Ep. 75: Faith and Mental Illness: What I’ve Seen in Dark Places w/Anna Gazmarian

Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus

Episode Summary:

(CW): Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation, Depression, and Anxiety)

Anna Gazmarian’s new book Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, investigates the overlapping complexities of religious faith, mental illness, and doubt. If you grew up in religiously conservative spaces, odds are you either never talked about mental illness or you were made to believe only people with a demonic spirit could suffer from mental and behavioral disorders. According to research by the National Institutes of Health, evangelical Christians often see mental health as the outworking of a harmful spiritual condition and therefore, the solution is to just have more faith in God. This is not only completely erroneous, it’s harmful. In this deeply personal conversation, Anna shares her struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, darkness, and doubt. For those of us who have lived on the dark side of the human experience, we have gifts to give to the world that only we can give because we know what it is like to lose touch with reality, to be in pain, to question the entire human experiment, to suffer with anxiety, to struggle to get out of bed in the morning, and to fight to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. I’m honored to share this space with Anna and have this needed conversation about mental health and faith.

Bio:

Anna’s debut, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in March 2024. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Guardian, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun, and Quarterly West. She works for The Sun Magazine and lives in Durham, NC.

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Show notes:

http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/Christianity-and-mental-illness

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This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.