Struggling with Prolonged Mental Illness as a Conservative Christian
In the Mennonite, Conservative Christian, and Evangelical communities I called home, mental health issues were not taken seriously and tended to be attributed to spiritual deficiencies. While I now have a healthy, varied, and trauma-informed approach to my mental emotional care, I spent the first two decades of my life enduring intense suffering without understanding why. In my earliest memories, I remember not wanting to be alive. My mother tells me when I was very young I would talk about how excited I was to die so I could go live with Jesus in heaven. Those feelings became increasingly frequent and intense as I grew up, and the only context I had to understand them was through Biblical teachings and the Christian worldview. From a young age, Christianity taught me I didn’t belong here on earth. In the beginning, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, the original home of man, to live a life of pain and struggle for their sins. As a result, Heaven was the reward for...