Michele Gyselinck

 No, I'm not involved in tha ministry although I do read  stories once in awhile and If I run across something that's relevant elsewhere I'll bring it to the attention of the administrators.  I'm a Regional Advocate for Disability Concerns, and I think that if you're sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities you can be sensitive to the needs of people who have been abused.  It's not that big.of a stretch of the imagination, but I find that getting actively involved in Safe church would require more energy than I can spare.

  As someone who became a Christian in the CRC at the age of 17,and who later made profession of faith in this denomination I find that those who advocate we throw out terms like Classis because they're too difficult for outsiders to grasp are underestimating our intelligence.  Like this debate about replacing Merry Christmas with Happy Holidays supposedly because it offends immigrants is hooey. Most of the time, it isn't immigrants who want this but unbelievers whose ancestors have been here for generations, and who grew up in the church but later gave up the faith.  They're the ones who want to throw everything associated with  Christianity out the window, not immigrants who'd rather we use our own holiday terms because they feel more free to use theirs then.

Sometimes I have a feeling that some people in the CRC are embarrassed about the cultural origins of the denomination and project that onto outsiders.  If you have a problem with your cultural origins, that is your problem not ours.

 No, I'm well aware that not all people with schizophrenia are not as self-aware as I am.  I believe that God allowed me to have the illness severely enough to know what I'm talking about, yet light enough to be able to speak on behalf of those who can't speak for themselves.  When I subscribed to Schizophrenia Digest as it was known then, one of the columnists and regular contributors, a professor of Psychology whose own brother had schizophrenia often wrote about anosognosia, a term borrowed from neurology to describe patients who had had a stroke but were not aware that the stroke had impaired their cognitive abilities.  The term in psychiatry is applied to patients who do not know because of their illness that the voices they hear or other symptoms they have are caused by their illness.  Such is the extent to which a brain can go awry when it's affected by schizophrenia.  

Of course, when people do realize that they're ill, they don't take their meds, and the cumulative effect of psychoses on the brain is deleterious.  Very often those patients will have paranoia among their symptoms, which means they think that people want to harm them, and they believe the meds are intended to poison them, so after a stay in the psychiatric ward, they will agree to take their meds but not bother to refill the prescription or stop taking the pills once they're back home.  That's why long-injectables are prescribed in such cases.  The patients receive injections of anti-psychotics that are released gradually in their body over a month's duration.  But even that is not fool-proof because the patient may not show up for appointments to receive the injections.

  It would probably not hurt because even among people living with mental illnesses there are varying degrees of severity.  For example, some people who have schizophrenia are able to work full time and juggle family life as well while others cannot function alone, and I'm somewhere in between.  But I wouldn't want this spectrum thing to be an excuse for trivializing what people with severe forms of mental illnesses endure as I discussed in my blog titled,"On Chronically Normal People."

Glad to hear it,Terry.  Helping people like Jack and others with mental illnesses gives meaning to what I endured back then.  Now that I'm no longer in pain I can see what they're going through with perspective.  It seems that my post has helped even people who don't have a mental illness.  Which is great too.

Glad to hear it,Terry.  Helping people like Jack and others with mental illnesses gives meaning to what I endured back then.  Now that I'm no longer in pain I can see what they're going through with perspective.  It seems that my post has helped even people who don't have a mental illness.  Which is great too.