Review by Jennifer Coleman, 2008
Greene-McCreight, Kathryn. Darkness is My only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006. $16.99.
In, Darkness is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness, Kathryn Greene-McCreight engages a topic seldom mentioned by the Christian community, the problem of mental illness. McCreight received her Ph.D. in Theology from Yale University, is the author of several books, and is the chair of Christian Theology and the Bible with SBL. She has taught at Smith College, Albert Magnus and Yale University, and is an assistant Priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church in New Haven, CT. Additionally, she is married, the mother of two, and suffers from severe Bipolar Disorder.
McCreight’s work is not merely as an outsider attempting to examine Mental Illness from a theological perspective, but the poignant work of a theologian who is subjectively related to her topic as a Theologian and Christian, who happens to be mentally ill. Accordingly, her book is a tour through the life and suffering of a mentally ill person and a theological encounter with, and response to, her Bipolar Disorder.
Part one focuses on how McCreight personally faces life with Bipolar Disorder. The utter deleteriousness of depression where the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of suicide is a constant reality and the consuming nature of mania, are fixed in view and strikingly contextualized into McCreight’s profession, family, and religion. For McCreight, all of these go together, her faith is her life—there is no separation. This is stated flatly in the book (114), but is also obvious in the way she allows herself to slip into theological commentary and back to personal experiences again, and again. Most obviously, is her compelling and moving commentary on the nature and meaning of suicide (44-49).
Part two, focuses the reader on the intersection of faith and mental illness. McCreight relates, with skeptical sharpness, the role of religious experience in her life as a Christian with mental illness. She downplays the importance of her personality, her being, which is under constant threat of dissolution into madness (76-79). Rather, she argues, “God does not look upon us according to our feelings but according to the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” (93). This reflects, for McCreight, a departure from typical subjective emotional religious experience to a focus on the objective, external and CONSTANT person of Christ. She cannot rely on her own emotions, or her own personality; she cannot trust herself. She must ground this trust in another and the deliberate activity of obedience (116). Yet, she betrays, quite obviously throughout the book, the subjective religious experience of meditating and internalizing Scripture in order to process her pain.
Nevertheless, McCreight never displays a simple ‘tomorrow will worry about itself’ faith. Rather, she recognizes that her disorder inclines her to specific forms of sin, and profound “spiritual fallout” (107). She is aggressive toward her illness medicinally and therapeutically. Yet, she never recoils from her faith. She is faithful, both in obedience and her beliefs about human nature, to the disgust of many of her care providers (112-127).
Care givers, the role they play and practical advice on choosing them, along with the role of family and faith community, is the focus of the last section of the book. McCreight advocates for the necessity of therapy for the mentally ill while also providing advice on how to deal with visitations and other offers of help.
This book is a welcome edition to an area too long neglected by churches and professional theologians. Hopefully its insightful themes and provocative accounts will stimulate better discussion on this subject of growing importance.