Darkness Is My Only Companion Quotes

“I learned that we must always pray, even and especially when we don’t feel like it or when it feels compulsory and rote and dry.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Of course, to speak of the dark night of the soul is anathema to many in the psychiatric field. I was told by one of my psychiatrists over the years not to equate depression with any religious experience such as the dark night of the soul. I never asked him why; I just assumed that he didn't want religious language to be mixed with medical. I did try to tell him, however, that religious language covers all and every aspect of being, that I could not simply separate it from his profession's language and concepts. He looked disgusted.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness hurt.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying—or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity—but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“It is not like cancer, where there is hope at least of cutting out afflicted parts of the body in hopes of eradicating the disease. In mental illnesses, the symptoms plague the whole body and mind equally. I am not necessarily sad when I am depressed. I am not necessarily “down.” Sometimes I just have a gnawing, overwhelming sense of grief, with no identifiable cause. I grieve as though my loved ones were dead. I imagine their funerals. I feel completely alone and isolated.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Sleeping, while I am sleeping, if I can sleep, helps as an escape. Tasks, busyness, gardening, tidying up: distractions. Mustn’t think, mustn’t be conscious, mustn’t reflect. This escape from consciousness is at the heart of suicidal energy. It is not wanting to hurt the self. It is simply wanting not to hurt. When I am depressed, it seems that the only way not to hurt is to cease being a center of consciousness.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Suffering is not eliminated by the resurrection but transformed by it.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off, pull out of it, or slow down mentally. While God certainly can pick up the pieces and put them together in a new way, this can happen only if the depressed brain makes it through an episode to see again life among the living.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“The three cords to my rope were the religious (worship and prayer), the psychological (psychotherapy), and the physical (medical treatments, hospitalization, and exercise).”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off, pull out of it, or slow down mentally.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“The nature of mental illness is to remove one from the normal constraints, perceptions, and understandings of the world around, whatever one’s rational self may say. It is not merely a question of feeling but of the world being a different sort of place in all one’s perceptions. The struggle this brings, and with the struggle the disassociation from those around one, is profound and utterly overwhelming.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Prayer is more than merely thinking of someone, even though it does involve thought. My point here is that I believe in the efficacy of prayer, in God’s pleasure at hearing our desires and needs and in providing for that which we seek in prayer. That many people were knocking on God’s door for me strengthened me in my putting up with the disease and sped the healing, even though the full healing was not an immediate reality. Maybe a degree of healing would never have come if people had not been praying.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Children need communication at times even as horrible as these, but it must be judicious communication. Do not mention suicidal thoughts or gestures. Just something simple. “Mommy is sick. She is very sad. She needs to go to the hospital. She will get better and be home soon. The doctors will take good care of her.” Even telling children that “Mommy has a brain disorder” is better than saying nothing, or than saying that her heart hurts.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“Yet human love, such as that of my husband, can certainly be a conduit for divine love, even for those who do not recognize love’s true source. If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that is promised to pull us through, a love that bears it out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we are, then the statement that love heals depression is in fact the only light that shines in the dark tunnel.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness

“But when one looks at the problem of mental illness from a completely secular perspective, Jamison’s implicit thesis (clearly meant to be hopeful and hope-filling) in fact can fill me with more despair than ever.”
― Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness