The First Step in Recovery from Mental Illness is Desire

An uncomfortable truth about suffering

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I write all the following as one who is not a mental health professional but who has significant lived experience and who has walked with others through their own lived experiences. Which means you must take my words for what they are: at their best, wise counsel, not professional advice. And at their worst, well-meaning but ignorant advice. With everything use prudence.

The longer I am alive, and the longer I am required to wrestle with the demon of mental health “issues,” and the longer I witness them in others, the more convinced I have become that the first step in recovery from mental illness is a desire to be healed.

I say the “first step” quite intentionally, because it is a necessary but not sufficient step toward recovery. Desire itself can’t heal you. On the other hand, a lack of desire can keep you from seeking help or applying the wisdom you’ve gained from that help.

I say “recovery” with some trepidation. Sometimes “recovery” from a mental illness looks like learning to manage the symptoms in a healthy way that no longer disrupts your life dramatically. But the symptoms are still there, the depression, the anxiety. Other times, people are able to “recover” in the more traditional sense, where their symptoms are not only managed but are insignificant. They may arise again occasionally, but everyone has a bad day now and again. The reality is that each person’s path of recovery from a mental illness looks different. Some may take weeks of therapy, some years. Some may take medication, some not. Some may experience full relief from symptoms, some might just learn to live with them in a healthier way. And I want to acknowledge the variety of recoveries while still saying, as I did in On Getting Out of Bed and in these pages, that if you feel you are debilitated by an mental illness, pursuing recovery through professional mental health services is good. The point of all this is that through proper treatment you can get to a place where things are better. That’s all I mean by recovery.

The heart of the matter is that whatever “recovery” might look like for us, we cannot begin to move toward it unless we have made an internal commitment of our will. At some point we have to make an inward decision that we are committed to, desire, and ultimately deserve to pursue recovery. We’ll tease out those other pieces in a moment, but let me stop and explain what I mean by “deserve to pursue recovery” because this might not sound very Reformed of me. But I think it’s an important point, especially for one struggling with mental illness of the kind that attacks with shame or guilt, which many of them do.

Because you are a beloved child of God, you deserve to pursue the health of the mind and body God has lovingly and graciously given you. You don’t deserve specific outcomes, specific types of recovery (“I deserve to never feel depressed again for the rest of my life!”). But it is virtuous and God honoring to care for the mind and body He has given you. Just like you deserve to pursue care for a broken limb, you deserve to care for your mind. This is a difficult teaching for many to receive because their minds tell them that they explicitly do not deserve to recover, that they do not deserve to get better, that they belong in this state of misery. This is a form of despair, hopelessness. It is a lie, a demonic lie, that tells us that they are worthless and better off remaining in bondage to an illness.

This negative voice is so powerful that you may find yourself despising and praying for relief from the symptoms of your ailment while holding tightly to the experience of your disorder because it has become a kind of close friend, it has become comfortable, safe, normal. This is why it’s not a trivial or obvious thing to make the case for desiring recovery. I talk about this in On Getting Out of Bed—the danger of falling in love with your own suffering. It’s a terrible reality, and I fear that it’s only growing more widespread with the growth of social media and the trends of identifying intimately with your illness (notice I haven’t named mine here, even though it is public information at this point, because I don’t think of it as defining me. I won’t give it that satisfaction) and oversharing to gain attention. It’s possible and I suspect (total conjecture) increasingly common for people to feel terribly unsatisfied with their mental health and yet cling tightly to their illness as a sign of their significance, uniqueness, identity, or the dramatic tragedy of their lives. So that if you were to ask these people if they want to be freed from their illness, they would immediately say “yes,” but what they would mean is “I want to be freed from these symptoms but retain the safety, security, and identity of this disorder.”

And that is precisely why we must turn our will toward recovery by making a commitment to God and ourselves that we will take the necessary steps to heal. And by this I mean practical steps: eating, sleeping a health amount, exercise, bathing, walking, socializing. As well as more intentional steps of making an appointment to see a therapist. And if that therapist doesn’t work out, asking for a referral or for other treatment options. This is why it is so critical that you believe you deserve to pursue recovery. Because unless you are committed to your own healing process, you can grow discouraged when the first therapist or medication fails to show promise. You have to be doggedly committed to your own healing. And that requires desire.

On a deep, emotional, spiritual, and mental level you have to desire to be well. Not just desire to be free of suffering, but desire to be well. To recover. To be healthy. Not expecting or demanding perfection, but striving toward health and wellbeing because being good stewards over your body means caring for your health and wellbeing. And also because God loves you. And if He loves you and you can’t possibly know better than Him, you ought to love yourself. And to love yourself is to care for yourself. This form of care is called selfless self-preservation and there is nothing vain or self-centered about it. It is God honoring. I’ll talk more about this in Re-Collecting.

So how do you go about making this decision? The reality is, that if you are in the midst of a mental health struggle, you likely will have strong voices in your head telling you not to pursue your wellbeing and health. That you should not desire recovery, that you do not deserve to get well, that you should feel ashamed and live in shame and squallar for the rest of your pathetic life. The critical voices in our heads can be hell on earth and they are liars and from the father of lies. You also might think that there is no hope, that you’ve tried one therapist or maybe two or three even, or tried several medications and nothing seems to help. You’ve gone down the path of “recovery” and it has lead to a dead end time after time and you are done with dead ends. Notice that both of these narratives are forms of despair, and despair is the vice of hopelessness, to which the opposite is the virtue of hope.

Hope allows us to long for and act on some “not yet” future fulfillment. As Christians we act in hope for the resurrection, organizing our lives around the belief that one day we will all be bodily resurrected from the dead, even though that promise has “not yet” been fulfilled. We continue in hope. And so in mental illness, we must continue in hope. And it is helpful to remember that as a virtue, hope is something we practice, not an emotion. You may feel that you deserve to remain in your illness because you feel worthless, but you can act in hope by taking a step and calling therapist and making an appointment. Or even calling a friend and sharing what you are going through. You may feel like there is no other options for you and feel like giving up on professional services, but you can act in hope by calling another therapist, trying another medication, using the tools they taught you in therapy one more time.

The answer of how to begin turning our will to desire recovery is by hoping, and that hope rests securely and firmly on the love and care of God the Father. If He is the good Father who cares for His children, and He is, then we can trust Him to care for us. And we can hope in His provision for us. Perhaps we will continue to struggle. Some thorns in the flesh will remain. But He will give us what we need to endure. Once we have grounded ourselves in faith in the personal love and care of God, we hope in His promises, and we hope for healing, whatever that healing may look like. And we make a commitment to ourselves, intentionally choosing to work toward recovery despite the pain and suffering that it will involve (all healing comes through some sort of pain). And when those voices of negation and despair appear as they inevitably will, we pray to God for deliverance from them, we give them no energy, we don’t argue with them, we simply recommit ourselves to the recovery process.

It takes a great deal of virtue to walk through a mental illness, now that I think about it. Prudence to decide on therapists and medications and to discern voices. But especially faith in God and hope in His promises and courage to take the steps necessary to heal. And finally, but most importantly, love. Love toward God for His care and provision; love toward your family, friends, and community by pursuing healing; and love for yourself, because God first loved you.