Mental Health

Great News: Great Joy!

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I had an opportunity to bring the sermon this past Sunday morning at my home church, Tennison Memorial United Methodist Church of Mount Pleasant, Tx. The recording is available below, followed by a transcript if you prefer to read rather than listen.

Automated Transcript Below:
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Today’s scripture reading is from the letter that Paul wrote to the Galatians (chapter 5, verses 22 through 26). By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There’s no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the spirit, let us also be guided by the spirit. And let us not become conceited competing against one another and envying one another.

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. 

“Joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to remake the distressing into the desired, the discarded into the creative. Joy is prayer. Joy is strength. Joy is love. Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.” -Mother Teresa.

I have always struggled with joy. So when the DS asked me to fill the pulpit, one Sunday during Advent this year, I was looking forward to doing the love Sunday. 

Love comes much easier to me. I can preach about love all day long. Imagine my dismay when I realized that I had agreed to preach the joy Sunday instead! Joy and I are not exactly besties; we’re more like distant family members. We exchange hugs every few years and then we go our separate ways. It’s not that I dislike joy. It’s just that it’s so hard to recognize her when she shows up.

Growing up, I had a misunderstanding of the application of the passage, of Galatians 5 in general. To me, this just looked like a bulleted list of all the ways that I was absolutely not the spirit-filled reflection of Christ that I was supposed to be. 

So starting at the top, working to the bottom, these were the things I needed to produce in myself in order to grow in my faith and relationship with the Lord, things that I would need to produce in myself in order to be a good valuable member of the human race. 

But Galatians 5, just like all scripture, does not exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a whole message and it ought to be considered in that context. So let’s go back, and for the sake of time, I’m not going to read the first five chapters of Galatians to you. (But you should.) And you’ll also be pleased to know that even though I was raised Baptist, I have edited my sermon down from seven pages to four and a half. So there’s not going to be any danger of whether or not you can beat the Baptists to lunch.

So if you have brought your bible, please feel free to follow along. 

The letter was written by hand and it was carried to various churches out throughout Galatia, and like all letters, it’s going to start with an address. And then remembering that the letter didn’t have verse numbers back in AD 55, we move past the greeting of the letter into the body into verse 6. 

So right out of the gate, Paul skips his usual glowing accolades about their behavior and he jumps straight to chastising them, and this is not his normal formula. Normally Paul spends quite a bit of time giving the church a compliment sandwich: here’s some great things you’ve done, here’s some gentle criticism, here’s some encouragement and a few more compliments to finish up. Instead, right after the greeting, this is what we hear:

“I’m amazed that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ to follow another gospel. It’s not really another gospel but certain people are confusing you and they want to change the gospel of Christ. “

That that’s a pretty harsh accusation. So what does Paul say that they’re changing to? And he doesn’t get to that right away, he spends the next several paragraphs backtracking to provide a little bit of personal history. Who is he? Who was he? What did he do in his previous life, where he was this militant enforcer of the letter of the Jewish law? 

And then he was dramatically converted by the risen Christ and ordered to preach to the Gentiles. Not the Jews. 17 years after his conversion, Paul explains to the apostles in Jerusalem what he’s been preaching to the Gentiles, the uncircumcised people. The apostles who’ve been preaching to the circumcised people agree with what he’s been preaching. Everything looks great; they send him off. But then Peter, one of the apostles who’s been preaching in Jerusalem, visits Paul in Antioch, and Paul has a serious problem with him. It turns out Peter has been hanging out with gentile believers until his old circumcised friends show up, and scripture even says that he carries off several of the other apostles with him in his hypocrisy.

And Paul wasn’t having any of it. He lit into him. So, starting in verse 14, Paul tells Peter to his face, “If you though, you’re a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew, how can you require the gentiles to live like Jews?” And then he says, to the Galatians, “we’re born Jews! We’re not gentile sinners. However, we know that a person isn’t made righteous by the works of the law, but rather through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.”

So there it is; this is the whole point of the letter that he’s getting to. Paul found out that the Galatians are doing the exact same kind of nonsense that he’s been seeing happening in other places:

Trying to add to the grace of God by piling extra works on top of it.

And when you listen to what he says next, you’re going to understand why the way that I previously understood Galatians 5 was so damaging. He said,

“I don’t ignore the grace of God, because if we become righteous through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. You irrational Galatians who put a spell on you? Jesus Christ was put on display as crucified before your eyes. I just want to know this from you: did you receive this spirit by doing the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so irrational? After you started with the spirit of you, now, finishing up with your own human effort? Did you experience so much for nothing?”

How many times are we just as guilty as the Galatians, of adding our own little rules on top of grace? Wear this, don’t wear that. Eat this, but don’t eat that, and pray this way, but don’t pray that way — and cut your hair, but good gosh! Not like that!

And we’re reminded in chapter 3 verse, 28, that there is no longer Jew, or Greek, or slave, or free, or male, or female, but we divide ourselves up by race and class and gender and everything else we can think of, and we are just so interested in what we can do that we forget about who Christ is and where we’re all going.

My old friend JJ Jordan, before he passed away, he used to preach that if all of scripture is going in one direction, and you find one verse that sticks up, that seems to point in another direction, chances are you’re the one that’s wrong. 

So if Galatians 5 is not supposed to be this bundle of tasks that is to be completed, then how are we supposed to interpret it? How exactly am I supposed to bear this fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, and all the rest. Let’s consider the lilies of the field like Jesus said. 

A farmer who plants a tomato seed does not expect apples. And despite his best efforts, a farmer cannot force the seed to do anything at all. He may cultivate the soil to loosen the hard clay. He might fertilize the soil, he might change the fertilizer, right? Because one plant needs more nitrogen and one plant needs more calcium. 

And it’s just the same with the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit that is produced in us by the Spirit is through no works of our own. No amount of effort or stubborn determination or calendar planning. (laughter) is going to create in us this fruit of joy. There’s no feat of strength that will produce love, or generosity for that matter. 

So what are we supposed to? Just throw our hands up in the air and say “oh just let it do what every it wants to do”? No.

Let’s look at this, another way. A tomato vine: if it’s not trained, it runs all along the ground. Right? And the fruit can rot because it’s sitting right on the ground. 

But if you try to train the tomato plant at the wrong time, what’s going to happen it? The branch snaps right off in your hand, right? Because you didn’t train it early enough. Now, let’s imagine instead of a tomato, we have a human child. Like, one of my kids. 

A child that’s untrained is going to run around, just the same as an untrained tomato. And if we just wait around until we see that there’s this undesirable pattern, we may end up with a broken child. We can’t force the child to grow, right?

We can provide them with stability. We can remove barriers that are preventing them from growing. We can treat them according to their temperaments and to their talents and we can support them in the ways that they’re the weakest. Adults are no different. Children are born persons, just like Charlotte Mason said.

We’re just children in big bodies. 

The fruit that is produced in us by the Spirit cannot be brought about by any work of our own. The fruit that is produced in us by the Spirit is produced by the Spirit of God himself through the miraculous mechanics of His grace. If we want to produce more fruit, we don’t add more weight to the branches. We can cultivate the environment for the best growth, and the fruit will produce itself.

And because I have always detested a sermon in which I was always told what I was doing wrong and never how to do it right, here are some things that we can do, today, right now, to begin to cultivate the kind of soil that the fruit of the Spirit can grow in easily and abundantly, produce and reproduce.

If you want to see more joy, encourage it first by no longer comparing how happy you are to how happy everyone else around you seems. Theodore Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy, and I think he was on to something. Study after study has shown a direct correlation between how much time we spend scrolling on our news feeds and how miserable we feel afterward. And after seeing perfectly crafted images in magazines on tv, on Facebook, on Instagram and even in our own friends living rooms, our own little Christmas tree seems much smaller and more humble. And a child who is delighted by the offer of a bowl of ice cream might become dismayed when they start examining the contents of their neighbor’s bowl. Just like verse 26 in the text points out, let us not become conceited, competing against one another and envying one another. 

So as I often tell my children, “hey Bethany, When’s the only time we look at our neighbor’s bowl?” (To see if they have enough.) That’s right, to see if they have enough.

And that brings us to the next point: generosity is more than just a fruit of the Spirit that’s produced within us. It’s also a healing medicine. My husband’s grandmother, who happens to be a retired, professional counselor with a doctorate, she told me this: she said when you’re in an unbearable funk and there’s nothing to be done, nothing to be done about your own situation but move forward, turn your gaze outward. Right? Turn your gaze outward and reach out to a friend or a neighbor.

I have an alphabet soup of anxiety disorders that comes from the kind of history that just doesn’t really suit a sermon about producing fruit and joyfulness. And if you want to hear that kind of history, I’ve got a recording somewhere that you’re welcome to hear about. But until then, please trust me when I say that I am anxious a whole lot more than I am joyful. And my favorite thing to do, when I’m anxious, is to text someone else that’s going through a hard time and check in on them, or surprise a friend with a small gift: a cold drink, dessert that I happen to have a coupon for, a card that made me think of them. It doesn’t take a fortune to be generous. Some of the most generous gifts that I have received have been from friends who had as little or less than we did. 

When Charlie and I first got married, we were invited over several times a week to join one of the church families for dinner, and they were some of the few people that were kind of like close to our own age, and it was their absolute delight to invite us over. They called it “sharing their nothing” with us. And it was so much more than nothing.

So there’s this ancient Jewish parable that has since made its way throughout the world into many cultures, and it’s got many iterations. And it’s this, there’s this vision of paradise and hell and in which there are two identical banquet tables. And they are filled with diners and they’re all seated and the tables are full of this huge feast, and the only handicap that these people have is really long spoons. They’ve got really long spoons. And in paradise, all of the people are happy and well fed and they’re kind to one another and they’re just chatting away. 

And you look, and the people in hell are just withered and they’re cranky and they’re thin. And the only difference between the people that are in paradise and the people are in hell, is that the people in heaven, have already learned how to feed each other. And the people in hell are still thinking about themselves. 

Besides the instruction in the text to avoid comparison and seek generosity, there’s plenty of other ways to cultivate opportunities to be surprised by joy. There’s no need to chase after joy. Again, we do not produce joy through some active sheer determination, as much as I would like to try. We were created to experience joy, and the joy is there waiting for us to notice.

We can spend time in green places in nature. We can sing loudly, alone, and in groups, you can join the choir. Just saying, if the pew fits, you know. We can share a meal with a friend. We can volunteer our time serving others. These are all rooted in scripture and in science as conduits of joy, peace, and spiritual healing.

There’s even a style of meditation. It’s called mindfulness meditation, and it’s the discipline of observation. In the 1600s Brother Lawrence called this, The Practice of the Presence of God. It’s this state of drawing your attention back. Drawing your attention back to this moment that you’re in. Right now. Just like a small child experiences complete delight at every turn, just from the joy of being alive. Have you ever heard a baby laugh? They’re really easy to get to laugh. They’re easily amused. Everything is delightful because it’s brand new. Mindfulness, practice allows us to just simply be in a non-judgmental form and observe life as it’s happening. One moment at a time, the beauty of this sunset. The taste of this bite of pie. CS Lewis highlights this in his book, The Screwtape Letters, where the protagonist attempts to distract his patient, the Christian, from the simple joys of life that might remind him of his faith. 

In fact, CS Lewis said “we are mirrors, whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.” The lightness in our life was never dependent on us.

The joy of Christmas looks forward to Easter. It’s the other half of this pair of bookends that represent the Creator’s mortal time and visibility on this planet. It represents both our own mortality, and the blessed hope that we have in him: that our mortality will be raised in immortality. It is a beginning without an ending.

During Lent, we prepare our hearts to Good Friday and Easter down the path of mourning. We open our observation to the griefs and sorrows endured by Christ. So during Advent, let us open our eyes to the possibility of joy, preparing our hearts to rejoice in the audacity that is the incarnation. A creator who pursues us and delights in us as though we were each his individual favorite and favored child. 

Let me end with a final example. I have a dear friend. We’ve been friends since eighth grade. He was telling me about an evening that he spent recently playing Lego with his toddler, while his wife sat on the couch with their newborn baby, He said he was suddenly overcome with the sense of gratitude and awe of his little family that he was nearly in tears. And then of course the moment passes, right? The baby cries, the toddler needs bedtime. But the moment was there, waiting to be observed. And this is great news. Because it means the joy that you’ve been searching for has been there this whole time. 

Good to Eat: How I Said “Goodbye” to Anorexia and “Hello” to Cheese

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This piece is a wonderfully written perspective on disordered eating.

Emily Stimpson Chapman

I was all set to write a fun, breezy little post about one of my favorite things in the universe—wine—when the Great Hive Mind informed me that this is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Thanks, Facebook. Now I feel guilty writing about wine.

Because I don’t do things I feel guilty about—or, at least, I try not to do them—the wine post is on hold. Instead, I’m going to share a few thoughts about how I walked away from anorexia for good 14 years ago.

For those of you not familiar with the disease, the prognosis for those battling eating disorders isn’t exactly rosy. While most people who struggle with anorexia get somewhat better, few get all better. The majority spend their lives waffling on the edge of a relapse. Many fall right off that edge.

But me? You couldn’t drag me back to that edge with a thousand horses…

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What is Stress?

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Hans Selye, the pioneering endocrinologist who first coined the word ‘stress’, defined it as the amount of energy spent by the body when adapting to a change in its environment. He ultimately gave the official term ‘general adaptation syndrome’, and was the forerunner into research of our bodies’ response toward change, both physical and non-physical.

This is just one of the many things we learned today during the class on How to Hang Loose in an Uptight World. Contact me if you would like to learn more about stress, its effect on the body, and how you can combat it, as well as how you can support your body during times of stress and facilitate the healing process.

I also highly recommend Elizabeth Baker’s book, How to Hang Loose in an Uptight World to everyone, whether they think they are stressed or not. It is available through Amazon.com in both paperback and ebook format.

What is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?

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The best illustration I ever received in describing the physical nature of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) was from Elizabeth Baker, who happens to be my dear grandmother-in-law as well as a valued mentor and teacher.

She described the human mind as a fishing net through which thoughts pass; thoughts were represented as varying degrees of gravel, sand, etc. Sand represents fleeting thoughts. Then you have pea gravel, small rocks, large rocks, and ultimately boulders. In a normally functioning mind, only the boulders get really “stuck” and need help being removed.

Then she described the OCD mind very succinctly: the net is too tight.

What a fantastic illustration! Having a spiritual nature, all humans must at some point battle removing the obstacles of the mind; Christians in particular have a pressing motivation for removing the objects that we don’t want to keep. Now, imagine for a moment that a Christian has OCD. Without divine intervention, the mesh in the defective net isn’t going to get enlarged; however, we still need to work spiritually at removing the obstacles, right?

The problem arises because so much more gets caught in the mind of an OCD believer. As Christians, we know that we have become a new creature in Christ, and as such, we are much disturbed by the things that are getting caught in our nets. The enemy fights dirty! He attacks us where we are weakest. For an OCD believer, the assaults of the evil one are particularly painful because not only can we not control the obsessions or compulsions that enter our mind, but we become distressed by the fact that we cannot rid ourselves of them. No amount of logic will deter the obsessions held in an OCD mind; we are fully aware that our obsessions are irrational.

For the believer, this is most distressing. We are admonished by scripture to cast our cares upon the Lord, and here we are: held in helpless captivity by our cares. This, of course, is precisely what the enemy wants. Not only can he attack us by causing us to be anxious, even limiting our ability to function at times, but now he is provided with an almost limitless source of shame with which to taunt us.

At one point in my battle against OCD, it was liberating to recognize that my OCD and the resulting exacerbation of my panic attacks (the body’s response to an adrenaline switch stuck in the “ON” position) was, in a great way, the product of my fallible human body. When I became able to separate my OCD from my panic attacks, and furthermore the physical aspect of my OCD from the spiritual aspect of the fears that were getting stuck in the first place, I felt as though the battle had been won.

However, this stage in my spiritual walk is completely different. This new frontal assault on my OCD, I feel, has been a direct result of the building up of spiritual strongholds. I allowed myself to become spiritually parched — unwatered, and unfed. I nurtured tiny sins that blossomed into full grown trees of spiritual captivity. By not being vigilant, I had opened myself up for spiritual attack. In my position of weakness, my faith became the perfect target, and my OCD the perfect vehicle to carry the fiery darts.

Now every day, every moment, is a fight. Every day the Lord is opening my eyes to areas of my spiritual hedge that I have allowed to become weak, areas of my life that I have allowed to stagnate or even fester. Every moment is an act of pure will to survive, to recover the spoils that the enemy has claimed. I am hanging onto the Lord in a way that I would never have imagined — when, as C.S. Lewis said, I look all around me to discover all traces of the Lord’s presence gone from me, and still choose to obey Him. This month has been a moment by moment battle in sweat and grit and tears, a focusing of my mind like a laser in order to allow no room for the OCD.

There’s where the clincher comes in: my physical body, and its weakness, are affecting my spiritual walk. I made a difficult decision today — I allowed the provision for an escape valve.

Those of you who know me personally know that I have a personal aversion to psychotropic medications. In fact, I rather dislike any pharmaceutical medication. Of course I recognize their uses and vital necessity in the saving of many lives, but I also hate to use them myself. It’s a personal opinion, perhaps weakness, of mine. So, even the consideration of having an escape valve in the form of a pill was abhorrent to me.

I wrestled back and forth with it. In taking something in the heat of a debilitating panic attack, would I simply be ignoring my mind? Would I be avoiding a spiritual battle that needed to be sweated out? Or was my avoidance of medication ruining my ability to function so that I could not move ahead spiritually?

The biggest obstacle in this phase of my battle has been “trying to figure it out.” I want to rationalize it, label it, box it in, and squish it. I want to gain peace by understanding, and understanding by the work of logic. I am fighting against the Holy Spirit with the concept that I cannot, will not ever be able to, have no hope of ever answering the riddles that plague me. Worst of all, I recognize that the faith that will quench these fiery darts is not something that I can work up within myself, or just try harder to obtain and thereby succeed.

It was then that I came to my conclusion. By allowing myself an escape valve, it was an act of proclamation. It was, in a sense, my decree that when, after fighting and sweating and doing all that is within me to battle against my OCD, it becomes a giant so huge that it starts to take over my body, and I begin to panic so that I cannot think, cannot breathe, cannot function, and feel that I cannot live, that I have the choice to say this:

“I have a disease. This disease causes me to be weak. You are attacking my weakness. I am tired of wrestling with you. I am tired of trying to rationalize you and figure you out. I don’t care if you’re right or not. You can be right. I am going to exercise my faith based on God’s word, not how I feel or how I cannot rationalize or understand. Therefore, I am choosing not to listen to you any more. By the grace of God, you can be right all you want to — I’m not listening to you any more. I’m going to rest now.”

I have not yet had to take the medicine, which is a very mild, non-habit-forming sedative prescribed to me by a trusted physician who is a mature believer in Christ. Just knowing that I have the the “out” has been enough. It is my own weapon, as if to say, “Fine. Go ahead. Taunt me. But just know this: you aren’t going to win.”

Do I think the battle is over? With a certainty, NO. Not even close. But for this day I have been given strength — and that is all that has ever been needed.

Zoloft – My Personal Experience

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Disclaimer: Do I think that all pharmaceutical medications are bad? No. Do I think that all psychotropic medications are bad? No. Am I personally recommending that no one in the whole entire world take Zoloft? NO. I am sharing this experience so that people can realize that not every medicine is perfect for every person, and not every problem has a “magic bullet.”

After experiencing 6 months of persistent chronic depression symptoms, and knowing that I have a personal history of difficulty in this area, I decided to bite the bullet. Anyone who knows me knows that I hesitate to take any medication at all, preferring to “tough it out” or use more natural, gentle methods to help the body do its job naturally. However, after about a month of intense depressive symptoms that left me drained, I decided to talk to my doctor about a “safe” mood stabilizer for pregnancy.

I was immediately recommended Zoloft™, which is the brand name for sertraline hydrochloride, a popular SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). **See notes below on SSRI function**. I was hesitant to make a commitment right away; honestly, I was expecting her to say, “No, there isn’t anything safe to take during pregnancy.” I called a trusted friend, a former licensed counselor, for advice on the subject. She initially recommended that I avoid the medication, and try behavioral therapy first. She did agree, however, that there was a good chance that the medication would make a temporary solution to make my symptoms more bearable until I could address the underlying issues causing the imbalance.

I also did some private research on Zoloft™, but only in the realm of pregnancy and breastfeeding. Previous experience with SSRIs told me that there would be a time period of adjustment to the medication, just as with any medicine, in which I might experience digestive upsets, drowsiness or insomnia, etc. The red flag that went up for me is that when Zoloft™ is taken during the last trimester of pregnancy, it increases the risk for pulmonary problems in the infant. That makes sense; the last trimester is when the lungs are forming, branching out the bronchi and forming the complex system that brings life-giving oxygen to the blood. So naturally, I called my nurse back to express this concern.

She assured me that in the 10 or so years she had been practicing, she had never seen pulmonary problems in the infants of mothers who took Zoloft™ during the third trimester. Because the only research I had done was in respect to pregnancy and breastfeeding, this assurance was enough to persuade me to put aside my personal fear of pharmaceutical medications and try the Zoloft™ in hopes of alleviating the depressive symptoms long enough to think clearly and address the underlying issues.

The first day wasn’t so bad. About three hours after I took the medication, I had some nausea and lost my appetite, but for the first day on a new medication, I expected it. The second day, the side effects progressed. I started experiencing anxiety symptoms; since I have a problem with anxiety disorder and OCD, this didn’t really throw up any flags. I had auditory hallucinations when trying to sleep at nap time, which I informed my husband of in case it became a recurring issue. By evening, I was so nauseated that I sat at the table and watched my family eat dinner – something I haven’t done since my first pregnancy.

Day Three: I spent some time in my favorite health food store browsing before an appointment across town, and while perusing the foodie section, I came across a bright orange flyer on SSRIs. It was warning about the use of SSRIs in children, but particularly it cited statistics that Zoloft™ was shown to be effective in the treatment of OCD in children at a rate of 59%, 10% more than the placebo sugar pill. 10% more than a sugar pill? Only 59% effective? How strange! The wheels started to turn in my mind, but aside from the concern that I might be enduring all the nausea and hot flashes for nothing, it didn’t change anything. Again, starting three hours from taking the medication, I started experiencing untoward symptoms. I was eating lunch with my husband and children at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants. Suddenly, I was so overcome with nausea that I was unable to eat my lunch, or even to chew it. The taste became as cardboard in my mouth, and I mechanically chewed as much of my meal as I could bear. I boxed half of it to take home. During the course of the meal, however, I started feeling very “loopy” and confused. I would turn my head and it seemed that it took my mind a long, slow time to adjust to the movement. My food didn’t quite look right on the plate. I stared off into space, and realized that I wasn’t hearing my children talking to me. I expressed my concern to my husband about driving home with the children; he just advised me to “push through it.” This agitated me; I was being acted upon by an outside chemical force. How does one push through that?!? I knew he was right about one thing, though – I had to get home. I don’t remember much of the rest of that day. I tried to finish my lunch later in the afternoon and was uncertain whether I could keep it down. The excessive salivation and nausea was enough that I was sure I couldn’t make it to a safe place to vomit if the time came. Thankfully I was able to bear through it.

The true realization came on the night of day three, however. Insomnia was at its worst – when you’re exhausted, long for sleep, and yet the sleep doesn’t come. I wasn’t even able to attempt sleep until at least 2-3 AM, 2 hours past my usual ritual relaxation stage. I tried to lie down, and then I was wracked with the most excruciating panic attack I’ve had in years. About 3:30, I woke my husband, begging for help. I couldn’t quite articulate what I needed, and bless him, in his sleepy state he isn’t the most patient of people. “Think of something else!” he says. Think of something else… I couldn’t think of anything else to think of!! But he was half-asleep, so it was excusable. He suggested taking a barefoot walk around the backyard, feeling the cool wetness of the grass on my feet. I stumbled around the yard, crying and praying and begging for help. When I returned to the house, I vacillated between stumbling blindly around the house and kneeling on the floor, rocking back and forth. It was hideous. This lasted until at least 4:30 in the morning, when stumbling to the bathroom for about the 15th time (hooray pregnancy), I had the presence of mind to pray that the Lord would bind the demons that were using my physical weakness to torment my mind, that He would cast them out of my house, and that He would raise up a shield of protection over myself and my family. I stumbled back to the bed, falling into a fitful, exhausted sleep. I woke about every twenty minutes for several more hours. I had hot and cold flashes, physical feelings of intense terror, sweats, and an uncontrollable obsessive thought pattern.

I woke on the morning of Day 4 to the immediate return of the obsessive, intrusive thoughts. I honestly don’t remember much of day 4; it was mostly just surviving. I took my medication faithfully at 9 AM. I thought for a while that perhaps I was finally adjusting to the medication, forgetting that my symptoms never surfaced until about three hours after consuming the pill. I spent some time in the early morning sun, pulling weeds from a seated position. I walked to the mailbox and back, and watched the dogs play. I tried everything I could think of to help ease my panic. Lunchtime hit, and by that point it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to eat that day, either. I began to suspect that the Zoloft™ was aggravating my OCD rather than helping it, and looked up the drug information on Zoloft™ on http://www.drugs.com. Here is what I found:

“Call your doctor at once if you have any new or worsening symptoms such as: mood or behavior changes, anxiety, panic attacks, trouble sleeping, or if you feel impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless, hyperactive (mentally or physically), more depressed, or have thoughts about suicide or hurting yourself.”

Whaaaat? Zoloft™ is often prescribed FOR the treatment of OCD and other anxiety disorders. You mean it could make it worse? You’re kidding. I called my nurse up, and she assured me that the medication had not possibly been in my system long enough for the therapeutic effects to start working. I insisted that I thought I should at least give the medication a break for a few days, to see if my anxiety symptoms lessened. If they persisted or got worse, in spite of discontinuing the Zoloft™, I agreed to try something else to target the depression. She was very reluctant to agree to this, but I was adamant. I’m not going to pose risk to my unborn child for a medication that doesn’t work for my body.

The afternoon was terrible. I could barely function. I sat, curled up, on my front stoop, because it faces to the south and had direct, beating sunshine. I attempted to play with my dogs, barely able to concentrate even on the feeling of their fur beneath my fingers. I stayed on the porch there until the nausea from the added heat of the sun became unbearable. I called up my trusted friend again, telling her everything that had happened. She was surprised to find out that a medication commonly used in treating anxiety disorders actually had a warned side effect of increasing the anxiety instead of aiding it. We talked for a long time, and I was able to calm some. It helped to know that she not only believed me, she understood – at least, on an academic level – what I was going through. We discussed a few options to help with my underlying spiritual dryness and the return of my previously controlled OCD. I still felt terrible, but I felt as if a burden had been lifted. I had hope! I wasn’t imagining things. There was a genuine possibility that the medication WAS making me have these terrible intrusive thoughts. It’s not that the medication itself it bad; it’s that it is bad for me, for my body.

I went out with my husband and family again that evening; payday is usually grocery day. We went to a local Italian place in hopes of finding simple, digestible starches for me. Unfortunately I was only able to eat a few bites of my meal and a single piece of bread. The nausea and confusion were coming again in waves, making it difficult to concentrate on my husband’s face as he spoke. I somehow managed to make it through Wal-mart to get a few things, and then we began the drive back to Pittsburg to do our grocery shopping. I could hardly tolerate the ride home, the nausea was so pervasive. Then, about halfway through our shopping, my intrusive, obsessive thoughts came back. The nausea hit in another wave. The hot flashes returned. I pushed through, although I’m sure I forgot a few things that I’ll need to get this weekend. We went home, and I went straight to the phone to call my dear friend. I talked to her as I put away the groceries. She prayed for me, there on the phone, that I would have comfort to make it through the night. Even as I knew that this night would be a battle, I felt encouraged, and my obsessive thoughts began to recede. A warmth suffused my face, and my headache started to recede. I was able to function a little, buoyed up by the hope that on the morrow, I would NOT be taking the medication and would begin to see an improvement over my symptoms.

I paid bills. I listened to a favorite children’s radio program with my husband and son. I piddled about on the internet, and my anxiety stayed at manageable levels. I headed to bed around 12:30, in spite of the rising panic and obsessive thoughts. I knelt and prayed a short prayer – that the Lord would bind the demons tormenting my mind, and that I might rest. I woke about every twenty minutes to repeat this exercise: toilet, stumble to bed, pray, fall into bed, sleep fitfully, wake. Finally, I gave in. Around 3:30, I prayed that if the Lord wanted me to endure this terrible mess, so be it. I would bear it, if only He would give me the courage, and would bind the obsessive thoughts. I slept in as little as possible, the hot flashes and sweating waking me up and keeping me uncomfortable. My son woke screaming with a bloody nose, and I cleaned him up, and brought him to bed with us, wrapping my arms around his tiny body. I prayed again that the Lord would help me to bear the burden He had chosen for me, and I finally slept.

At some point on day 4, I happened to scroll down the rest of the page at http://www.drugs.com, and here is what I found:

“Call your doctor at once if you have any new or worsening symptoms such as: mood or behavior changes, anxiety, panic attacks, trouble sleeping, or if you feel impulsive, irritable, agitated, hostile, aggressive, restless, hyperactive (mentally or physically), more depressed, or have thoughts about suicide or hurting yourself.

Call your doctor at once if you have any of these serious side effects:

· very stiff (rigid) muscles, high fever, sweating, fast or uneven heartbeats, tremors, overactive reflexes;

· nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of appetite, feeling unsteady, loss of coordination; or

· headache, trouble concentrating, memory problems, weakness, confusion, hallucinations, fainting, seizure, shallow breathing or breathing that stops.

Less serious Zoloft side effects may include:

· drowsiness, dizziness, tired feeling;

· mild nausea, stomach pain, upset stomach, constipation;

· dry mouth;

· changes in appetite or weight;

· sleep problems (insomnia); or

· decreased sex drive, impotence, or difficulty having an orgasm.”

(Excerpted from http://www.drugs.com/zoloft.html, emphasis mine)

It was then that I realized that there was no way I could have been imagining the symptoms; I didn’t even read this list until after I had already called my nurse to inform her of my decision to discontinue the medication.

Today is day 5. Slowly over the course of the day, my OCD has lessened to a background irritation, like the buzzing of a fly. I am able to think more clearly, and my appetite is very slowly returning. I have lost three and a half pounds over the course of these few days, bringing me back down below my conception weight. As my mind clears, shaking off the vestiges of the medication, it is becoming more apparent that my gut feeling was right – that this medication, although it may help others, is not for me.

I was really hoping that I would be better by the end of the evening, but the night time symptoms are returning. Granted, they are twenty bajillion times better than they were yesterday, but they are still there. My husband thinks it will be a few days before my system will completely purge itself of the effects. I was sure hoping for a better night’s sleep though.

**SSRI – what is an SSRI? An SSRI is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It functions by slowing your body’s ability to reabsorb the chemical serotonin in your brain, thereby leaving more serotonin available for use.**

Warning from the Mayo Clinic on serotonin syndrome:

“Serotonin syndrome requires immediate medical treatment. Signs and symptoms include:

Confusion

Restlessness

Hallucinations

Extreme agitation

Fluctuations in blood pressure

Increased heart rate

Nausea and vomiting

Fever

Seizures

Coma”