Читать книгу Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton - Страница 9

The purpose of this book is to provide readers with rich, deep, and thick descriptions of the spiritual experiences of Christians living with mental health challenges. It assumes that in order to understand people’s mental health experiences, we need to find time to listen carefully and cannot be bound by assumptions, even those of powerful explanatory frameworks like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This book is about how Christians living with severe mental health challenges—depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder— experience their faith lives and strive to live life in all its fullness in the presence of sometimes deeply troubling experiences. The book is not about “severe mental illness” understood as a clinical category. Rather, it is about the experiences of unique and valuable disciples of Jesus who seek to live well with unconventional mental health experiences—experiences that some choose to describe as “severe mental illness” but that can also be described in other important ways.