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A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (\u201cenjoy\u201d isn\u2019t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can\u2019t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase \u201cburn like a red hot iron.\u201d Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren\u2019t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven\u2019t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron\u2019s <\/span>Darkness Visible<\/span><\/i> or Andrew Solomon\u2019s <\/span>Noonday Demon<\/span><\/i>.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for reasons outside their control. I still think God speaks to them, but it’s trickier to suss out the still small voice from all the other voices in the case of some mental health disorders<\/span><\/p>\n One facet of Latter-day Saint soteriology that I find fascinating is the idea that in Gethsemane Christ literally suffered every possible pain, mental and physical, known to man. Or, as Stephen Robinson put it in a classroom lecture. No matter how deep a pit you think you are in, there are pits ten stories deeper than that, and He has been through them all. The scary corollary is, of course, the idea that if we too wish to be deified we have to go through something similar. I know at this point we are entering into very speculative theology, but on the face of it it makes sense. If we are going to become masters of the universe we have to descend both above and below all things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In our own life we get a small taste of the total range of pits. For the really gratuitous experiences it hurts so bad that you would rather just let that cup pass even if it might be great for your personal development, but reading about others passing through the experience provides a more comfortable kind of\u00a0 educational insight into the experience even if it isn\u2019t a replacement for the real thing. Of course, even reading about some things can be emotionally draining. When I was in a more comfortable stage of life I was really into heavy Russian novels, but once you have kids in a hospital life is close enough to a Dostoevskian novel that sometimes you just want to watch <\/span>Dumb and Dumber<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, the aforementioned subgenre can be useful and provide perspective. A book I recently read <\/span>Addicted:Notes from the Belly of the Beast <\/span><\/i>provides a compilation first-person experiences of a variety of different addictions (gambling, sex, alcohol, drugs) from people who have suffered through them and who know how to write about them. IMHO this and the memoir <\/span>Beautiful Boy <\/span><\/i>provide the best written accounts of addiction, and the people they affect. It\u2019s not pleasant, but it\u2019s reality.<\/span><\/p>\n There are weaknesses such as narcissism that are easy to attribute to the person\u2019s own personal failings, and there are born-this-way weaknesses that are easier to bracket. I don’t know how valid that distinction will be in the hereafter, but for people in the throes of addiction, it is easy to bracket it and see them as victims when reading about it from afar.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the Latter-day Saint context, we are often quite spiritually hierarchical about people, but with things like addiction you realize how much of living an elite gospel lifestyle (supposedly) could probably really just be attributable to not having a certain set of dispositions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I doubt there are a lot of bishops that have had a public history of addiction. Is that just because they can grind their teeth harder and exercise more self control? Or do they just not have the addiction gene? This is one of those things where earlier in life I thought it was the former, but as you get older, you realize how hard it is to transcend deep-set dispositions, and increasingly I lean towards the latter in cases where they simply don’t struggle with addiction at all. And this, of course, has all sorts of implications about where people will land on the scales of justice and mercy in the hereafter once predispositions beyond their control or taken into account.<\/span><\/p>\n One of the ironic things, of course, is that some of the most deep and profound spiritual journeys wrestled with very significant, fundamental sinful weaknesses. as I’ve mentioned before, without a gambling addiction, we would not have Brothers Karamazov or Dostoyevsky. And I sometimes wonder if we would not have Joseph Smith as Joseph Smith if it was not for his family\u2019s dysfunction. Ironically, the Smiths very much were not that family in Cedar Hills with the million dollar home, harp-playing kids, and the dentist Stake President father. God had something bigger for Joseph, so he gave him an impoverished, alcoholic father instead.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, with addiction it’s easy to go too hard in the other direction and glamorize it. The hook that gets a lot of artistic types into drinking and drugs is the idea that they too can become a Hunter S Thompson or Alan Ginsberg with the right chemical cocktail, but in the accounts in <\/span>Addicted<\/span><\/i> it’s hard to find a writer, artistic type for whom the pros outweighs the life-disrupting cons. So in this world, when psychedelics in particular are becoming quite popular, I appreciate the Church\u2019s just say no stance.<\/span><\/p>\n In the \u201cPsalm of Nephi\u201d Nephi sings (or soliloquies) about his own wretchedness and weaknesses. While we typically read these unnamed weaknesses as being some banal failing one we almost all fall prey to, I think it would be more deep if this unknown shortcoming was less along the lines of \u201cI sometimes get angry with Laman\u201d and more along the lines of a deep addiction. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (\u201cenjoy\u201d isn\u2019t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can\u2019t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase \u201cburn like a red hot iron.\u201d Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren\u2019t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven\u2019t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron\u2019s Darkness Visible or Andrew Solomon\u2019s Noonday Demon.)\u00a0 In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/37ee30c6-0604-435a-9b0f-a3c1d0277ddc.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47956"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50280,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47956\/revisions\/50280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}