Christians and Medication - Episode 32

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Welcome to Jen’s New Song.  My name is Jennifer Holmes and I’m so glad you’re here.  This is a podcast for the broken, the weary, the hurting, and the suffering.  Here we have honest conversations about mental health issues and we look at them all through the lens of God’s word.  A lot of people don’t realize the vastness of what the Bible has to say about depression, anxiety, doubt, fear, or relational issues.  The Bible is full of comfort and guidance for all of life’s problems, including the struggles of our minds and emotions.  

Each episode will have a short encouragement from me as we study God’s Word together, drawing on my own experience with mental illness and my continuing education in counselling, or we will have honest conversations with a guest.  

Whether it’s you who struggle, or you want to better understand how to minister to others, thank you for joining me today.  

Today we’re going to talk about my decision to go on medication for Bipolar and my experience with it so far. When I asked on Instagram if there was interest in hearing about this, I was surprised at the number of people who responded yes, so here we go!

One month ago I went to see my doctor.  Since being diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, I have seen him almost every three months, but that had been interrupted by the Covid situation.  I knew something had to change for me, so I gathered all the information I thought I would need and called for an appointment.

Years ago, I lived with debilitating body pain that no doctors were ever able to explain. I had given up on doctors and was instead working with a homeopath, a reflexologist, a chiropractor, and an osteopath. I tried it all, and they loved me and helped me all the way to where I barely experienced pain.  What a difference from the years I had spent on a rollercoaster of not knowing when the pain would sideline me for the day and I would end up propped up on the couch on the softest pillows I could find and try to run a household from that corner.

But these past few months, it was coming back. Years ago when the doctors wanted to send me to a psychiatrist, I thought it was just a hurtful dismissal of my symptoms, but now I can see that was probably what I really needed. 

With Bipolar II, there are two main issues - depression and hypomania. My depression has not been very difficult for about a year, but the hypomania has definitely been a problem. There are lots of things that come with hypomania, but the main issue for me is that my brain thinks I don’t need to sleep. I can easily function with energy on three to four hours of sleep. In fact, part of me knows that it’s not good for me, but part of me enjoys the fact that I can get so much done.

And this is okay when it’s just for a week or two.  But by November of this year, I had gone three months with only two days of more than four hours sleep. And it had been a fairly big issue for months before that. It was in November that I realized the pain in my body was because my lack of sleep was damaging it. Or at least, I’m pretty sure that’s it, I’m not a doctor.  I started getting migraines frequently and headaches every day. I struggled with that feeling of your body being dead tired and not wanting to go on, and yet my brain telling me that I could do all the things still, resulting in mood swings. In short, by November, I was a mess.

So I prepared for my doctor’s appointment, and looking at all the information myself, I wondered if it was time to go on medication for my bipolar. My counsellor and I had been working hard to keep me off medication, not because I was ashamed to go on it, but because of my aversion to the thought of being on a medication for anything for the rest of my life.

Sure enough, my doctor - who’s amazing by the way and I know I’m super blessed to have - spent the next forty minutes with me laying out my options and giving me his recommendation. For someone who has spent the past almost two years trying to get Christians to be comfortable with hard words, I still slightly recoiled when he said the words anti-psychotic. I mean, I knew deep down that where we were headed, but it still wasn’t the easiest to hear.

Let me jump ahead to the end of the story before I walk you through my process of deciding to take those anti-psychotics. It has been four weeks now, and I feel so much better. I have had two whole weeks now of sleeping at least six hours, mostly seven, sometimes eight. I can feel the pain receding, and I have only had one migraine in the past month. I am so glad that I listened to my doctor.

So, I wanted to walk you through some of my thought process in going on medication. Maybe it will help you in your own decisions, maybe it will help a friend you can pass this along to, or maybe it will help you to understand others more.

First, I believe that the brain needs physical care just as much as all the other parts of the body. Mental illness can be caused by imbalances in brain chemistry and my mental illness, bipolar, is not caused by a spiritual issue or a lifestyle issue. It’s a brain disorder. Christians have a history of believing that everything to do with the brain must be a spiritual or character issue and that is simply not the case or even logical. Our bodies and our brains live in a fallen world and we see the affects of that on both. If you’ve been around here any length of time, you know I love to talk about the story of Elijah. After the great triumph over the prophets of Baal, he ends up wanting to die the very next day. God’s first response is to take care of Elijah’s physical body with food and rest. God doesn’t condemn him for his depression or tell him to get over it. All throughout Scripture, we see how God cares for the bodies of people, even giving instructions on how to take care of certain diseases and ailments. The body is important to God, but we’ll save more thoughts on that for another time.

So if the brain can get sick just like another body part, it becomes much easier to decide to go on medication, just like we would for any other sickness. Before I decided on medication, I did other physical things to help my brain function better.  Exercise, Biblical meditation, breathing, sleep hygiene, and more, are all things I tried before medication, just like you would try exercise and diet for a lot of other physical ailments. But when they didn’t work, I didn’t feel wrong moving to the step of taking medication.

Secondly, I did not to decide to go on medication outside of getting help for myself in other ways also. I understand it can be hard to know where the mind, soul, and brain all begin and end. They are interconnected and there are a lot of things we can do to help the brain that don’t require medication. One of the reasons it took me two years to decide to try medication is that I also wanted to try everything else. I was very consistent with my counsellor (except for the three months I knew I was off the rails but didn’t want to hear it. I ended up with some suicidal ideation, so I went back and determined to never take that amount of time off again!). We worked together on a lot of ways to help me deal with my bipolar. He taught me a lot about sleep, how anxiety and depression work, and how to bring my faith into my healing as well. Through those two years I learned to mostly manage my anger, how to ask for help when needed, how to build the amazing friend community I have now, how to be vulnerable, how to recognize a downward spiral, and how to depend upon God for strength. The one thing we couldn’t fix was how to sleep. 

Those two years were invaluable. I don’t believe that I would be the same person I am today without those two years of counselling, and I intend to keep going.

Now, in saying that, I want you to hear me well. This does not mean that the right decision for you is to make yourself learn everything before you try medication. In fact, in some cases, it might be the opposite. You might be so depressed or suicidal that there is no way you could learn anything at the moment and you need medication to get you levelled out before you could even think about learning and growing. I was not struggling with deep depression over these two years - more of an up and down cycle - so I was able to do it in this order. But that is not what is best or even safe for others.

The point I want to make here is that we want to depend on more than medication to make us completely well. Whether you take meds at the beginning or after a while, or not at all, your faith, a good counsellor, and a strong community all work together with the meds to help you on your way back to good mental health. We cannot simply take a pill and expect good mental health as a result.

Thirdly, I want to address some of the fears of going on medication. One common fear is side effects. I hear this more with medication for the brain than for any other medication, and that might be because of stigma or it might be because of the unknowns. Yes, there can be side effects from the medication. Same as there might be side effects from every single other medication, including the tylenol or aspirin everyone takes without thinking about it. If I were to have side effects from these meds, I would just work with my doctor to try other meds or different dosages, the same way I would if I was diagnosed with any other disease. Side effects can happen, but for me, the way I was feeling was worse than any side effects that the meds would have produced. Thankfully, I have had zero side effects so far and I’m on such a low dose that my doctor does not expect I will have any. If side effects are what’s worrying you, please consider what you would think if it was diabetes or any other disease and see if it’s actually the side effects that are concerning you, or if it’s the stigma.

Another fear is that you won’t feel like yourself. We will often hear, I don’t want to be turned into a zombie. Can I just say, I haven’t felt this much like myself in years. When the meds started really working and the pain started leaving, the brain fog started leaving, and I felt very level, I was overjoyed to feel myself again. Meds are not made to take away your feelings or make you a zombie. They are to level you out so you can be you again. If you take meds and they make you feel like that, talk to your doctor to adjust the dose. The point of meds is not to make you feel nothing, no doctor is trying to eliminate your joy or even your sadness. They are just trying to help you see clearly through the darkness.

This is just a really quick snapshot of my thoughts on medication for mental illnesses and I’m not a doctor. But I wanted you to know that there is a Christian out there who will tell you that it’s okay, and that taking medication does not take away your faith. I really just want there to be open conversation on this topic among Christians so that we can erase some of the stigma for those who need some physical help.

Thanks for listening today. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or try to answer any questions you have - whether you’re listening or reading, you can message me through the website or on Instagram. I’ll message you back! Let me know how I can help you.

If you’d like to read more about this, I did a few posts on Instagram and I’d love for you to join me there - just search Jen’s New Song. Let’s continue the mental health and faith conversation.