Mental Illness and a Life of Struggle

We encounter a great variety of people here on the BaptistBoard, some are here to reach out for help.
Some of those that reach out know they have a mental illness, others desperately claw for answers to problems they don’t understand.

John Andrew Bryant has written a book about his struggles with mental illness called, A Quiet Mind To Suffer With, mental illness, trauma, and the death of Christ (Lexham Press, 2024. 291pp).

There have been many books written about mental illness. Reading them helps me understand, empathize, and interact with those that are affected. Bryant’s book differs from all the others because it incorporates a glimmer of hope through the labor of the constant struggle.

The opening paragraph takes on a poetry of affliction and suffering often expressed in the Psalms.

“My thoughts are gems and bastards, but it’s a stretch to say they’re mine. With thoughts this vivid, uncontrolled, and catastrophic, I am rather, it seems, at their mercy. If they are mine, they are only mine in this way: that I am the one they are happening to. I am the one who has to see them.”​

Bryant’s book is dark, brooding, frighteningly stark and brutal, but it is not without hope. He reaches out to the only one we can really depend upon, our Savior, the Christ.

Everyone has times when things didn’t work out, where we failed, where we turned our back to the Way.
This is the story of one man’s struggles. It is not a how-to book with a happy ending, but it tells of one persons path through a lifetime of trouble…
And how Christ walked with him through the long way.

Rob