When you are suffering from a mental illness, it can seem to those around you - and sometimes even to yourself! - that the illness defines who you are - personally, morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually. When Katie Schoener took her own life after a long struggle with bipolar disorder, her father Ed, a devout Catholic and deacon, wrote an obituary to remind us all that our mental illnesses do not define who we are, do not encompass the full picture of our personalities, and do not tell the whole story of our lives. "Katie was not bipolar," he wrote, "she had an illness called bipolar disorder - Katie herself was a beautiful child of God."
Read the whole story in the Washington Post, here.
I've shared the article on Facebook. I think that Deacon Schoener makes a vitally important distinction: we are not, or should not be, defined in terms of our illnesses, whatever they may be.
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