I have a new blog friend who has written lately about depathologizing pain.
I think I know what she means, and I appreciate it: that pain is not unique to certain individuals, that pain is not the same as crazy.
And yet I find myself doing the same thing in the opposite direction: pain is pathological because it is not what we were designed for. (I don’t mean ordinary healthy pain like being able to feel when you get a cut or something. (I don’t think my friend means that either.)) But it’s a pathology that all people share, not one that divides the sick from the healthy. We’re all sick.
Like her, I don’t have a Mental Illness, a diagnosis in capital letters with a standardized treatment plan. But like everyone in the universe, I have mental health concerns. If illness can mean un-ease, discomfort, colds as well as cancer, then I think we all have mental illness, at various times, to various degrees.
I don’t think the line between sick and healthy, sane and crazy, is anywhere near as black and white as we want to think it is.
I think that’s why every time I get gruff with Amy when I’m angry at her, I think about abuse. I am not an Abuser. But I think the line between well-adjusted and abusive is pretty thin, too. And so I will take it seriously when I deal poorly with my anger, because I don’t want to cross that line or get any closer to it than I can avoid.
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Edited to add: No, I realize I don’t mean that pain is pathological — I mean that some of the things that cause pain are pathological. Maybe all things. Eden was perfect — I’m not sure if that means no one ever got a scrape or a cold, but there wasn’t any sin yet and therefore no pain caused by sinning and being sinned against.
Pain is not pathological, because it is healthy to respond to harmful things with pain — whether the harmful things are scrapes and colds or sins and sinning.
ah! the theology of mental suffering! good luck to you, marcy.
i find it easier to think of mental pain (vs. physical pain) in terms of personal and collective history. if someone i love dies i feel pain. that’s history, not sin. if i was neglected as a kid and now i have a hard time creating trusting relationship (i don’t; it’s just an example) that’s history, not sin. etcetera etcetera.
unless of course you talk about original sin, which marks the entrance of finitude in human life and so makes pain (all pain — physical, psychological, moral, all the way till death) possible. no scrapes in eden. no loss and anguish, either. no death. but it seems to me that the ontological finitude of man and woman is somewhat different from that sinfulness that consists in willfully going against the will of god on a minute-by-minute basis. if i kick you because i want to, that’s sin. if i kick you because i stumble, that’s finitude. in eden that would not have happened. still, i’m not responsible for it in the same way — at an immediate, repent-apologize-and-make-amend kind of level.
it’s LATE to be thinking about these very difficult issues! very interesting post. thank you for giving me the occasion to reflect on this. i’ll think about it more.
Comment by ama — October 24, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
I agree the lines are fuzzy and not just black and white.
Comment by risingrainbow — October 25, 2007 @ 12:42 am
Ama, yes, I’m talking about sin in a broad sense, including both willful direct sins and general historical pervasive sinfulness and the results, finitude, darkness, separations, and so on.
I would say that if someone is neglected as a kid, that is sin — not the kid’s sin, but the one who neglects the kid. It may well be sin in the general sense, taking into account the neglecter’s own history, but it’s still sin.
And thanks back at you for raising the question to begin with.
Comment by Marcy — October 25, 2007 @ 8:14 am