiving. My dad would pick him up at the boarding house where he lived about an hour away. I don’t know this man’s history, but he would play ragtime on our piano.

Of course, I’m not saying that all mental illness has any productive use.

Contrast that with an disease like pica – where the sufferer feels the insatiable compulsion to do something unnatural (eating inedible things, ripping out their hair or whatever) but seem and feel not-crazy otherwise. It’s genetic, disproportionately affects a certain population, neurological, psychological, causes real suffering, and flies almost totally under the sympathy radar of pretty much everybody who doesn’t have to live with it, whether or not the cultural ecology is amenable to it or not. We have a much better sense of its presentation and etiology nowadays, but once-upon-a-time and generally, it was just a weird, quietly life-ruining compulsion practiced by weird people who couldn’t very well explain it or help themselves.