Delight in Disorder Ministries
Tony Roberts, Chief Shepherd
Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.
(Psalms 37:4)
Revealing Voices podcast celebrates their seven year anniversary!
Season 8 is underway with new episodes, Haikasts, and “Healing Stories” – testimonies of the people, places, and things which contribute to a sober, sane, serene life, and the foundation of faith that makes it all possible.
Desert Dispatches – Devotional Emails Launching in March!
Join our mailing list to receive these spiritual reflections. These brief meditations on life in recovery amid dual diagnosis are designed to lift your spirit no matter where you are in your journey. See this page to join the list!
Balance Revisited
I wanted to put out a post tonight and to topic du jour in my thoughts and conversations has been balance, or lack there of. 24 hours ago, I went to bed at a decent hour -- 11 pm. I woke up at 6 am to take my morning beds. From that time until late afternoon I was in a waking coma. It started to lift around 4 pm, and over the next 4 hours my mind cleared. Now I am in a mixed state, which is like having the bleak hopelessness of depression and the irritable impatience of mania swirling inside and around me. In other words -- constant chaos. It would not be wise to write now, so I'm going to recycle a post from last Fall. What follows is a reflection on balance I published in October of 2021... When I am most imbalanced, I have taken [...]
Hope for Troubled Minds: Living Our Wedding Vows by Janet Coburn
Born in Kentucky, Janet Coburn now lives in Ohio with her husband of 39 years, Dan Reily. She also lives with bipolar 2 disorder. Janet loves reading and country music. Dan loves gardening and archaeology. Together they love travel, science fiction, and cats (they have two at the moment, Toby and Dushenka). A graduate of Cornell University and the University of Dayton, Janet writes two blogs, bipolarme.blog and butidigress.blog, which she posts in every Sunday. She often contributes articles on mental health to The Mighty website. Janet has also written two books on bipolar disorder, Bipolar Me and Bipolar Us, which are based on her decades of experience with the disorder, and frequently answers questions about mental health on Quora. The man I married didn’t know I had bipolar disorder. To be fair, I didn’t know either. I was famously moody and given to what would now be called [...]
Profiles in Advocacy – Janet Hays, Reimagining the Office of Sheriff
Janet Hays is reimagining the office of sheriff and has proven experience putting vision into practice. She is a New Orleans resident and national leader in the advocacy movement for those impacted by serious brain illnesses. In her work with Healing Minds NOLA and Mental Illness Policy Org she is putting broken bones together and breathing life into them. Now she is running for Sheriff in her Orleans parish. Kathy Day, Senior Family Liaison at Treatment Advocacy Center calls Hays, “... a passionate advocate who works harder than anyone I know. Her persistence often pays off in ways that help families dealing with serious and persistent brain illnesses.” Leslie Carpenter, a leading advocate for people with no fault serious brain diseases, cites the Zoomcast series Hays produced in 2020 and into 2021 as, “... one of the best compilations of both what is wrong with the present system and... what [...]
What’s So Funny About Mental Illness?
Some time ago I posted a meme that has been going around in various places. It goes like this: Being popular on Facebook is like eating at the cool table in the cafeteria at a mental hospital. I posted it because I identified with the humor. Two of my goals in life have been to be popular on Facebook and sit at the cool table when I’m in the mental hospital. One of the things that keeps me relatively sane is my ability to laugh at myself and I find particular pleasure in making people laugh with me. Certainly, I have a serious mental illness; that's a part of who I am. Not taking myself too seriously diminishes the power of my disordered ego. Thus, more often than not, the things I find funny are self-deprecating jabs. But self-deprecating humor may be misleading when used in non-intimate settings such as [...]
The Relationship Between Creativity and Mental Illness
I start this post with one basic assumption. Not all persons with mental illness are creative. Some sit around all day playing video solitaire, watching episodes of Judge Judy, counting the cars that pass by. Some persons with mental illness have neither the desire or the capacity (or both) to do anything that resembles creative expression. (Though you never know the depths of creativity lodged in their brains.) At the same time, I find my mental illness plays out in a creative way, primarily in my way with words. I'm not Hemingway. It's not quality, but quantity for me. Most of my waking and sleeping hours are spent plotting how I can use my words to the best effect. When I am under unusual amounts of stress, you will likely find me tucked away in a corner, Pilot G-2 gel pen gliding across a composition journal, describing the world as [...]
Hope for Troubled Minds: Compassion Amid the Chaos
These letters are written by Vikki Plessinger. Vikki is Christian data clerk who hopes to retire in 7 months. She enjoys family vacations & get-togethers, gardening, fishing, hiking & puzzles. I am a mother of 2 children with brain illnesses. One is trying so desperately to save his life. The other seems determined to end hers. My son has a very rare, Central Neurocytoma tumor in the 3rd ventricle of his brain with malignancy. And my daughter has a 17-year drug addiction that has led to psychosis. We'll start with my son. My first-born baby. He had a fall and hit his head & his symptoms led to a CT scan which has led to 8 months of appointments, scans, diagnoses, surgeries & gamma knife radiation. He has lost cognitive abilities, memory, and well, a lot of his life. Justin, This current journey of ours is so very difficult. [...]