From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
For years, people have been talking about Donald Trump’s “mental state,” throwing around the term mental illness as a lazy catch-all for his erratic behavior, inexhaustible cruelty, and inexplicable recklessness. In the wake of the election, a growing choir has assembled singing the same refrain.
This has always struck me as particularly damaging, because it assumes something dangerous: that all mentally ill people are vengeful, bigoted, unrepentant sociopaths.
We are not.
As one of the 51 million Americans who battles a brain affliction, I can attest to the reality that the vast majority of us are not oblivious to the feelings of other people or unaware of the results of our actions—we are in fact, highly sensitive to them. It is precisely our illness that makes us feel the pain around us deeply, that causes us to notice the fractures and grieve the wounds of the world that many people are unaware of.