HARRISONBURG, Va. (Mennonite Mission Network) -- Ninety to 95 percent of all suicides are associated with one of five major psychiatric illnesses, according to Kay Jamison, one of the key mental-health experts interviewed for the Fierce Goodbye: Living in the Shadow of Suicide documentary Mennonite Media is producing with Faith & Values Media, to premiere on Hallmark Channel this summer. The three most common illnesses, which sometimes end in suicide, are depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
Jamison is professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and has bipolar illness herself. She stresses that paying attention to mental-health needs will save lives, and help patients find wholeness and happiness while living with ongoing disease.
"The bad side of these illnesses is that they are extremely painful and potentially lethal. The good side is that they're very treatable," Jamison said. "The problem is getting people into treatment and onto the correct treatment, and also realizing that it sometimes takes time for the correct medication or a combination of medication and psychotherapy to take hold." The combination of medication and psychotherapy "helps people understand why they need to take medications, and what they can do to control their lives," she said, emphasizing that more education about how treatable these illnesses are needs to be done through churches, schools, parents, pediatricians, internists and general practitioners.
Especially problematic are Christians who in faith ask God for healing, and then abandon medications as a faith response when they feel better.
"We need to stop looking at medication as a sign of weakness," said Sherry Davis Molock, associate professor of psychology at George Washington University in Washington. "Medication can be a gift from God, another angel, if you will, that will help you."
Mennonite Media produced the hourlong documentary for Faith & Values Media because suicide and the aftermath for families is not only a critical issue affecting society and the church, it has been a theological and missiological issue in the church. "Helping the church be educated about mental illnesses and how [the church] can respond more helpfully will save lives," says Burton Buller, producer of the program.
Another part of the problem the church can respond to is how most current health-insurance policies place caps on treatment for mental illness.
"Lifetime limits are just atrocious," said Sheri Smucker, a teacher from Harrisonburg, Va., whose first husband, Darrel Brubaker, died by suicide after reaching his lifetime limit for psychological treatment. "Depression is very much like cancer. It can reoccur. You live with it. You go into remission, but I'm not sure you are ever totally healed from it. If there's no lifetime limit on cancer treatment, I don't think there should be a lifetime limit on depression treatment." Smucker is interviewed at length in the Fierce Goodbye documentary about her experience living alongside someone with deep, debilitating depression.
Smucker offered words of counsel for people who want to know how to help someone who is living with someone in depression. "Give the caregiver breaks," she said. "If you can, go and spend time with the depressed person so that their spouse (most often) can have a break such as to go out and have lunch with a friend or just have a break from being with that person." She says it is so overwhelming to try to talk to a depressed person, because "you can't reason with them, you can't talk them out of their depression, and it's just exhausting."
Barbara Borntrager, also of Harrisonburg, had a son who suffered Tourette Syndrome and eventually died of a drug overdose after numerous attempts at suicide. She said that at one point she came to realize that "I just couldn't go on living the way I was living because it was draining the life out of me. I had a panic attack." She ended up going to the hospital and a doctor asked her what she was doing to take care of herself. "It seemed like a totally foolish question at the time because I was trying to take care of Jon and keep him alive. There wasn't any time left for me. But when the panic attack happened I recognized that I had to change some things about my life or I wasn't going to make it."
Patients often try to hide their illness or depression from others, because of the stigma associated with it, and to protect their loved ones. Jill Marks, a holistic psychologist from Minneapolis and mother who tells her family's story in the documentary, said that she now thinks her daughter had bipolar disorder and may have suffered a previous bout with depression. But even as a counselor, Marks didn't recognize it. The daughter was living away from home at the time.
Jameson said undetected illness is common. "People can hide it. People may look to other people as though they are 'normal,' and in fact suffer from profound depression. In my own case I worked in academic psychiatric settings all of my life and for 20 to 25 years, most of my colleagues had no idea I had a very severe form of mental illness." She explained that especially young people try to fit in with other people, look normal, and so depression sometimes goes undetected.
David Brubaker of Phoenix and twin brother of Darrel also appears in the documentary. He reflected on the stigma of mental illness. "I remember thinking there's a larger stigma: hospitalization to treat those illnesses. And although I would now look back [13 years ago] and say that's really sad that we have that stigma, at the time I was keenly aware that it exists. And so I remember thinking that [my brother's hospitalization] could have an impact on Darrel's future career and perhaps by extension on mine."
Stigma leads to unwillingness to find help. Roger Steffy of Harrisburg, Pa., was formerly pastor of a congregation where a key leader died by suicide. Steffy said the man's denial of his depression later led to anger and pain for Steffy. The man didn't want others to know and refused to share his problems even with his small group. "It was very well hidden and so I was angry about that, as in, 'You know, we tried to help you to get the support you needed and you refused.' It was kind of an irrational anger but it was real nonetheless."
Steffy didn't talk about these emotions either at the time.
"But the emotions were very intense," he said. "I felt like we could have done more, but also he didn't do his part and there was a sense that he let us down. And I had to work through those feelings and recognize that in his depression he had done all he could."
Steffy also came to recognize his own intense fatigue from giving extended pastoral care. People in his small group started saying, "Roger you're on the edge of burnout. You need to do something to take care of yourself or you’re going to not be able to help anybody." Steffy ended up taking a one-month sabbatical in order to do some self-care.
"I thought my own self-care was fairly good," he said. "Not so. In that kind of crisis I was not emotionally or spiritually prepared to go the distance. So I needed to take a kind of medical leave of absence in order to recuperate and continue that process and put some different kind of practices in place for my own self-care after that. It was very nearly my own emotional destruction."
Molock stressed that the church needs to give out information on mental illness and even suicide, including from the pulpit, because the average person is not going to come to a workshop unless he or she has been directly affected by depression or suicide. "But the entire congregation needs to know what it means to be depressed. They need to know that being depressed is a mental illness; it is not a sign of lack of faith. It is not demon possession; it is not a sign that you are cursed by God."
Molock pointed out that the Bible has lots of examples, especially among the major prophets, of people who suffered depression. "Moses, in the book of Numbers, at some point gets so overwhelmed by trying to help all the people, he says to God: 'Why don’t you just kill me? I can’t handle this.' And then God sends him an angel through his father-in-law Jethro." Jethro encourages Moses to set up a counsel of elders to help him.
"So how did God work? God could have just zapped the depression away, but God worked through people," Molock said.
The documentary will air Sunday, August 22 at 12 noon ET/PT, 11 a.m. CT. The program does not deal with mental illness at this length, but extended segments will be available on the DVD version of the documentary as well as at the web site, www.fiercegoodbye.com.
The documentary is produced in cooperation with Faith & Values Media, the nation's largest coalition of Jewish and Christian faith groups dedicated to media production, distribution and promotion. The programming services of Faith & Values Media are available on Hallmark Channel and on www.faithandvalues.com. Faith & Values Media is a service of the National Interfaith Cable Coalition, Inc., established in 1987.
