james on Mental Illness

Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challengin...

I (Rich) remember a time while serving as a young pastor at Peace Community Church. At the beginning of my sermon every single Sunday an elderly believer in the church tilted his head to the right and...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—You are ever the same in Your grace and truth, Your power and love; Yet, You always challenge us to grow, change and become more like Jesus. We’re not yet what we w...

Loving God: Abba—our Father; Jesus—our Savior; Spirit—our Comforter. As Advent begins ... we take a deep breath, we grit our teeth and steel our nerves anticipating the fast pace of the next few week...

Gathering information without processing and applying it is counter to how the mind works and how the brain is structured and has a deleterious effect on our mental and physical well-being, creating a...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Learned Helplessness can be easily seen in a research study when participants are given a math test. In this study, some participants are told, “men don’t tend to do well on this test,” or “Millennia...

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

Health is not valued till sickness comes.

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.

Sin is a deep interior dislocation of the soul. It's a desire to keep control of your life.

Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.

Two decades after I worked with the airmen, I read a fascinating article, “The Quasimodo Complex,” in The British Journal of Plastic Surgery, Two physicians reported in 1967 on a landmark study of e...

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

Many of life’s annoyances just have to be ignored. That doesn’t mean that we suppress, ignore, or deny every pain. Serious pain has to be confronted. But one mark of resilience is learning to tell whi...

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity. Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

I have tried to serve God faithfully all my life. Though I have not been perfect, I have tried to passionately follow Him. And now this God whom I have been following has given me this disease because...

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

Heavenly Father: You know all about us – our weakness, our failing, our sin; And you still love us enough to give your Son to redeem us. Hear the cries of our hearts today. There’s someone for who...

If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

One of the challenges, at least in the western church, is an inability to deal with our wounds in a healthy way. Our training as Christians has been focused on Bible studies, small groups, and Sunday ...

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Healing begins when, in the face of our own darkness, we recognize our helplessness and surrender our need for control… we face what is, and we ask for mercy.