Climbing Out of Hell: A Tale of Mental Illness and Spiritual Transformation

I can’t believe that this was me just over a year ago. I had just begun to emerge from the underground to face and speak to the world again. I thought I’d share this with you, dear reader, because when it was first published I had but 31 subscribers and it offers context both to my recent post If My Spiritual Father Can Be Healed Then So Can I and the forthcoming sequel to that post.

The Daily Battle

Every day, it is a challenge for me to get up in the morning, because I take one of the old-school medications for Bipolar Disorder at night that takes more than a night to wake up from. I take another medication in the morning that, while not causing sleepiness or weight gain, results in complete anhedonia. I cannot feel pleasure or take pleasure in anything. To counteract this, I take a high dose of stimulants and two antidepressants. And if that is not enough because I suffer from complex trauma and panic disorder, I regularly take Xanax.

The point of sharing a glimpse into my medicine cabinet is not to gain your pity, but to help highlight how difficult it is for people like me—those with medication-resistant Bipolar Disorder—to find a workable regimen of medications. However, my struggles extend beyond just managing medications.

Living with Disorientation

Once I get up in the morning, I struggle to place myself in relation to the ordinary flow of life because I’m missing the necessary reference points which most people use to organize and understand their lives. I don’t remember much of what happened this last week or what day it is or what I did last night or what is different about today than a week or two or three ago. I can’t even recall more than flickers of the first two years of my children’s lives. For a while, I didn’t even know I was missing this information. It just was just what life was like after the year and a half I did Electro-convulsive Therapy (ECT) to come out of a pit of depression sparked by a four-month-long psychotic break.

Spiritual Television

I stopped ECT over a year and a half ago, but I have to go back seven years to find a place where I can situate myself in relation to some sort of purposeful activity to render my story a narrative. This places me at University of Chicago Divinity school amidst in the grey Gothic stone ivy covered buildings—wandering the seventh floor bookstacks at the Regenstein Library. I had been given a generous scholarship, and this told me that I could finally rest my ego on my elite status as the grand doors of a career in academia opened up before me.

But this sense of self turned out to be fragile and the more I tried to preserve it, the more I subconsciously avoided my work to try to prove myself to myself by achieving some sort of tangible and publically recognizable perfection. I would spend all day in the bookstacks scanning book after book, random page after random page of whatever was of interest and then spend all night, writing and writing about everything but what was assigned to me.  

All it took then with the precarious state of my ego was a failed presentation and receiving my first B as graduate student for me to lose it.  The shame was so sharp. I fell off the cliff I had mounted in my mind. I found myself in a coffin of depression which led me to check into the hospital. And that was when it began: the four-month-long psychotic episode which would determine the next several years of my life.

I started to tune into this thing I called "spiritual television." I could see events happening on the other side of the world and peak into my wife’s and children’s private lives. I could hear the things being written about me on the internet. I even once traveled back in time with St. Silouan the Athonite and remember walking up this dark, torch-lit stairway to H.H. Holmes' office and St. Silouan knocking him out.

Some of the hallucinations were strangely satisfying like that. Like when the demons thought they could get me to betray Christ by crucifying me, and I got to fulfill my lifelong desire to die in a manner befitting of a Christian.

But then there were experiences that are hard to speak of. Like when the demon that was crucifying me pulled up a television set in front of the spot where I was hanging and showed me live footage of my children. He told me that if I didn’t betray my Lord then they would die and since I didn’t acquiesce I had to watch them burn to death. That happened twice.

The psychiatrists tried every medication available, but after 18 days in the hospital, I still wasn’t better. At that point, the insurance ran out or they had just given up on me and thinking I would not be a harm to anyone, they released me.

A Turning Point

Four months I was like that. I did things and said things I can’t even imagine. I couldn’t get myself to accept help from anyone and in a last gasp of hope my wife sent me to visit the monastery where my spiritual father was. I don’t remember much about being there, but when I came back somehow everything began to calm down. My spiritual father carried me out of hell with his prayers. Other than that, I don’t know how I ever would have come back to myself again.

Coping Mechanisms

At the time I didn’t realize how lucky I was to get better or that I only got better due to the prayers of my spiritual father, so instead of dealing with the trauma of going insane, I went back to smoking pot. Having spent so long out of work and not taking care of the kids, I did nothing but smoke away the days as I slowly died inside.

Life was constantly passing by all around me. I couldn’t touch it.  I became numb to everything but my own feelings and my feelings were rotting out my insides. I tried quitting pot, but the feeling wouldn’t go away, so my psychiatrist recommended ECT.

All I can remember from the first two weeks of ECT is one instance of getting back to my bedroom at the psych unit and experiencing a powerful strobe light pulsing the entire world in and out of existence.

Living with ECT Treatments

During ECT, I stayed at my parents' house because my illness had forced my wife and kids to move into her mother’s house in Indiana. I was going back and forth between Chicago and Indiana for the treatments. I remember reading John Behr’s new translation of Origen’s On First Principles and feeling a powerful insight that I had to share with my wife. I called her, but she seemed unimpressed. That hurt me, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that every week, I’d reach the same spot in the book, have the same epiphany and call her to share the same insight. My life was on constant repeat for everyone else in my life. The only one consistently amused by the same thing was me.

Months into the treatments , I remember my father dropped me off at the hospital for ECT and despite having been there many times, I couldn't remember where to go. I got flashes of faces and people but couldn’t remember the floor number or the name of the treatment room. Finally, as I was wandering around the second floor, a nurse found me and led me like a child to where I was supposed to go and then called up my father and yelled at him for leaving me to find the place on my own.

The Breaking Point

Eventually, my memory began to improve—especially when the ECT treatments began to be spread out—but I still wasn’t well enough to watch my children. In fact by the time I stopped doing ECT, I had lost any sense of being able to do anything at all.

Before my psychotic break I had been either watching the kids full-time or working or going to school, but after two years of having high voltage electricity shot through my head, I wasn’t able to do anything but play video games. Occasionally, I’d subconsciously get upset over the emptiness and loneliness of my existence and burst out in anger, and then later I’d suddenly remember what I had said or done a day or week or month ago and get suicidal over the unbearable shame I felt. I was convinced that my kids would be better off without a mentally ill father who had outbursts he couldn’t control and more than once I was closer than I’m comfortable to admit to committing suicide.

Steps Towards Recovery

It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that one day, when changing medicine, I realized the meds I was on were keeping me from being able to feel my feelings.¹ I needed the meds, but until I got off them I didn’t have the emotion quotient necessary to realize the nightmare I was in wasn’t a nightmare, but real life. That I had allowed my problems to kill my capacity to love and accept love. I realized that I had children and they needed me and that it didn’t matter how I felt, I had to show them love. That’s when I began to recover. Not because of medication (though finding the right meds helped), but because I decided that my children and God were more important than my pain.

An Uphill Battle

Once I got on the right meds I began to force myself out of bed to watch the kids again. At first, just watching them for one whole day felt like a triple marathon. But after I visited my spiritual father again, I received the exact words I needed to hear. Mainly, that I should not have a self-image. When I realized the importance of this, of not seeing a distance between who I thought I should be and who I was, that helped enough that I could begin to take responsibility for everything I had done.

Practical Spiritual Practices

The key to my recovery was learning to practice watchfulness and bear a little shame. Holding up my embarrassment in my heart to God allowed the light of His presence to show me what parts of my struggle were of my own making.  For instance, depression leads to sleepiness, lack of enjoyment, and even pain, but it is not the same as despair. Despair is a lack of faith that leads to self-pity and resentful sorrow. Once I came to accept this, I realized that most of my thoughts were logismoi—complex thoughts charged with demonic influence. These thoughts often coupled an image of myself being happy, something I needed to do, or forthcoming terrors, with an impulse to incline myself passionately toward the depicted scenario.

This realization led me to understand that everything I let into my imagination became material for the demons to work with and that seeking self-gratifying pleasure rather than the will of God led to the emptiness and despair I was experiencing. Moreover, I came to understand that I had to get out of bed and take care of my children again. Slowly but surely, I got to the point where I could care for my kids, and as I got going with that, my capacity to write, read, and remember what I had read improved drastically. I even began to get to the point where I could consistently detach from or fend off thoughts that led to despair, despondency, or anxiety before they took root in my heart.

Rediscovering Life and Learning

This may not seem like much, but it is a tremendous change. I went from an inability to get out of bed and helplessness before despair to being able to get up each day and participate in life. I even began conducting research again, developing a comprehensive understanding of the development of Church doctrine from the early Church to Maximus the Confessor in the 6th century before moving on to trace the outlines of the foundations of modernity. I now have a better understanding of history and historical modes of thinking and being in the world than I do of my own history.

My timeline for my life is not my own but one from Hellenism to the end of late-antiquity. (Of course, there are many gaps, but the point remains that I know the general currents of history better than myself.)

Conclusion: Hope and Faith in the Journey

My hope in this post is twofold: to ground my spiritual and religious writings in the experience of a real person and to provide hope for those suffering from mental illness that there is a way to get better. Much of this hope is given to us by the spirituality of the Philokalia—e.g., the Eastern Orthodox Church. The insights I’ve shared in prior posts on spirituality and watchfulness come from my practical engagement in spiritual practices and prayer that have helped me grow enormously.

One other thing I’d add is that one of the major difficulties of my spiritual life came from how much grace I initially experienced upon entering into the Orthodox Church. I’ve had miraculous healings from Saints and profound experiences of saturated phenomena that expanded my being and widened my entire horizon for how I saw myself and life. Part of my greatest suffering was when this initial grace seemed to recede.

What I learned from reading St. Sophrony though is that this is part of the journey. God shows us Himself and then, after a while, pulls back to allow us, with our own will, choose Him and His way of life. This is necessary for us to truly grow in our love for Him and to participate in our healing and deification. Moreover, this is when God is more than experience, but the grace that changes and alters your way of life so that you can grow in a real, tangible way in love for others and in wisdom and understanding.

1. That is almost three years ago now.