Disability Concerns
I watched the videos about Mental Illness and the Church until the wee hours last night and only stopped because my computer was making a weird noise. Anyway. Very good videos.
Everybody belongs. Everybody serves.
I watched the videos about Mental Illness and the Church until the wee hours last night and only stopped because my computer was making a weird noise. Anyway. Very good videos.
Michèle used to write poetry while living in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Now she mostly paints in Montreal.
Mountains. Walls of rock everywhere. Grey, brown, black or blue. Close up or far away. Every time I set out to paint the landscape of my mind. Mountains crop up...
The media compound problems by reporting in minute detail whenever a person with a mental illness attacks someone who is presumed to be sane. The same media don't say a word when the opposite happens...
I think we should work harder at advocating a decent standard of living for people living with disabilities. Living in poverty places undue burdens on already vulnerable souls.
Many people in the CRC complain that our denomination tends to favor head knowledge at the expense of the heart. But for people who live with mental illnesses, basing our faith on knowledge acts as an anchor against raging emotions.
For a long time I struggled with the notion that as followers of Christ we should be glad to suffer, even if the troubles we get are not necessarily persecutions per se.
I wanted to share this book that was made available to participants of the Disability Concerns Leadership Training Conference last fall.
I hope that reading this will help people to better understand what schizophrenia is and how it affects those who suffer from it.
People try to pin the blame for egregious deeds onto people with mental illnesses or anyone with whom they can’t relate as humans, because this blaming distances them psychologically and emotionally from evil.
One question that came in challenged the judge’s ability to do his job because of his illnesses. This challenge is based on the assumption that mental illnesses affect an individual’s intelligence and judgment.
A few years ago my sister bought a board game titled Pandemic. Every time we played, we lost. We used to think we were doing something wrong. Now I think it's the nature of the beast.
This documentary shows how schizophrenia affects the individuals who suffer from the illness(es) and their entourage. I think watching the video speaks for itself.
In an episode of North Woods Law, Fish and Game wardens and volunteers carried a girl who had broken her ankle down a mountain in the rain. My roommate commented on the danger of hiking in the rain.
My main reason for writing about schizophrenia specifically, and mental illness in general, is to help those who may be suffering from it or who know someone who does, but don’t know how to help because of stigma.
God has allowed people to develop mental illnesses for the same reason some people have heart disease or cerebral palsy; it’s a consequence of original sin, and nothing they did.
As I read through the book Finding Jesus in the Storm, I come across parts that are emotionally difficult to deal with. They’re difficult because they make me angry.
For a congregation to show agility in accommodating their congregants with disabilities means they cannot continue to do things the way they always did.
Élise was a bright young woman who developed paranoid psychosis at roughly the same age as I did my schizophrenia—around mid-twenties to early thirties. The two illnesses are related. They are both psychotic.
Since his behavior was not normal, some people assumed that it must have been mental illness.
Many people who read my blogs know that I live with schizophrenia, and that on the whole I’m doing pretty well, but last night a number of factors caused me to feel angst about the current situation.
Many people assume that when we say a disease has a psychosomatic cause, it means the disease is imaginary. Not so.
Finding the right medications has taken decades for Michèle Gyselinck.
For me, traveling mostly involves managing motion sickness. Still, I count my blessings, because traveling for many others living with disabilities is much more complicated than it is for me.