What is mental illness and how should people of faith treat it?

Dr. Meg Chisolm is no stranger to mental illness. She’s suffered from several serious bouts of depression that brought her close to taking her own life. She was fortunate to get the help she needed and then went on to become a psychiatrist and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. Meg is an author of a psychiatric textbook and a book on psychiatric illness for patients and families, From Survive to Thrive: Living Your Best Life with Mental Illness.

In her conversation with Gloria, Dr. Meg outlines temperament and personality, along with different kinds of mental illness. While there is a disconcerting stigma still associated with “mental illness,” Dr. Meg says its best understood as “any time when the mind has gone awry, when there's been a problem, developed in your thoughts or in your behaviors, your actions or in your emotions, in your feelings [...] when mental life doesn't go as planned, when it goes awry.”

Dr. Meg provides an insightful mapping not only of a mind gone awry, but she also outlines the key factors in human flourishing, and what role religion can play in our happiness.

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