Stigma at the papal funeral
This week, I’ve put in some long hours connected with the death of Pope Francis and it’s truthfully been an honor and a privilege.
Last night, I had a few tasks that I wanted to have done by the morning. Pope Francis’ funeral would begin at 3 am my time, so I decided to get an evening coffee and get my work done in time to watch the funeral.
I decided to watch the feed from EWTN, which is pretty much the gold standard in Catholic broadcast news. I tried the feeds from CBS, NBC, and the AP and they left much to be desired.
As they were transferring the pope’s body from inside St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the commentators noted that the pope is not only a spiritual leader, but is also a head of state and political leader. A priest offering commentary responded to this by saying, “No pope is a schizophrenic, there is a unity within.”
If you’d like to hear it for yourself, you can watch the video at 1:08:48 here.
Now, I am admittedly more sensitive to mental illness stigma than the average person, and in the grand scheme of things the priest who made this comment does not typically do live news commentary. However, this is not the first time I’ve heard this exact comment, including mistaking schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder (DID), from a priest.
The first thing to note is the difference between schizophrenia and DID, which was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia is marked primarily by hallucinations and delusions, whereas DID is defined as an ego which has split into multiple defined ego states. The person with DID has different parts that behave in different ways, often without being aware of what other parts are doing, resulting in dissociative amnesia. Both disorders can be a result of trauma.
The second thing to note is that neither schizophrenia nor DID is a moral failing. While we don’t fully understand how they develop, all signs point to them being protective measures when someone has experienced significant trauma. In DID, the personality compartmentalizes so that it can go on with life without being consumed by the pain and anxiety of the trauma. With schizophrenia, the brain tries to anticipate dangers and imagines dangers that aren’t there in the process.
When I look at my own experience of DID, in a very real way, it is a gift from God that enabled me to survive trauma that would have otherwise destroyed my brain and body. At one time it was adaptive and now it is maladaptive, which is why I work so hard to manage it with therapy, prayer, and medication.
What I believe this priest was hinting to us a spiritual understanding that holiness is connected to a sort of wholeness within a person. The mind, will, and heart are aligned in a person who is holy, so that what they think, do, and desire is all the same, and what they think about is God, what they do is God’s will, and what they desire is heaven, or eternal union with God.
The word that is used for this spiritual progress is often the same that is used for someone who has recovered from DID: integration.
Integration for someone with DID looks like untangling the trauma they’ve experienced, processing it, and re-unifying the parts that had split beyond their control as a coping mechanism. Some people with DID are fine with learning how to cope with living with DID. A person who experiences this mental illness is not morally deficient; like someone may have a broken arm from abuse, they have a brain and central nervous system which have been broken through no fault of their own.
There is also a phenomenon called “code switching,” which would probably more accurately describe someone who appears one way in front of one crowd and chooses to act another way in front of another group. In light of the comment made at Pope Francis’ funeral, I believe the commentator was saying, “His action as a head of state was not separate from his action as a spiritual leader. He was the same person who held those two roles.”
But that’s not what this priest said. Instead he used a stigmatizing phrase that actually doesn’t even make sense given the definition of the words he used. As one of my friends said, “It’s so easy to just not do that.”
One aspect to destigmatizing mental illness is realizing that you likely encounter people with severe mental illness on an almost daily basis. Most people who I interact with, unless they’ve read my writing, would likely be surprised to know that I have what was previously known as multiple personality disorder. And yet, here I am.
To put it this way: one day we could have a pope who is a schizophrenic. Maybe he works hard to cope with it, has a service dog that helps him identify what is real and what is not, or has a medication regimen that works well for him. Having schizophrenia would not make a pope less holy.
In fact, for many of us with mental illness, it is in that exact wound where we encounter God’s tender mercy. It is in carrying this cross that we become holy, that we become saints because we are so acutely aware of our need for God’s grace and our inability to sustain ourselves.
Why would we want to stigmatize that?
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